Two Weeks of Internship: Where’d My Money Go?
It’s 2 weeks into my internship and I’m about the get my first paycheck, so decided it would be time to review and see how well I’m sticking to the budget I set out for myself in this March article. Here’s a screenshot of what my monthly budget looked like translated for two weeks, and to the right, how my current spending stacks up, with red meaning less money saved, and green meaning more money saved.
A chart for the visual breakdown of my two weeks spending, which is split roughly in thirds from housing, saving, and other expenses.
As expected, housing, investing, and taxes make up my largest expenses, and my food and entertainment costs are lower than what I predicted. However increases in housing, transportation, and personal care are much higher. One of the reason here is I ended up staying in a different location that expected, with higher rent and transportation costs, but with easy access to a kitchen I decreased my food prices.
Overall it was surprisingly easy to stick to my budget, I didn’t have to think about it too much, except in before going out to eat. To me this just reinforces how helpful the original budgeting process was for me (which only took me 2 hours). Because of this, I didn’t worry about where I was spending my money and had an easy time covering all my expenses and saving ⅓ of my first paycheck.
Let me know if you’ve had similar budgeting experiences, let me know in the responses section and I’ll be happy to discuss! As always feel free to contact me at cedrib@umich.edu.
