Adulting Update, Week 7

It’s been about a month and a half of adulting and since my last update (week 3), I haven’t made much of a change in the way I spend. But, given that it has been over a month, I am able to analyze my monthly spending, as a whole, including big, once-a-month expenses, like rent.

My salary for September (salary paid for the month of August, on September 14th) was 50% of what I’d normally get because I was on holiday for the first half of August. AND THAT SUCKED. Absolutely sucked. I won’t get paid for September until October 14th and I will admit that I already spent almost all of what I was paid last month.

Here’s some of my findings and updates:

I’ve been trying to live on a budget of ¥10,000 a week, not including my “Don’t Fucking Touch” savings box, or other unexpected expenses. But for groceries, food I buy, restaurants I go to, I’ve been trying to keep it around ¥10,000 per week. My groceries cost around ¥2,500-¥3,500 a week, depending on how much I intend on cooking throughout the week and if I need to buy things that are maybe monthly purchases, like rice, coffee, or tea. If I do buy dinner on my way home from work, it’s never more than ¥800, and that only happens once or twice a week.
Most of the spending occurs on the weekend, if I go out to dinner and drinks on Friday and/or Saturday night. Going out is my biggest expense up until now. Those nights easily cost about ¥3,000 and can be way more if I get carried away with the drinks. My restaurant/bar expense since the start of adulting is ¥28,777, which averages to ¥4,111 per week. Not too bad actually, I thought it was going to be way worse. There were a few weekends that I didn’t go out at all, so that helped the average. You know, if I didn’t drink alcohol at all, I would save so much money. But, who am I kidding?! That won’t happen.
My “Don’t Fucking Touch” savings box is up to ¥16,800 after today! That’s quite good, but I’m starting to feel that cash missing every week. It started out as a fairly low amount to set aside each week, but today I had to put in ¥2,800, and it’ll only get higher from now. I’ve decided not to cap it at a certain amount, though. I’ll miss the money now, but I’ll be happy when I go on my winter trip and have all this money set aside for it.
My transportation expense up until now is ¥19,370. CRAZY. That’s all I have to say. It’s crazy how expensive it is.
Makeup. I recently bought makeup. It cost me ¥13,651 for two eyebrow pencils (one that I already use and another in a lighter shade that I want to try), one tube of mascara, and setting powder. I haven’t switched over to drug store makeup and I don’t think I can. 🙁 Oh, and I bought a new moisturizer, which I include in makeup, for the purpose of my spreadsheet, which cost me ¥1,380. Total makeup expense up until now is ¥26,371. Sad.
I’ve decided to take the JLPT N3 test (Japanese Language Proficiency Test, level 3) in December, which cost me ¥5,500 to register and another ¥5,000 for study materials. I figured it would look good on my resume if I pass, so why not try?
Today, I just finished applying for this side hustle job where I caption videos. They pay up to $0.75 USD through PayPal for every audio minute captioned. If all goes well, I figure I can do this after work for an hour or two per day and make a bit of cash on the side. An extra $200 a month would be nice. It’s not a whole lot of money, and it’ll depend how much I do it, but there are interesting videos to choose from and it’s pretty easy to do, so I’ll give it a shot.

A month and a half of adulting and I’m still a broke girl. 🙁 LOL, but what can really be expected in such a small time frame. The main thing is that I’m making positive lifestyle changes that’ll benefit me in the long-run! Just the simple act of logging down every thing I purchase has made me so much more aware and has really made me think a lot more before making purchases.

In other news, I’m going on a family trip to Okinawa in less than 3 weeks! I’m very excited about that. Stay tuned for pictures!

Thanks for reading and for joining me on my journey out of broke girl status. 🙂