Grad Student Budgeting

So, when I started this blog I thought I would try to avoid writing about personal stuff, because it's just boring. I mean who is going to come across a blog and go, "OMG, some girl in Seattle who I have never met has a runny nose today. I am seriously going to have to bookmark this!! Is she going to be better tomorrow? Is she going to take some sudafed?? The suspense.. it's better than As the World Turns!!"

Anyway.... I decided today I'm gonna write about my "budget" cause I feel like it, and hey this is MY blog and with my new fascist budget it will be one of my few pleasures in life.

First I will make a confession. I am 26 years old and I have never once in my life made a budget for myself. I had a relatively frugal upbringing, and I try to limit myself to sensible purchases, but I have never set monetary targets for myself. In undergrad I was lucky to have a large college fund from my parents, and a couple scholarships. Most of that college fund went to Europe with me, and the rest of it went into the purchase of my house.

For two years after college I was working, and gradually got lazier and lazier about being frugal. $8 or $9 lunches went from expensive to routine, to even cheap. I went to nice restaurants more and more, and started ordering drinks instead of ice waters. $5 a morning at Starbucks seemed like a small price to pay to keep my sanity at work... and $2 Mickey's 40s turned into $10 margheritas or red-bull-vodkas.

Back in school, I tried to tone it down a bit, but some of that laziness has stuck with me. If I'm tired in the morning, it's my god-given right to have a $5 toffee nut latte from SBs, or if I don't feel like making lunch, $8 for sushi is fine - and of course even healthy, added bonus!!

But now, facing at the very least 3 more years to get my phd, and unable to sell my GD house in Tucson, I am leaking money at an alarming rate. I have successfully ignored it for about 8 months but unfortunately, I have now faced the facts.

Long story short... here are some of the things I'm going to do to help my financial situation. (I'm mostly writing this down as a diary for myself, so I can see how I'm doing. I'll try to post about my progress and if I come up with any new, creative cost-cutting ideas).

1. Limit coffee spending to $2 per day. My official coffee budget is now $60 per month. That includes snacks purchased at coffee shops. I like to study at coffee shops and it's super easy to spend $4-5 just buying a medium coffee and a cookie. This budget doesn't include coffee beans from the store though, so I'll just be brewing at home a lot more.

2. NO more magazines. I'm going to try and be really strict with myself on this one. A magazine is usually at least $5, and more importantly it is filled with other things I want to buy. I'm usually drawn towards travel or food related magazines. Or the Economist, which I just flat-out don't have time to read anyway. I LOVE reading magazines and someday I will find a way to make a living off of that, but today is not that day.

3. Shop at different stores. I just blew my whole month's drug-store budget at Bartell's today. For things like toilet paper and contact solution I will have to break down, get in my freaking car, and go to Fred Meyer.

4. This one is something that I have also never done, and in fact I used to consider almost as much of a waste of time as voting.... clipping coupons! UGH. Well, I won't be super hard on myself for this one, but I think it'll be worth spending a few minutes every time I get coupon things in the mail to see what's on sale.

OK... that's it for now. I figure I'll start with a few small goals and try to work my way up to bigger things such as frequenting soup kitchens, or paying for my coffee in all pennies.

Science isn't funny?

My friend Mike was a sociology major in undergrad, and for some reason he is now taking some kind of science class - I think it's biology. He keeps complaining about how science is so dry and boring and saying stuff like (direct quote) "I would so much rather stick my dick in a blender then do science". He's a character.

Anyway, I read this paper the other day about stastistical language modeling, and it had the following sentence in it: "This in turn allows the end user more flexibility in expressing the desired command/query, which tends to reduce the associated cognitive load and thereby enhance user satisfaction."

Now tell me that isn't funny.