Even I find this hard to believe, but until today I had never brought my lunch to work. I'm 43. We have an awesome, subsidized cafeteria at work, but the prices have been creeping up lately. A salad that used to cost me $3 a day now runs around $5. Today I packed a lunch (string cheese, turkey and a yellow bell pepper with Russian dressing on the side).
I had bought a lunch box for myself when they were all over the grocery stores last fall, but it took me a while to work up the impulse to actually bring lunch. I am just now realizing that I've been a horrible spendthrift. In fact, until reading this blog, I thought I was a fairly frugal person. I've never had cc debt, for example, although I've spent around $3K per year on clothes just for myself.
I've always been pretty disorganized, and it has led to incredible waste (Example: Two years ago, when flying from NY to California with my kids for vacation, I had a car take us to Newark Airport; our flight was out of JFK. So I had to pay an additional $160 taxi fare and a $200 change fee to get to JFK and get on a later flight). I have always made enough to cover these errors pretty easily, but for 2014 my goal is to calm things down, be less busy, and get control of my spending.
In the past few months, I've ditched my $117 per month gym membership in favor of the free (and awesome) gym at work. I now shower at that gym 3x per week, using the company's shampoo, hot water, hair dryer, towels. I am paying off my car loan in two weeks, so that is another $435 reduction in spending per month. If I can bring lunch every day, that's another $100 per month, at least. Last year I spent around $8,000 on two vacations (Florida Keys with just my kids, and Cape Cod with extended family). This year I am cutting that down to $3,000 (skiing in Vermont with extended family for a long weekend -- we all rent a house together -- and a road trip to Montreal with the bf and my kids).
I have my hair cut and colored every 8 weeks, for $160. That's one expense I really can't see myself letting go. But I'll be looking for more savings. I found $652 to cut out of my monthly budget pretty darned easily in the last few weeks. There's got to be more I can cut, once I figure out what I'm actually spending. In the long run, I want to make a major career change, and until I stop spending like there's no tomorrow, I'm going to be stuck in the corporate world.
