Random Thoughts

Work has been super busy!

C and I have been doing a good job of keeping track of our expenses for this month. I have a spreadsheet that I update every night and I bug him about what he spent. I might be missing some of our reoccurring bills that automatically get charged and paid by our credit card, but that will be easy to reconcile later.

My client right now has a $0.25 for everything vending machine. This means that I'm spending WAY more on snacks than I normally would. I can't figure out if the vending machine is a good thing or a bad thing. A lot of the things end up being cheaper than what I would pay at the store.

Should I wait until I get my next raise (early next year) before leaving and looking for a job or should I start now?

Lunch Challenge

Krystal has created a great lunch challenge and invited her readers to participate. The goal is to not spend money on work days on food (lunch, snacks, drinks) from now until March 31. I wish I could participate, but there are too many variable in my life that make participating in this challenge particularly difficult. Here they are:

1. I'm going to be visiting one of my favorite cities, NYC, for one week this month. I will be working, but I will not be getting reimbursed for my meals. It's going to be a semi-vacation, and one of my favorite things in NYC is the food, so I don't want to give that up.
2. I normally get a meal allowance, so technically I get reimbursed for almost all of my weekday meals (I just get a meal allowance, so I do my best to spend the least amount of money possible)
3. I'm going to be working from home for about half the month, so that seems a little like cheating. In my opinion, it's much easier to not eat out when you're at home.
4. It's pretty extreme to bring lunch from home when you get a meal allowance and have no frige at your hotel. I could bring lunch and store it at the fridge at work, but then I would be hogging space in the communal fridge.

Instead I'm doing my own modified lunch challenge. My goal is to only buy lunch once during my normal work weeks (e.g. weeks when I'm not in NYC and not working only at home). I don't want to get too specific, but suffice it to say, I think this is pretty challenging when facing obstacle #4 listed above. When I'm in NY, I'll probably buy lunch 2-3 times. When I'm at home, I don't expect to ever buy lunch out.

If I were working locally, I would have it as a goal to bring my lunch 9 days out of 10, meaning only one lunch out every other week. I just think doing the lunch challenge while traveling is a bit too much for me.