April spending...

So I made two blog resolutions for the month of April. One was to come up with a giving plan, which I'll be posting in the next couple days. The other was to keep a detailed record of my spending for the first time in my life.

I failed miserably.

I'm going to try to do a better job in May (and every month after that until I get it right), but in the meantime, this is what I was able to piece together from my credit card statement, bank statement, and from memory, so theoretically it's not too far off:

Groceries: $42
Eating out: $51
Transportation: $40
Clothes: $7
Gifts: $8
Charity: $65
Entertainment: $33
Misc: $34

The first thing I notice from this is that to get any real use out of this, I'm going to have to average out several months in a row-- at least based on my previous perceptions, the groceries number is low and the eating out is high.

Okay, wish me luck. As I said, I've never been organized/disciplined enough to keep track of this stuff before, but hopefully the spectre of coming back month after month to tell the whole wide internet "Oops, I failed again!" will motivate me into getting it right!