So its a new year. My final semester of College. I at times wonder what will I amount to after graduation in May. I don’t know. I can’t see that far into the future. I can see the short term however and start to try to plan for the future.
I started to track my money more. Currently, I’m using mint.com. I hate it. I heard it was supposed to be better the quicken. I don’t believe it. Sure it’s nice to have things update automatically for free but it misses the pending transactions on one account. because of that it doesn’t recognize a transfer between banks so I’m showing more the $1300 more then I have. I can’t plan for future transactions. About the only thing I have found is I spent over 100 dollars on fast food this month. And thats not even the most updated figure.
I think tomorrow I will start getting Quicken caught up for the year. Should be fun.
I started the year off with 3999 on my credit cards. With the help of some student aid money, I was able to get that to 1999 and still have money left in savings. Currently I am in an intro period for another month or two and have 0% interest on that card. I’m hoping I’ll have more paid off when I get my tax money.
Besides the fast food budget, everything else is falling about where I expected it to. Mint.com is yelling becuase I went over what I had inputed for the budget, but I’m not worried. Currently I’m trying to figure out my spending so I know where to cut.
Forecasting is probably my favorite part of a budget. Trying to figure out what to save up for and estimate how much I’ll make and have. I know rent comes, since it’s split, I only have to pay every other month. I have expenses in the way of a real estate career I’m pursuing. Total starting expenses are expected to be around 1500-1600 in the first year and expected to be around 8-900 dollars after that. I’ve spent 275 of that already with the class I’m taking. Some of this will be tax deductible at the end of the year.
I’m also trying to become better at saving money. I opened up a money market account with ally.com. The interest is current 1.49%. Much better then the .01% with my chase savings. If I wasn’t limited on the amount of transactions, I would probably keep my chase savings at a lower balance. Hopefully with the ally account, I’ll be able to save more money as I won’t have it as easily available to me. Even though the interest is low, I think I’ll end up better in the long run.
I’m hoping that I can get far enough ahead and be good enough in the real estate career that I’ll be able drop one of my two jobs by March or April. That should be exciting. Things are looking good for the future so far.
