DAY 2 (Saturday):
Hulu Plus: $7.99
Total spent: $7.Ninety nine
Total remaining: $99.Thirteen
On Day 2 of the Live the Wage challenge I ran up towards a mild snag. My to-do listing stated it became time for me to do my month-to-month giving, making contributions to numerous causes. (Some humans do this as soon as a 12 months, commonly in December, but we pick out to unfold our donations out over the year.) However, the quantity that we deliver in a everyday month might consume up our complete budget for this venture 3 instances over. Obviously, if we had been absolutely dwelling on minimal salary, we couldn't come up with the money for to provide almost this lots?But cutting returned on our giving failed to without a doubt appear in tune with the spirit of the project, which is meant to sell empathy with low-salary personnel. By the same token, it did no longer without a doubt appear right to cast off my monthly giving until the mission modified into over and preserve these really worth motives expecting their coins. So I determined to move ahead and do my giving on time desk, however not depend it toward my budget for the task.
On the alternative hand, I did remember the $7.Ninety 9 price for our month-to-month subscription to Hulu Plus, which routinely renewed on Saturday. Normally I do now not recall this object as a part of our prices, because it comes out of my PayPal account, that is funded withsurvey reward points. However, I figured that changed right into a useful resource not each person should have, so I treated the $7.Ninety nine as although it had pop out of my actual pockets. That changed into our handiest price for Saturday, so we are now all of the way right down to $ninety nine, or approximately sixty 4 percentage of our rate range for the week.
DAY three (Sunday):
Starbucks: $four.Seventy six
Total spent: $four.Seventy six
Total closing: $ninety four.37
On Sunday, a brand new wrinkle arose inside the Live the Wage challenge: my monthly software bill arrived, with a stability of $sixty four due. Paying it right away, as I ought to usually do, would leave me with best $35 for the relaxation of the week, which would no longer be now not possible with the aid of any method, however it would really advise we'd want to observe our spending cautiously for the next 4 days. Of path, the invoice wasn't due till September 9, so I should have surely not on time paying it until the assignment is over, but that type of felt like cheating.
To complicate matters further, I wasn't really sure whether I ought to count this expense against my $77-per-person budget at all. As I noted when I first introduced the challenge, it's not clear whether utilities are supposed to be counted as part of your housing expenses. I tried Googling "live the wage challenge utilities" and eventually turned upthis article in Time that says the $77 budget is for "all their expenses, not counting utilities and rent." This was the most definite answer I could find to the question, so I went ahead and paid the bill but ignored the cost, just as I did with my monthly giving on Day 2.
The only other expense we had on Sunday was a trip to Starbucks. Yes, that's right, Starbucks—the very definition of a frivolous expense, the first thing most people would assume they needed to cut in order to get by on a strict budget. Financial guru David Bach has even coined the term "latte factor" to refer to all the little mindless spending habits that add up to big money over the course of a whole year. But for us, a trip to Starbucks isn't a mindless habit; it's a special occasion. Since our nearest Starbucks is about a mile and a half away, taking a walk there and back is a good way for the two of us to enjoy a pleasant late-summer day together—and by making the 3-mile round trip, and splitting a Double Chocolatey Chip Frappuccino rather than each getting our own, we take some of the curse off this highly caloric treat. And we also keep the expense of the whole excursion under $5, which may be high for a snack, but isn't bad at all for an entire Sunday outing. And since happiness economists say that most people get more enjoyment out of an occasional treat than they do out of a routine expense, spending $5 or $10 a month this way maximizes the happiness bang for our buck.
Moreover, in most cases, the $5 or so we spend at Starbucks doesn't even count toward our monthly budget. That's because I pay for it with my Starbucks card, which, like our Hulu Plus subscription, gets funded with survey points via my PayPal account. But once again, I decided that since most minimum-wage workers don't have this source of bonus income, I should count our Starbucks splurge against my limited budget. So the $4.76 we paid for our Grande Frappuccino was our sole expense for Sunday.
Tallying up our expenses over the first three days, we've now spent $59.63 of our $154 budget. If you break down our $154 budget to $22 per day, then our budget for the first three days was $66, which means we're now back on track and under budget after our high spending on Day 1. If the rest of the week goes like the past two days, we should have no trouble meeting our $154 goal for the week.
