For the month of December 2010, I spent a total of $595.79.
$223 was spent on full coverage car insurance
$108 was spent on gas
I spent $100 on a new skateboard
$44 was spent on fast food. I hadn't yet made it a bad habit.
I spent $30 on beer (can't remember if it was at a bar or a case of beer for a party)
$20 was spent on a haircut
$20 was spent on prepaid minutes for my phone (total of 120 minutes)
The rest of money was spent on miscellaneous items.
The most notable change on this month was that my employer at the time brought me on as a full time employee. My time as an independent contractor was over. This did have some pros and cons. The major cons was that withholding from my paycheck started. Had I just worked 40 hours at $12 an hour, I would have made $480. After getting on salary, I started out making $500 a week. After taxes and fica, my take home pay was $400 a week. The pro was the fact that I was expected only to work 8 hours a day and had a set schedule. I was also not required to show up on Saturdays. At this rate, my annual salary was $26000 annually and my take home pay was $21100 (I rounded off the numbers).
This month, I took home $1600. After expenses were deducted, I saved my goal of $1000.
This was one of the worst months of work I can remember. My job duties was to send payments out for child care benefits. While not just processing invoices, I also handled customer service which meant I would get constantly interrupted to talk to the clients.
With it being December, these families depended on getting reimbursed on time to pay for Christmas related expenses. This resulted in some really hostile and nasty phone calls. Constantly I was tempted to tell those jerks that they shouldn't have had kids they couldn't afford but it wouldn't be until a few years later that I realized that those kids were being used as a source of income to gain benefits via the federal government. I think it was December 23rd or 24th that my coworkers were going to go out for lunch after work but I was so pissed off from work that I just left and went home. It was only going to get worse for the next few months.
I used a tracfone for all my phone calls. I had a phone that gave me double minutes for life. It was the same phone I had been using for my last year of college. $20 gave me 120 minutes.
This was also back when I used to go to a barber to cut my have. The hair cut cost $15 each time and I always gave a $5 tip.
This month, I felt kind of secure. I decided to buy a new skateboard as I had been putting it for for some time. I also remember getting some pizza and beer with some friends. Out of the three of us, they both looked at me like I was the successful one of the trio. I was the only one who graduated college at the time and found a white collar job.
I looked up my birthday and saw that I spent no money. I remember my coworkers bought me lunch from Steak and Shake. That evening, my parents took me to Dave and Busters. I remember having one or two 22 ounce Blue Moons. There was some guy playing an acoustic guitar. He was paying a cover of the song "Secret Agent Man".
2010 had been just an absolute miserable year. I was glad to see it go.
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