As you may know, I’ve been trying to frugalify my life in order to extend the amount of time my little company can survive on its own. My wife and I have made a bit of a game of it, trying to find ways to spend less and yet keep the standard of living at the same level. I’m a big fan of constraints when it applies to building websites and software, and it has been a pretty natural transition to also apply constraints to our spending and consumption.

I got this data from Mint, which is an amazing site, but I wish they had more flexible ways of comparing spending by month with multiple categories instead of just one at a time.

April had a couple big one-time payments related to debt from McLeod Residence, so is a little bit inflated.

In June, we tried to eat out a lot less often than in May, but our total food and dining expenses only came down by 26%, which is a bit surprising. We didn’t make any trips that saved us quite a bit of money. Entertainment expenses were cut by 79% (though we did still find ourselves highly entertained during the month… camping trips, boat rides, etc helped a lot). Spending to get my new office set up might have been a little high this month, plus I got the new iPhone. So… overall, still some big areas that can see improvement.

Overall, spending was cut by 39% in June compared to May. We’ll continue to frugalify our lives and see if we can bring July in at about 45-50% of May’s spending.

Money and spending is a really difficult thing to control so far. So many habits are tied with spending, and it’s difficult to make changes that touch on root aspects of my personality. But, one month at a time.

This entry was posted by Buster on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 9:08 pm. It is filed under Frugalification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.