Welcome to Money Mondays! I used to post my financial inflows and outflows on Fridays in the past but I decided to move this to Mondays instead. I normally go grocery shopping on Sundays after church. I will now post the last week’s worth of financial inflows and outflows on Monday so that I can include the weekend spending as well.

This week my financial outflows were:

$152 for the electric bill. I hate that my electric bill is so high but we have been having some really cold weather here so even with just running a space heater it is high. I do use a rollover budget so any money not used in one month gets to be used the next, effectively making that budget category larger. I have been rolling electric extras over so I have a little ‘stash’ of usable money that I can afford to pay these high bills for now. I can’t wait until the weather mellows out so that I don’t need to pay so much and can start rebuilding that stash for the unbearable summer heat.

FruitAndVeg

$48.53 for food and I really have no idea why this was so much for what I got. This was not a shopping trip at my favorite low-price store, but I wanted to get some fruits and vegetables and this other store has better quality items.

This week my financial inflows were:

I got my tiny graduate student salary, for which I am quite grateful. There was some sort of glitch where someone got half of their salary on the last day of the month and she was waiting to see if she will get the other half on the first. We normally get paid on the first of the month, unless it is a holiday so I did not even look on the last day. I have no idea what happened, but my full amount came in as scheduled.

Luckily she got the second half of her salary on the scheduled day and she will try to get an explanation for what happened. She was really stressed out because she did not have enough money to cover bills for the month if she had only gotten half of what she was expecting, since her bank account was empty.

This incident stresses the importance of saving every month until you get to the point where you are living off at least the last month’s salary. That way if you get paid late one month, or if there is some other error you have at least one month of expenses available in your checking account so that you can make it through.