A swing, and a miss.

First, the good news:

• I did do my math right, and I did have a little more than $300 left in my bank account for the ski trip.
• Fiddling with my W4 gave me almost $100 extra per check, which will totally cover the cost of my new insurance! You can't miss money that you never had.
  

Yup. That's it for the good news.

Now, the bad news:

• Somehow I messed up when I went to make the payment for my CitiCard (or Citi messed it up?) and selected my checking account that had $15 in it rather than my main checking account, so I ended up overdrawing and somehow got charged twice for the overdraft fee. I am still working to resolve this.
• Winter Park ended up costing me a lot more than $300. So I overspent my paycheck ... again (and the $300+ I got for babysitting last week has to go pay of my LOC account at my bank rather than into the car fund to earn interest - grr.)

I am taking this incident in stride for a number of reasons:

1. I know that this doesn't mean that I will never be able to do this. I must be able to do this.
2. Most of the overspending came from boozing, which was awesome and super fun, so I can't be too mad at myself because I feel like I got real value out of what I overspent on.
3. The vet bills are all paid off (except one tiny one) which means that I will have all of my paychecks to start working with from here on out - WEE!
4. I am really starting to put forth a significant effort to get my spending under control, or at least bring in a little extra cash so that I can create an allowance for myself so that I don't feel like I need to keep spending.

I know I messed up, and while I am frustrated by it, I know that this will pass and I will get everything back under control and then I can move forward. Onward and upward, right? It's odd to be so at peace with myself over this because I never really have been before.

Plus, after many thoughts and hours of hard pondering, I have decided to stop trying to create a budget for myself. Instead, I am going to map out savings goals, what I need to do to get to my savings goals and then work within those parameters. And, like I mentioned above, I am going to give myself a cash allowance from each paycheck to spend how I please (or save in a piggy bank, this money will not be going back into the system unless absolutely necessary) and I am going to have to leave my debit and credit cards at home so that when I run out of money, I'm out and won't have any way to get more to ruin the whole thing (which is one of my downfalls).

Living within my means ... here I come!