$30 a day goal ended up being $43, but not a complete fail!

Just looking at the numbers comparatively suggests that my budgeting initiative for October was a complete failure. I aimed to average 30 bucks a day on anything that are not monthly bill expenses, and I averaged 43 bucks a day. But I learned some valuable things and will try again in November and December to attain the 30 dollars a day or less average for a whole month. I know my blog is known to have words in every entry, but for this blog I will try to use less words, and share my learning experience through a brief list instead of longwinded paragraphs.

1. Grocery shopping does make things much cheaper.  30 bucks or less spent at a grocery store can be enough for dinners each night of the week, and several other snacks. Cheap dinners out range from 7 bucks to 20 bucks a day.
2. Avoiding alcohol drinking greatly reduces expenditures.
3. Preparing for a known expense can help instead of being oblivious to your spending. In mid October I knew Crabfest at London Lennies would be a 100-buck meal. On vacation that week I ate most of meals at home, and therefore the weekly budget averaged out.
4. Pure gluttony comes with a price, and is best avoided. One of our good friends is moving to the west coast so we had a send off at Sparks Steak House in Manhattan.  The meal was fantastic, but I should have spoken up against the choices of bottles of wine that were around $170 a pop. My share of the tab was $230 and that weekend alone I spent $400. That excess toward the end of the month threw off my whole budgeting equation. Before that weekend I was near that $30 a day average.
5. Massages, even the cheaper ones are too expensive to have regularly.  In October I believe I got three sessions of massages, and doing that raised up the daily average.   Alternatives to massages are learning how to stretch better, more exercise, maybe longer warm showers, or trying to get a girlfriend.
6. Jotting down in a notepad all expenses is a good way to gauge how much one is spending, and it can easily be evaluated. I recommend it to anyone that is feeling a financial crunch.

How about that, a blog entry from mallisonwhat.com that is under 400 words! That might be a record for brevity on this blog!