MOOP!

Therapy today was good! It was a little narrative-life-focused instead of organizing-life-focused, but actually in a way that helped make clear some of my todo list items for the near future. Specifically, having run a Pretty Good gender presentation, I should maybe re-use those slides and run it again in the future? So I'm going to do a thing that I claim to hate above many others, and attempt to sell myself to some people.

(Luckily those people are gonna be 1) someone who explicitly asked about the presentation for their professional group and 2) the director of professional development in my school district, who is constantly asking folks to suggest new PDs anyways).

On the organizing-life side of things, I feel like I have set up a Pretty Okay Process for dailies right now. I've been using it for four of the last six weeks (and all of the last three weeks), and I'm really pleased with the Dice Innovation, which _critically_ rewards me for hitting 75% and therefore helps me recognize that 100% every day is actually too much and will cause burnout. So that's all really good!

But then I want to start working on my Next Process, and that's harder, in that I'm not...totally sure what to work on next?

One option is that I probably should start thinking in a more sophisticated and adult fashion about money. Which is to say, I've long since mastered the art of "if you don't have any, stop spending it; if you do have some, buy dice or other frivols" but the thing about having a real job and few major expenses (I eat out a lot less than I did two years ago) is that, uh, I'm getting a bunch of savings? Which is the opposite of a bad thing, and I'm happy to keep socking away dollarbucks into my savings account, but presumably I should eventually do...something...with them.

In a shorter timeframe, I'd also like to have a better budgetary sense than yes/no. Step one is figuring out a way to actually track how much I spend, and on what, so I know whether it's reasonable to set my dice budget at $500 per month or merely $300. I had a great idea for a little google form, that I could just bookmark directly onto my phone screen and throw in the item/category/cost and it was a great start...when I began it on March 9th, 2020. I maintained it for all of like two days, then suddenly stopped going anywhere or buying anything and quickly got out of the habit.

So maybe I just try that again?

There are other options, like "useful todo list" and "get good at calendars", but I'm wary of trying to do too many things at once. The key word here is "incremental". Incremental progress is good. Even if it's exhausting and depressing not being perfect all at once, that's still probably better than being perfect for exactly 42 hours before burning out and dropping everything at once.

(okay, but I am going to try an experiment and put calendar into my fingers for reading my comics in the morning and see if that does anything interesting. That's how I got back into the swing of reading here, after all.)

So let's stop there for now. Keep doing dailies, keep earning dice (oo, aa!), and now maybe add in a tracker for when I Purchase Things on the Internet. Or off the internet. Really just...purchase things.

("Couldn't you just use your bank statments" not as visceral, not in easy categories. I should probably compare the information occasionally though, shouldn't I?)

Anyways. I hope you are well. If you have money advice for an early-thirties-something, I'd love to hear it (I already know the one about "go put more into retirement than you are already doing" and I should work on that)

~Sor
MOOP!

It was brought to my attention that I do not especially know how to budget¹.

That's mostly okay, in that I've been a dumb privileged white kid for the last bunch of years, and one of the infinite advantages of having parents willing to pay for college is that they pay for room and board too. Budgeting for me has exclusively thus far been "do I have enough money for that event I want to go to" and I can more or less afford that on babysitting.

But I'm going to join the real world somewhere in the next 3-6 months, and not only do I not have a great grasp on how much the world is going to cost, I don't think I have a particularly good grasp on what I'm going to be spending that money on. A friend mentioned that he was paying about a thousand a month, for everything except rent and utilities, and I certainly *think* I can keep my expenses under that number², but I don't know if I'm managing to account for everything I'll need to spend money on.

So that's what I'm really asking for: What things am I going to be spending money on that I don't necessarily realize I'll spend money on?

Sitting down and thinking about it, I know there's:

*Rent and utilities
*Groceries/eating out (which is a huge "I have no idea" since I've been living off my meal plan for three and a half years --I imagine I should be able to keep myself fed grocery-wise for a hundred a week, I think that's about what I've spent on the (very few) times when I've had to fend for myself.)
*Dance, which is non-negotiable. If I can afford it in September, I should _absolutely_ get a season pass for SCD, which changes the shape of how much dance costs per month.

(as an aside, that's one of the things I'm finding complicated about trying to write a budget for myself, in that "monthly expenses" is easier than dividing "expenses per semester" by three, or trying to work out how much a year-pass would cost and when I would need that money and such.)

