Again, long time no post. If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m terrible at keeping up with posting blogs regularly! But here I am again, with a few things to note, both for myself and you guys I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and/or holiday season!

First of all, general budget things: I’ve gotten really lazy about keeping track of things, and when I’m stressed I overspend, but I still have managed to keep things even. If I spend far too much in dining out, I tend to spend way under my limit in groceries. When I end up buying more clothes than intended, I seem to instinctively cut back on other extras—drinks, movies—that require money. Still, it shows that I still have room for improvement, both in creating realistic budgets and in fine-tuning my attitudes toward money.

Apartment: We now have a 5th roommate. It’s not something I’m totally thrilled about and it caused a lot of conflict because he’s a roommate’s fiancée, she didn’t really clear it with us, and we let him stay three weeks for free before they announced he wanted to stay full time—and they were confused when I said he needed to pay rent. We came to an agreement: he will pay us other three roommates (outside of his fiancée) $50 a month, which brings my rent down to $710 a month. I know I’ll have to hound him for it and I personally think he should pay more, but I decided the stress wasn’t worth it (I do love my roommates after all and have no issues with him, just how they dealt with that). And he’s doing a fair split of internet and utilities, and I’m going to work him into the chores/household supplies rotation. There’s some other stuff going on there as well—like a roommate leaving for six weeks so she won’t be paying internet or utilities then—but it’s all things I can deal with. This has certainly been a learning curve!

School Job: Next semester I’m working 10 hours a week, and my pay was raised to $10/hour, so that should be at about $200 every paycheck (and that’s not including the extra shifts and full days I’m required to work). They wanted me to do 15 hours a week but I couldn’t swing it with my four classes, thesis, and the club I run.

Home Job: I got a random bonus during October—$230.88! The company got a new investor and they gave a bonus based on usefulness and years worked. I’m not super useful, but I’ve been there four years. This went straight into savings My pay was raised here as well. I was previously at $8.50/hour (ew) and was preparing to argue for $9 when my state’s min. wage goes up on Jan. 1st. But I just checked my last pay stub and I’ve already been put at $9.50 (woohoo!).

Roth: Saving for my Roth IRA took a slight backseat when school started. I was unable to put as much into it each month as planned, so I was stuck at about $500. But all of my Christmas money ($300) went into it, so hopefully I can open a Vanguard account in January or February.

I think that’s it for general updates. All good things—now it’s just down to me ironing out how to save money in other areas.