Happy New Year!

And cheers to a successful 2010!

My New Years Resolution:

Being on a wardrobe shopping ban just to see if I can do it.

What are some of your resolutions?

Inspired by The Oatmeal, and clearly nowhere as awesome as his comics,

I present to you:

I loathe budgeting for the year, because I don’t see a dentist or get a haircut every month.

But nevertheless, here it is as approximated.

Mostly, I will try to stay under $1000 each month.

I will not shop.

I will not shop.

I will not shop.

Okay, I will TRY not to shop.

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P.S. For those of you wondering, Donations is also a category, but I don’t really blog about it.

And it’s not included in the $20,000 expenditures. It’s a permanent, given extra.

The reason being that I hate the guilt trip mentality of “look at what I gave this year, and what did YOU give?” or the “why didn’t you give MORE?” talk.

It’s the one category I keep just for me.

Solly for the double confusion.

BF just handed me the invoice for December 2009 and we did a lot better than I had originally thought!

Areas that changed highlighted in yellow.

Sweet.

$131 = a dentist’s visit or a round trip train ride back to Toronto.

I can totally handle this $1000 budget.

Which reminds me, I am going to try and go back to Toronto in January to help out my mom, so I just MAY be spending a little extra….

I don’t love all the songs individually, but together they are certainly like musical gold in this fabulous mash-up by Billboard Top 25′s DJ Earworm.

Via The Breaking Time shared in my Google Reader by the awesome L. K.! Thanks.

THE DECEMBER 2009 BUDGET

The last one for 2009.

BF is slow in getting me the numbers for groceries and utilities, so I overestimated them just to be sure.

I spent under $1000 this month with around $48 to spare.

A real improvement from my original goal of sticking to $1500/month.

Then again, we didn’t have any events like trips abroad, or trips back to Ontario to see family, weddings to attend or gifts to buy.

I think starting in January, I could definitely keep to the under $1000 a budget, considering that I spent money on a haircut and buying more vitamin skin pills to restock my cupboard.

UPDATE: THESE ARE THE REAL NUMBERS

I have ~$131 left.

BUDGET PIE CHART

Spent mostly on rent, food, those skin pills and my cellphone.

When we shift back to Toronto for the interim, rent will drop from $384 to $250 a month.

Food might go up (we’ll be feeding more people out of our budget), and Toronto has far more choice in meats and vegetables than Montreal.

But not in cheeses, unfortunately.

Net worth clocks in at: $55,516 as of December 2009

I started the year with around $78,000 as my net worth.

Then I had to pay $13,000 in taxes for my business.

Now I am also paying $1500 every 3 months for what Quebec likes to call “prepaid tax” based on your earnings from the previous year.

So I should get all that money back around 2010.

So let’s take a look at my year end numbers…

YEAR END BUDGET NUMBERS

This is my FIRST YEAR in having yearly budget numbers because my files corrupted on my backup drive from 2008.

This is now why I have 3 backups!!

Anyway, I find this budgeting-for-the-year exercise extremely helpful.

It’s easy to say: Oh I’ll spend $200 a month here, that’s all right it’s a one-off.

But when you see it all at once for the year, it gives you a good kick in the ass.

The pink highlighted categories are what I want to cut down for 2010.

The last number there is after removing Retirement Savings and Savings.

Ergo, $26,577.29 = my real yearly expenditures.

It’s not BAD, it’s just not ideal because I know I could have done better at the start of the year.

Expenses improved greatly in the last half:

• Trimmed the food budget — stopped buying so much yoghurt & treats
• Trimmed on utilities — we’re around $10/month now; and 50% of that = FEES!!
• Tossed a lot of toiletries — had to replace with shea butter, and other purchases
• Bought a whole new set of glass tupperware — to have lunches in, store food, etc
• Wardrobe & Electronics — Mostly from traveling & seeing the enabling devil (my sister)

But this was a great year, and I don’t have any regrets.

All money well spent.

NOW ON TO THE BLOG STATS:

That’s 3 years worth of blogging right there, more or less.

This is kind of misleading because I hit 2000 posts before I came over to WordPress.

I just like to delete old, useless posts without any real content or point.

Major blog event:

I (finally) moved to WordPress (woo hoo!)

It’s been a good year, no complaints here.

COMING UP: My 2010 Goal.. in pictures!