*Transit, which I imagine is hugely variable. If I only ever took the T places, it would be a straight 60/month, but I also have a bike to repair and a future zipcar membership, and taxis and stuff. But on the flip side, if the bike is in good shape, and the weather is nice, I can spend maybe like fifteen dollars on the T and spend the rest of my necessary transit time riding my bike.
*Laundry, which becomes more important as I have to wear more professional clothing, since I don't have enough of said clothing, and therefore have to do laundry more often.
*Also, buying more clothing of the professional sort. I mean, I rock the thrift-store chic so hard, so I'd like to hope I wouldn't be spending too terribly much on this, but it's still a thing.
*Meds
*Other hospitaly/medical things, knock on wood. I don't think this counts as a monthly budget thing, so much as a "I should try to set aside a couple hundred(thousand?) dollars as soon as possible to be my "oh shit oh shit I just broke my leg" fund³.

And...what else? The last time I did anything like this it was in my seventh grade home ec class, where I think I was "renting" an apartment for 50 dollars a month, so it's not like I was exactly being taught accurate numbers for the real world so much as "here's how to balance your monies!"

The real world is hard, whine whine. But dammit, if I'm going to be an adult⁴, I might as well do it right, and not have to rely on other adults (read: my parents) for taking care of me.

Just rely on them for advice.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I have gotten as far as "If there is money in my account I can buy things, if there is not, I can't" and seem to do okay with that, but, uh, yeah.

2: More importantly, doing some googling and finding out how much I will make as a teacher implies that (assuming I get a job), I should be making at least 24k a year, which gives me enough for rent/utilities and "everything else". Assuming that my combined rent+utilities is in the thousand dollars or less range, which I think is an okay guess considering the places I've been looking at with Ria and Lauren and Mason.

3: Although, assuming I broke my leg, I could just transfer my dance fund to medical. Gods forbid.

4: I think I've decided that I don't want to be an adult because adults are ridiculously dramatic, often uncommunicative, and generally immature. I'd like to be mature instead. It seems much easier.

Postscript: And yes, I am writing actual numbers for these in another file, in a "trying to inflate everything so I wind up with too much money rather than too little" sort of way. But I figured that would be too gauche even for me to post.

And not in the file yet, because I don't know what the shape of my life will be like yet, is the concept of long-distance travel in order to spend time with faraway friends and SOs. Which could be eighty dollars a month for train tickets, or 500plus for a cross-country plane ride. Plane tickets are definitely my most expensive regular expense.

Also not in the file is the general thought of "here are things I want" and taking steps to buy those things. One of the reasons I want to have some discretionary income is so that I can start scouting sales for expensive things I want/need, so that when they show up for a decent price, I can get them without stressing that I've just wrecked my budget for the month. See also, the fact that I think I want 3 TB of external storage --one for job^a, one for backup, and one for media.

a: If everything stayed the same, I don't think I would _ever_ fill a TB of stuff just of assignments and resources and grades and worksheets and lessons and everything teaching will require. But things keep taking up more and more space, and inevitably I'll be teaching Skype lessons with an uberboard or something, and each lesson will be a gig and a half or something.

I don't particularily have anything to write about, but I feel like writing.

We went to the stoneridge book sale today. WONDERFUL stuff -two big rooms FILLED with books! And today was half price day -for...I think ten bucks, I got something like eight books. This makes me a happy Kat.

Find of the day? The Little Book of Stress. Manny would kill me. But it's just so good!

Afterwards, the lot of us went to the craft show. Whoot! I managed to not spend very much of my money by not looking too closely at any of the jewelry booths, and by looking at the pricetags of everything I oogled. This still didn't stop me from picking up a beautiful fur rose though. Iss fuzzy...

And we lucked out -we got the leftover soup from the truly awesome soup people as we left. Rock! So I had a good dinner, and I am full of tastyness now.

Nothing much is really going on. I really wish I had some sort of majikal way to make people who I feel like talking to to be non-busy when I'm online. Bah on the lot of them.

And I could sign onto AIM, but I don't feel like it. Because, honestly, I don't feel like making the effort. IM me if you want to chat. GTalk and YIM are better then AIM anyways. :p

I've nothing else to say, really. Pity.

Oh yes -I'm reading The Silence of the Lambs. It's quite good so far, I'm all of six chapters in. We'll see.

~Sor
MOOP!