Alternate title: Save Money, Lose Weight, Play More Video Games
After playing with
Mint for a few weeks, and fixing some of the (few) mis-labeled transactions, 2 things became abundantly clear:
- Owning and improving a home in the DC area is expensive as balls.
- I am spending enough money on fast food and coffee to lease a Kia.
The home improvement isn't that troubling, assuming anyone ever buys or sells a house again. Ever.
But the fast food spending is killing me (quite literally) in several ways. First, there are many better ways to utilize $310/month than Panda Express and Starbucks. Second (and I haven't done the legwork on this) I suspect there are healthier dining options extant.
Enter the magic of the internets. Starting Columbus day (no time to grocery shop before then) I will harness the self-improvement (and waist-line reducing) power of Joe's Goals, ING Direct, and self-loathing to banish fastfood and Starbucks from my (weekday) life. This should help me save money (for to pay off credit cards and buy a 40GB Playstation 3) and bring sexy back.
I typically spend ~$5 on breakfast/coffee and $10 on fastfood lunch and dinner. My thinking is that I can replace $125/week of fastfood with ~$50 of groceries, saving $75/week. Tracking my (hopefully) good behavior on Joe's Goals, I plan on dumping the first $35/saved each week into a no-fun ING account that will go towards credit cards. The other (possible) $40 will go to fun.
I'll check back in a month and let you know how it's going. If you don't hear from me, I'm probably at Pentagon City mall gorging myself on Kung Pao and Orange Chicken.
Now that you've used Todoist to get all your pending tasks done (or at least catalogued) and Mint to sort out your fiscal world, it's time to sit back and relax. 
