Today, I woke up @ 6:55 AM and proceeded to go to my early morning Saturday prayer meeting -- slightly on the tardy
side, but a decent amount of prayer. Afterwards, myself and Joe MSN, Steve Chung, John Chu and Min Song went to eat
some breakfast - Korean style... total expense for me $0.00 given that I was the junior member of the
group.
Then I proceeded to meet the EBay guy and gave him 2 Dodger tickets for today's and 4 Tuesday tickets for $65.00
I then went to Midas to replace my brakes... $250!!!. Sure, I could have gone to a Korean guy that charged
cheaper, but I guess I was willing to spend more to get the Midas touch. During the 2 hours or so it
took to get the new brake pads, I went to Baskin Robbins, and paid $1.95 on my favorite flavor of ice cream...
if you guess in class, I will reward you with $5 in Park's Place currency!!!
Today, I also decided to fly out to Baltimore to visit an old college buddy of mine after I'm through with summer school....
certainly doable even given my expenses especially since I'm teaching summer school.... I just need to find a workable budget
for the trip which will include tours of (hopefully) Yankee, Red Sox, Philly, Pirates, Nationals, Baltimore & any
other east coast baseball games -- I'll probably need about $1,000.
Other expenses today? I spend $31.96 on two books that I really didn't want, but I was too preoccupied
with other things to decline my books of the month through my Literary Guild membership. I also paid $26.96
for Ray, which is a good movie, but I already have a copy!!! I was too busy to decline the DVD Director's choice
via my Columbia House membership.... on top of that, I spent another cool $52 on the first season 3-disc
DVD set of my Quantum Leap, Jesus: The Untold Story, & Field of Dreams. In addition, I'm the current high
bidder to purchase Quicken, which is a personal finance software system. Even though I track expenses and income
on Microsoft Excel, my finances with having Waddell & Reed income, Eaton income, EBay income and other such ventures,
my finances are being complicated enough so as to justify a $20 investment into a personal financial software
program. I'm choosing Quicken over Money because of the brief Google search in which I typed in "Quicken vs. Money"
yielded results that favored Quicken over Money very slightly for those with more complicated financial situations.
Anyhow, this is an example of a journal entry... which you will need 10 of for the May 2005 budget project. I understand
that this particular entry is a bit longish, but some days will have need for more financial talk than others. So be it.
After church today, I decided to eat lunch today with some church friends. We went to Kabuki, a Japanese restaurant, and
I paid $13.96 for the "Kabuki" meal. For a lunch, that's usually more than I would usually pay, but it's not a
big deal to pay that much when I'm eating with a group of people. I would prefer not to spend over $10.00 on a meal if I'm
eating alone. Tomorrow, I'm going to spend $1381.83!!!! That's the cost of owning a home and a mortgage. However, since
it's directly taken out of my checking out, it's something that I've gotten used to. Also, I have a $320 car payment that
is directly debited from my account. This month is also the first month I'm contributing to my 403(b) account, so I've "expensed"
$500 towards my TSA. As for income... I have a Dodger game for Wednesday posted on eBay that will end today, and I'm hoping
the 4 tickets will end at over $40.00, but more realistically, it'll end at around $25 or $30, so we'll see about that.
