Freezing in NH

I’m expecting $600.  There are three main categories that you can do with any cash, whether it’s coins picked up the street, salary or windfall.  Those things are save/invest, spend and give away.  I suppose invest could be a separate category if you’re talking about starting a small business vs savings account, and spend could be divided between necessities (food) and non-necessities (going out to eat).  So maybe it’s five categories.

Anyway, before I get off track, here are the first things that went through my head:
Go out to eat
Get a massage
Join a gym
Save – “for the future”
Save – for vacation at the end of the summer
Buy a new vacuum cleaner
Buy part of a share of Berkshire Hathaway
Buy a domain name or two
Donate to charity

I’m probably going to split it three (unequal) ways to match my three categories above.  My general rule of thumb for “windfalls” is spend half, save half.  Spending half still feels like you get to do something special, and saving half is certainly better than none.

I saw somewhere (and I don’t remember where, sorry to whomever it was) recently the theory that by saving you’re not depriving yourself, you’re splitting it with “future you”.  I get this picture of me now handing that $300 to myself at 50 and saying “here, you can retire one day earlier”.  That helps with any resistance I have to saving. 

Anyway, it will probably go like this:
$100 to charity
$200 spend: probably a meal out, and maybe the gym, but I don’t want to commit to a membership until I have a higher paying job.
$300 invest: part into short-term savings like summer vacation and part to potential income generating items like a sharebuilder investment in BRK-A or maybe a domain name for a business idea.

We’ll see if I have any better ideas come May.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under frugality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.