Happy Halloween! Have any fun or scary plans tonight? Halloween isn’t really my thing. Once I got too old to go trick or treating, it just lost its appeal. Also, I’m not really into being scared.
Do you know what is scary?
How badly I failed this month with my spending and my goals!
Let’s review.
October Goals:
- Go out to restaurants only once a week FAIL. I was good the first two weeks, then my mom came for a visit and it all went down hill from there.
- Practice Spanish, Portuguese and French on Duolingo.com 5x per week. FAIL. Same reason as above. I also realized studying three languages at the same time isn’t a good idea?
- Finish one book. Success! I read a co-workers book (how cool is that?!) and I’m in the middle of two others. I’m all over the place.
- Write a guest post Success! Check it out
- Confirm three more people for my Dear Debt Letters project Success! I’ve published two letters this month by Girl Meets Debt and Erin! I confirmed two others as well. Are you interested in participating?
- Finish recording a song with my partner (he’s a musician, I sing) FAIL. My boyfriend got a sudden increase in work and we have opposite schedules.
But I did do a little better with my….
Goals for the rest of the year:
- Make my first $1 from my blog – possibly! I’m going to give this freelance writing thing a go and have someone interested. I’ll let you know how it works out. Have you seen my Hire me page? Trying to hustle and pay those loans, you know.
- Grow Dear Debt Letter project – in progress. I am going to start spamming Craigslist looking for many different voices and perspectives for this series.
- Side hustle enough so that I can continue paying $1,500 per month towards debt Success + Fail. I worked three out of the 4 weekends this month. But I overspent and “only” dropped $1200 towards my debt.
- Learn how to drive stick shift FAIL – opposite schedules
My spending was just awful this month. Between my birthday, my mom visiting and me feeling celebratory, I just had a little too much fun. The worst of it is, Ryan and I recently wanted to go out. Knowing that we had already been bad, we decided to go somewhere with a coupon during happy hour. AND WE STILL MAGICALLY SPENT $50!!!
I couldn’t believe it. I left there thinking, how is this even possible? It was my bad, because it was a “small plates” restaurant. Don’t go to a small plates restaurant if your ass is hungry! Lesson learned. That was just so stupid. Look at the prices and don’t pretend that you don’t care!
Anyway, enough with the bad, on to the good!
- I paid off $1,200 in debt, which leaves me with $45,668.46 in student loans. $8,290.84 of which is my undergrad loan, and $37,377.62 is my graduate loan. I am really eager to get under 40k! I’m hoping early 2014 I will see that, if not earlier if my income significantly increases.
- Erin’s Dear Debt letter was featured in The Globe and Mail. I got an instant surge of traffic that made me think something was wrong with my site.
- I started the Bloggers Helping Bloggers program as a mentee. My mentor is Lazy Man and Money and he’s a pretty cool cat. I am excited to learn and grow as a blogger.
- Freelance writing – writing my first post this week and we’ll see how it goes. I’m really excited about getting started on this.
- Today I received an email from a writer at Woman’s World magazine who found my article on How to Become a Brand Ambassador. She wanted to ask me a few questions and said she will use the info in an article. I’ll probably get two sentences of action, but it’s still cool. The publishing world is nuts, so it will most likely be printed in January.
- I worked three out of four weekends. One for my real job, one as a brand ambassador, and I worked two Halloween parties last weekend; one on my birthday and then one on Saturday. I am NOT working this weekend. My sweetie is taking me on a belated birthday surprise adventure and I can’t wait.
So yeah, this month’s spending was hella scary, but lots of good things happened as well. I am reining it in, and focusing on making things happen, making myself happy and living a full, frugal, fantastic adventure-filled life.
How was your month?