I'll confess, my husband and I do not have a budget, and never have in a formal sense. We have always lived below our means on the big things like houses and cars so we have not felt a need to watch the pennies carefully. Still, I keep reading about the power of goal-setting, so I'm going to give it a try. However, me telling my husband what he can spend at the grocery store this week will go over like a lead balloon (yes, he does the grocery shopping and groceries are one area where we could cut a lot). So, what to do? Well, one place I know I spend too much money is for lunches at work. I often eat "out" (the lunch counter in my building) for no reason other than that I didn't think to grab something at home. Add that to the times I go out to be sociable, and I've found a real leak that can be plugged.
Now, what to do about it that won't make me feel deprived and will make me feel like I'm accomplishing something? I've decided to open an account with Loyal3, an online stock broker about whom I wrote here. Every week (the mimimum investment is $10.00) I am going to invest $5 per day that I did not eat out at lunch. Every week I'm going to tell you how much I invested, and in what. Hopefully, this will be a better use of my "lunch money" than the use I'm currently making of it. Yes, it's kind of a game; I have other money that I will invest in other things and even if I never go out, this only comes to about $100 per month, but every month a large part of that $100 ends up sliding through my fingers; if this motivates me to save, that's a good thing. It will also give me something about which to write. You can follow this series by looking for Loyal3 Lunch on the keyword list on my sidebar, or to see the portofolio, look at my navigation bar.
To open the account I had to make a minimum investment of $10, so I invested it in Walt Disney. Why Walt Disney? Because I like going to Walt Disney World and know other people do too. It is a well-run company that has a lot of loyal followers. Is this a good time to buy their stock? I don't know, I haven't investigated that. My next purchase will be more carefully investigated and the reasons for the purchase more fully explained.
Do you have a bad spending habit that you break and direct savings to investment?
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich, A Disease Called Debt and One More Broke Twenty-Something*
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