I like to spend some time each day visiting the sites of readers who have made their way to my blog and show up on my MyBlogLog list. I stumbled across Lady Tawodi’s Blog earlier today and was inspired by her post Living Below Your Means: Break Free From Consumerism.
Lady Tawodi offers up several suggestions on how to save money on a daily and monthly basis and even charts all of her income and expenses each month. I have been wanting to do something like this for a while now, and I finally took a few hours to actually get it done. I used MS Excel and created detailed reports of my income and expenses starting in January of this year.
So how am I doing thus far? Not that great really, but, there is a reason for this (and no this is not me making an excuse). I spent a good amount of money in January to fund my trip to the 2007 CES. I consider this a one-time expense. The same thing can be said for February, where I spent even more money to fund the purchase of my dedicated test system. All of the expenses acquired for these two activities were to further develop OCIA.net and thus consider them a necessary business expense.
Other than that, one of my main “useless” expenses each month is eating out, which is one of the “don’t” listed on Lady Tawodi’s post. I have been doing much better about this so far this month and plan to keep it that way. Things are looking much better so far this month. I don’t foresee any “unusual” expenses and hope to have a more accurate representation of my month-to-month income / expenses at the end of this month 
