My Blank Slate

Last week, T and I went to sign the lease on my new apartment and scout out the situation.  The verdict? Smaller than I anticipated, but this is doable. The living room has already been furnished by my roommate, so I'm in charge of the kitchen plus my own room.

The kitchen includes two small squares of counter-top space, a small stove/oven combo and a small refrigerator.  Plus a microwave and panini press that may belong to my roommate's subletter.   I've got plans for extra shelving, but I'm worried about the minimal counter space.  The lack of dishwasher doesn't bother me, except that a dish drainer will take up valuable counter space.  The refrigerator's size was pretty worrying, but my roommate says she rarely cooks and never uses the freezer, so it looks like it'll mostly be mine.

My room is small too, but only slightly smaller than the room I lived in last year, so I think I can make it work. 

I know this isn't a very content-heavy post, but I wanted to share my before pictures.  When I move in a few weeks from now, I'll post the afters.

Small Successes: Slow and Steady

My attempts to reduce my waste while living at home have been met with a variety of reactions, from understanding to misunderstanding, from helpfulness to laughter and scorn.  When I tried to institute cloth napkins back in May, that last pair of reactions was the most prominent.  T thought it was gross to reuse them but wasteful to wash them if they'd only been used once (to clarify, at that point we had 8 napkins total, for 4 people).  Mom thought having to wash them was a pain in the rear.  Dad, after a while, confessed to me that he actually liked using them.  And more and more recently, everybody has used the cloth napkins.  As I've acquired more, I think their continued presence has helped my family feel like they're commonplace and ok to get dirty.  And sometimes everybody used paper ones and I would just silently exchange mine for cloth. 

But this. I came home Tuesday with a set of napkin rings and a some more new(ish) napkins from the thrift shop, and I looked at the middle of the kitchen table.  I realized that something was missing.  Can you tell what it is?

The paper napkin holder is empty.  I don't know when it was emptied, I think it may have actually been last week.  But it definitely stayed empty for at least three days.  Not much, but it's a start.

(This happened with reusable grocery bags as well, near the end of my high school days.  I bothered my parents to buy a few, and then kept bringing them along as often as possible, and now we have a fleet of them.  By the time the bag tax rolled around a year or so ago, we didn't even have to change our routine.)

Related to this, I've finally gotten around to getting napkin rings for the family.  I found a set of 5 wooden rings for 25 cents at the thrift shop, and have now decorated them with sharpies to distinguish each person's ring.

Preparing to Budget

I've finally gotten my housing assignment for next year, so my rent is a known quantity and its time for me to start setting up my budget.  I've given myself budgets in the past, to variable success, but I'm determined to stick with it this time.

The primary challenge to my budgeting process is that I don't know what my tax situation is going to look like.  I have a stipend, but nothing will be withheld from it as far as I know.  In addition, my fellowship package technically includes my tuition and some university fees that are paid without me ever seeing the money. Do they count as income? Will I have to pay taxes on it?  Right now, I have no idea, so I'm just picking the tax bracket that I technically fall into if my stipend were my only income and removing a flat percentage before I start budgeting.  If I wind up with extra money at the end of the year, hooray! I'd rather be cautious this year until I figure everything out. 

Post-taxes, this is how my budget will break down, percentage-wise.

Giving: 10%

Saving: 20%
- For the first year or two, most of this will go towards an emergency fund. My current savings will roll into the base of the emergency fund, and then I'd like to double the amount that I have right now.
- I'm also going to start putting away a little bit of money into general savings (which will eventually become a retirement account) and a future-house fund.

Needs: 55%
- My rent is about 42% of my total budget every month, although utilities (water and electricity) are already included.  I do have to pay a $29 internet fee every month, though.  I'm living in university-owned housing, which means I can live close to school without paying the higher rent that the neighborhood can command.  I'm also purchasing renter's insurance through my parents' home insurance.
- I'm budgeting $200/month for food. I wish I had kept track of my food costs last summer (I lived in the same neighborhood during an REU) so I could know if this is reasonable. 
- I plan to set aside a little bit of money every month to cover what I'm calling "career costs" - books, computer programs, dry cleaning for conference clothes, stuff like that.

Wants: 15%
- This is the category I'm most worried about sticking to. On the one hand, this percentage feels small compared to my other categories and recommendations I've seen online.  On the other hand, the actual dollar amount is well above what I've spent on myself every month during undergrad.  On the other other hand, my parents helped me out sometimes and won't be doing that as much anymore.  So yeah. Nervous.
- I'm including any eating out that causes me to go over my $200 "Needs" food budget.

I'm sure I'm going to wind up with some serious Wants-Vs-Needs analysis going on, especially the first semester.  Right now, my plan is pretty strict and my needs are almost entirely limited to food and shelter.  But I don't want to compromise on giving or saving, either.  The former category has been important to me for a while now, and the latter needs to become important for the future. So I will make this work.  Somehow.

Summer Slumping

I promise posts like this will not become a regular occurence.

I've hit my mid-break slump.  It happens nearly every school break that's longer than about a week where I don't have a job or volunteer position to take up most of my time.  In other words, it happens any time I'm left to monitor and motivate my own activities completely on my own at home.  After some relaxation and enthusiastic work on my projects, things peter out.  I waste a lot of time.  I avoid doing anything that looks like progress unless I have a due date that I can't avoid.

So that's what I've been doing for most of the last few weeks.  A whole lot of nothing.  I've probably spent upwards of 6 hours a day online.  95% of that time has been utterly useless (tumblr, twitter, tvtropes, online shopping (though thankfully no online buying), etc).  I've been reading the same book since I got back from Spain.  Not because it's an incredibly tough read, but because I've only been reading for a short amount of time every couple of days. 

And it's not that I don't want to work on things.  I go to bed thinking of all the things I've left undone that day, and what I plan to work on tomorrow.  It's just that, when the time comes, I decide that it's easier to do other things.  Work takes mental energy.  Tumblr takes approximately none. I can't think of anything interesting to post about because my waste-reducing efforts haven't had much effort put into them lately. 

I'm hitting the point, though, where work has to start happening.  I'm starting to climb my way out of the hole.  The end of the break is in sight, so I have to start getting things done.  I have a paper to finish writing before I leave.  I have to get ready to move.  My goal is to get regular posting restarted next week, and hopefully a post like this won't be necessary again.