Spending gets out of control quickly
No matter how frugal you are, no matter how carefully you budget your money, it doesn’t take much. Months of hard work, tracking every dollar, can be gone in a single day! One day of giving in, indulging yourself, convincing yourself that you "need" or "deserve" something new. Especially if that "something new" is expensive, and accompanied by several more "something news".
By now, you’re probably wondering what in the world my wife bought. But I say no! I can’t blame anyone but myself this time around. On Sunday I managed to spend close to $1700, all on myself. Holy guacamole. What did I buy, you ask? Take a look:
- New laptop – $800. My son’s laptop finally died ( my wife’s old one ), and we tossed around the idea of buying him a new one. What we ultimately did was buy me a new one for my job, and he gets my old one. My old laptop was working fine, but just beginning to slow down. As time goes by, I multitask more heavily, and the system had trouble keeping up. It will do just fine for a 9 year old.
- New Sprint mobile broadband card – $220. I had a PCMCIA card for mobile broadband. Turns out, there’s a new Express card format, and PC card’s just don’t fit. I purchased a USB card this time around, so there will be no future compatibility problems.
- New phone – $650. A brand new shiny Treo 800w. My first windows-based Treo, after a long line of Palm OS Treos. My trusty 755p that I had managed to hang on to for a year and a half is slow, crashes, and is just overwhelmed by everything I ask of it. So, I replaced it with a shiny new Windows machine, that should do a better job of handling everything.
The good news
There’s a couple things coming to offset the insane cost of the items above. One, I will sell my current Treo, as it’s perfectly fine for normal use. Expected sale price: $200. My current connection card will also go up on Ebay within the week. Expected sale price: $50-$75. And finally, my laptop went on sale Sunday, so I’ll be getting a $150 price adjustment. All told, I should be getting about $400 back.
In addition to what I listed above, all my purchases will qualify as business expenses. The tax deduction should be worth "roughly" $450. So I’m looking at a net cost of roughly $850 for all the new goodies. That’s still way more than I should be spending right now – there’s a lot going on that I need to post about. I am considering taking the phone back.. as it was really the least essential item that I purchased. It depends on whether Windows Mobile fits my needs better than Palm OS. I have 30 days to decide on that one.
Moral of the story
I didn’t write this today so that I could justify my spending. I know that I went overboard… the laptop should have been a Christmas purchase. I should have held off on the phone – there’s no question about that. From a personal finance standpoint, I failed big time this weekend. My point is, the best laid plans can be shot to hell and back in a big hurry. One major slipup and all your hard work is lost. Stay strong, and make sure you leave your plastic at home, where it belongs.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Why would you need a wireless broadband card except for work? I have one through work, but I have no idea why you would need one for personal use.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Good question. I do actually use the wireless card for work. See, at my dayjob, I oversee a group of 5 individuals, all whom need fairly regular computer access. My direct boss, in all his wisdom, decided that one computer is just dandy for our purposes.
Naturally that doesn’t work.. so I bring in my laptop to use daily. Since I can’t hook up to the company network, I use Sprint to get online. It’s a poor solution, but a functional one. Plus it lets me use my own network, and during downtimes I can work on my own projects. Not too bad overall.