Spending intentionally

A friend who is a personal trainer and a hero of mine has a fitness blog and her tag line is Eat Intentionally. I love that notion and think the intentional part can be applied across most areas of my life. Like our budget.

With that in mind, Kent decided to ditch cable TV. I am not a TV watcher in the least, and Kent hardly watches anymore either. When he does watch, he’s more likely to get movies from Blockbuster to take on his business trips. Well it turns out that to have just internet costs more than to have the exact same internet plus basic cable. I’m sure ComCast has metrics that show people who sign up for basic cable can be persuaded to upgrade. But I don’t think we will, and we’re saving a bit over $50 a month now.

Along the same lines, I read this article about brand disloyalty on Casual Kitchen. I giggled at his account of how he was blindly loyal to Tide. I did the same thing regarding certain brands for years but now that money is tight, I find I have very little brand loyalty. I’ll try the generic brand for pretty much anything, and if I like the quality, I’ll stick with it. For example, I tried the generic brand of regular oatmeal and it was disgusting, the texture was all wrong. So I’ll buy Quaker unless I find another brand to try. On the other hand, I love the store brand of organic diced tomatoes and won’t spend more on a brand name now.

We’re zeroing in on our final budget and will kick the whole thing off on Monday, June 1. I found some interesting statistics regarding percentages for various categories and as I suspected, our housing costs are higher than recommended since we spend almost 50% of our income on housing costs (the national average in 2007 was 34%). On the plus side, we spend very little on transportation—about 3%.

The whole point of doing all of this is to both prepare for our future and also to make sure when our money leaves our pockets, its bringing us exactly what we want.