Budgeting for February 2008

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post about the spending habits of young professionals in the DC Metropolitan area circulating yesterday. Basically, people of varying income levels tracked their expenses for a month and realized how much / how carelessly they were spending their money. Luckily, I'm a step ahead of the game here because I have been tracking my expenses for all of January using my iGoogle Tracking System . Even if, my reaction to some of these numbers for this month are pretty jaw dropping:

My Expenseview Report for January
(actual numbers have been removed)

197.78 spent in gas in ONE MONTH. WOW. It makes sense though, because just in the month of January I drove round-trip to upper Maryland (Wisp) , and twice round-trip to Charlottesville. There is also a large chunk of spending for the Gifts category, but that because I ended paying off my credit card for a couple Christmas presents in January.


The good news is that I still seem to be able to deposit a significant amount of my money into my savings account. Still, I'd like that savings number to be higher than 54% of my total spending; I'd like to shoot for 70%. So the next step from here?

I am going to try to make a budget based off of my ridiculous January spending habits where I ended up spending more money Snowboarding than I did on random gadgets or Bars/Clubs. We'll see how this ends up, I hope my February 2008 Expense chart looks better than this one!