week 6

Alright! This was my shopping week :3

And I went to a concert too!

Let's see how I did ...

$14.81 on makeup

$25.00 on a band t-shirt

$75.95 on clothes

$26.43 on hair product

$13.37 on sushi 

total : $155.56

My biggest week yet! :(

But truth be told, I saw that coming!

It's reading week after all, I needed to live it up!

Katrina

just a thought on gift-cards ...

Hey everyone!
So I've been thinking ... My friend and I went shopping this week to park royal. We both had things we were looking for, but my friend really needed to use up her gift cards because they wee going to expire in a couple of months. 
I didn't even know gift cards could expire!
But anyways, it got me thinking ... are gift cards really that smart of an idea?
i've got people coming into work all the time buying and reloading their coffee gift cards. And some people refuse to pay with anything else! They will literally make me do two transactions, just so that they can load money on their card first, and then use their card to buy a coffee!
That to me is just silly!
At the end of the day, gift cards are still just money right? But with one major difference:
You can only spend that money at one specific place. 


I'm not hating on gift-cards or anything. I personally love getting gift-cards to my favorite stores for my birthday or Christmas. But Im just wondering, are they a good idea, or a bad one?
On one hand, putting money into something can help limit how much you spend. For example, If I put $5.00 into my coffee gift card every week, that could potentially help me budget my coffee spendings.
On the other hand, you are storing you money in a card and totally committing it. There's no getting that money back out of it, and that card could easily be lost, forgotten, stolen, or like my friend's almost did, expire! And any of those would result in a horrible waste of your hard earned money. Is it worth the risk?


What do you guys think? Are gift-cards a good or bad investment? 

week 5

I spent a lot of money on food this week. 
BUT I HAVE A REASON FOR IT. 


For those of you who don't know, I am a closeted nerd. I love video games, sci-fi novels, complicated board games, and I looooove Lord of the Rings. My best friend and I live two doors apart, and once every few summers we throw a Lord of the Rings marathon in her basement (extended versions of course). So, thats a little over 12 hours of video footage, and the even took place yesterday. So needless to say, a lot of preparation goes into this kind of thing! We needed to have our meals planned and prepared. My friend and I had already completed the marathon twice. My boyfriend, however, was going through it for the first time. I decided that out of the goodness in my heart, I would support him by preparing for him. 
This required me to go grocery shopping. I needed enough food to feed him and I all day.
Just thought you should know, before you judge me.


Without further adieu:


$22.45 on food
$14.81 on makeup and a magazine


total : $37.26


I think I'm getting a lot better at watching myself, and keeping myself accountable. :)
I acknowledge that there are going to be weeks that I need to spend more money than others, even this next week for example, I plan on going shopping for some clothes.
So my weekly total next week will be much higher than usual.

Katrina

save money on skin care!

So, for all of you who take the time to use skin care products,  you know that it can get to be quite expensive after a while! Especially if you use them on a weekly or daily basis. 
I happen to have extremely dry skin, and the money I used to spend on moisturizers was pretty ridiculous. But! A few months ago I found some great online tutorials on youtube. Michelle Phan is a youtube guru who specializes in beauty! She has tons of uploads on makeup tutorials, and beauty tutorials. And what's great about her videos on beauty and skin-care, is that most of them are how -to videos, that teach you how to make the products using ingredients you already have in your house! So you are getting facial scrubs and peels for free! And from my personal experience, the work really really well! It's a great way to save money. 
I am going to post a few of my favorite videos that have saved me the expenses of store - bought moisturizers and scrubs. Enjoy!

How to make your own Pore Strips

How to make your own Moisturizing Scrub

How to get the most out of your Lipgloss

These are just a few, and they all worked like charms for me! I definitely recommend you try them out for yourself, and check out the rest of your videos!

Katrina

week 4

Okay people,
I have recently been putting a lot of thought into changing something on my blog. 
The conflict this blog is geared towards correcting is my problem of spending money on things I don't need. Things like food, and batteries ... But I do need things like school supplies. 
So, as I originally promised I will post all of my purchases on this blog, but instead of counting the cost of school supplies towards my weekly total, I will total that amount of money in blue, and it will get its own total. That way I am still keeping myself accountable, but its not so much of a consequence when I need to by things like textbooks. 
On that note ... heeeeeeeeeere's week 4!


$34.74 on School Supplies


It was an expensive week for school supplies. I had a lot of things that needed to be printed off at the dock this week, as well as a few opus purchases :$


$21.84 on my boyfriend's valentines day gift
$3.35 on candy
$26.00 on cab fare


total : $51.19


OKAY. So I had a rough week ... give me a break! It was Valentines day week! And as for the cab fare, I missed my bus for work, so I cabbed there. The trip to work cost about $14.00. The rest of it was from the cab ride home from my boyfriend's house. We live too far apart for me to walk, and since I live so close to the canyon, there is a risk of my running into a bear. BLAHBLAHBLAH long story short my boyfriend worries about me and sends me home in a cab when I leave, he always pays for it but I had cash on me that night so I paid for a change. 
And I'm a sucker for those chalky heart candies ... you know which I'm talking about?

These ones! Yumyum... I think it was worth the three bucks. I got a lot of joy out of those chalky little hearts. Anyways, thats all for now! Have a belated happy Valentines Day!

Katrina

week 3

Okay!
This week I was very careful about how I spent my money. I packed lunches through most of the week, and I found some strategies to help me resist spending money.
Here are some strategies that helped me out:


- Don't carry around any loose cash. 
When I have a bunch of money in my wallet I can be a lot more impulsive. I think this is because If I spend cash instead of using my debit card, the purchase doesn't show up on my debit history in my bank account. So it's a kind of sneaky way for me to spend ...


- Leave your debit card / credit card at home. 
If you are just going to the library to study, there really isn't a need to take your spending cards with you. I live 10 minuets away from the library, so I could easily just go home for lunch. But if I have cash or my debit card with me, I'll get lazy and buy lunch in the mall.


- Think of how much you really want what you're buying. 
When you're about to buy something, sometimes it helps me to think, "out of ten, how much to I really want or need this?" By rating the item in question out of ten, it really helps you realize the importance (or unimportance) of the purchase you're making. Numbers are factual, so if you only give the item a seven or six out of ten, its probably not worth the money you're spending. 




So, on that note I'll post how I've spent my money this week:


$13.70 on school supplies. 
$6.55 on food


Total : $20.25


Alright! This is a huge improvement from the past few weeks. 
These strategies are really paying off. I'm super exited about the progress that I'm making. 
However - I am not going to go easy on myself. Twenty dollars a week is still quite a bit of money, and I would still like to see that number go down (even though the majority was spent on school supplies). 




Katrina