Personal Finance 101 with Buxfer

As a part of Project rstlf, I decided that I need to get on top of my personal finances. I decided to keep a tab of my spends. So starting Aug 1, I have noted EVERY spend I have made on buxfer.com (affiliate link, if you sign up, I get $1). And here is how the summary looks like...

I will not get into absolute numbers, I dont want to tell the world the miserable and poor life I lead. The key spends are Home (I contribute about 20% to my household spend, rest comes from my dad, even though he's retired from his work more than a year), Shopping, Auto (Petrol, Parking and Toll) and Food.

Of these, I dont think I can reduce on home. In fact it would go up with time as I try and give a better and more comfortable lifestyle to my parents.

Shopping can be reduced. This month I made a large purchase, a phone. This may not be a recurring purchase and hence this could drastically come down as I have stopped splurging on shoes and am not too fond of clothes anyways.

I can reduce food as well. A large chunk of my money is spent on eating out. This is fancy restaurants, parties etc. Thankfully I dont booze and that saves a lot of money for me. Going forward, I plan to reduce this as much as I can. Eating at home will save me a lot of money. And then, maybe, just maybe it will make me fitter (which is a large part of rstlf).

Surprisingly utility payments was very little. Its part of Others. May be because my dad pays most of those and because the large component of the bills, the electricity bill, comes every two months and we dint get it in August.

So this is about it for the month of August. For next month, Sep 2012, spends could again be an aberration. Because as a part of Project rstlf, I am planning something outrageous and that would mean yet another spike in spends. Lets see how that goes.