If you read my blog I’m guessing one of four things is true about you. 1) You have at least a moderate level of interest in personal finance. 2) You could care less about personal finance, but you at least moderately enjoy my stick figure drawings. 3) You could care less about personal finance and my drawings, but you have at least a moderate level of interest in my personal life. 4) You ended up here by accident and will be leaving just as quickly as you came (I hate you fourth-category person ).

Since this is a personal finance blog, and most of us have an interest in the topic, I thought we could talk a little bit about the how we became so stinkin’ nerdy.

There is nothing inherently sexy, or even all that appealing, about money. We’ve already decided money has no intrinsic value, so why the heck do I find it so fascinating? I mean, it wasn’t always this way. Heck, I didn’t even know how to transfer money from my savings to my checking account until I was 22 years old! Twenty-freaking-two. (my mom always made the transfer for me)

In just three months, I went from college student; never paying rent, car insurance, or really any bills for that matter, to a federal agent who suddenly had all sorts of financial obligations and commitments. I couldn’t even spell 401K, let alone understand the importance of one.

It wasn’t until about three months in to my job that I decided I needed a game plan. I had a conversation with a close friend about Roth IRA’s and he gave me a PF book to read, Smart Couples Finish Rich. The book was meant for married couples, but that didn’t keep me from reading the thing front to back in two days. I was immediately hooked.

Who-woulda-thunk-it? Apparently you can get “rich” without having to be a millionaire. In fact, if I manage my money properly from age 22 to 65, I could retire with millions upon millions of dollars. I hopped on the internet, started reading some blogs, and decided to chronicle my own PF journey.

And that’s how it happened. In about seven days time I went from not giving a hoot about personal finance to starting a blog called Punch Debt In The Face. Crazy.

How did the start of your PF journey come about? What motivated you to get your life in order? What keeps you motivated as the initial excitement wears off?

p.s. in other depressing news, Los Angeles Counties Board of Supervisors just gave the okay that anyone who throws a frisbee or a football on the beach can be subject to a $1,000 fine. Never thought I’d have to say to my kids “When I was your age we use to be able to dig holes in the sand.” <—-also a $1,000 fine. Dumbest. Rule. EVER!!!!

Let’s have a little fun today shall we? Have you ever thought about money? I’m not talking about things like saving, paying doubt debt, investing, etc. No, I’m talking about tangible money. I personally am fascinated by it.

Think about it.  A $100 bill is worth ten times more than a $10 bill. Why? Simply because someone decided to print the number 100 on one piece of paper, and number 10 on the other. Money has virtually no intrinsic value. It’s only purpose is to serve as a medium for the exchanging of goods. (side note: did you know a penny costs 1.67 cents to make? how crazy is that!)

In fact money is so worthless that it’s quickly becoming an endangered species. If you’re like me then you get paid via direct deposit. Every two weeks my bank account increases as my employer transfers invisible cash in to my bank account. I can then head to Target and buy a plunger (you know for plunging things) with my debit card. Nowhere in that process did I see a single dollar. It’s this crazy magical accounting system that just kind of is.

So since we can all agree money is pretty much worthless, I figured we could get a little creative today and create some hypothetical currencies. I personally like the burrito factor. If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a little rundown from a previous post…

I can get a California burrito for $5 at the local taco stand. Not only is that sucker scrumtrulescent, but it also fills me up. Now, whenever I go out to eat and look at the menu, I run the burrito factor through my mental calculator. It looks a little something like this… “Okay, this salad is gonna cost me $12.50, which is the same price as 2.5 California burritos. Plus the salad is probably only going to fill me up 50%. So that means this salad is gonna cost the equivalent of 5 California burritos to get full. Death to salad!”

So reader, what’s your currency?

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Let’s get right to the point today shall we? I go out of my way to ensure my personal finances are significantly more complicated than they should be. In fact, I’d even go as far as to say that I sleep better at night because of it. No, I haven’t lost all my marbles, I just hate the idea of automating my finances.

I know I’m probably in the minority here, seeing that numerous personal finance blogs preach the wonders of automating your finances. I won’t try to convince you my way is better (even though it is), but allow me to at least explain myself further. First, I’ll list off all of the regular recurring payments I have each month.

1. Rent- $1,175 (all utilities are rolled in to this one payment, including cable/internet)
2. Cell Phone- $60
3. Car/Renters Insurance- $180
4. Credit Card(s) – Varies depending on balance (usually around $1,500)
5. Charitable Contributions – 10% of gross income
6. Storage unit – $65 (storing our baby grand piano)

I may be forgetting one or two other bills, but for the most part I think that about covers it. I could theoretically set up an automatic withdrawal from my checking for each of these bills, allowing the companies access to my checking account. As the bill comes due, the company would pull the money from my checking account.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that totally freaks me out. Getting married and sharing a checking account with Girl Ninja was scary enough, I couldn’t imagine giving a bunch of random strangers access to my account as well.

I’ve read horror stories about people who thought they set up a $200/monthly payment and were shocked to find out $2,000 was withdrawn instead.

Or how about the person that had their car payment scheduled for the 8th of every month. Well it just so happened that on the night their account was to be debited, their bank was beefing up security protocols and restricted all customers accounts for a few hours. As a result, the payment never processed. But because it’s suppose to be automatic, you never think to check and make sure everything went smoothly. Thirty days later you are dealing with an angry Toyota representative hounding you for being one month past due.

No thanks. Automatic payments don’t sound worth it to me. To be perfectly honest, I actually enjoy manually paying my bills. It reminds me how much money comes in and out of our account each month, but more importantly it makes me want to continually shop around and make sure I’m getting the best deal possible. It essentially keeps me intimately involved in our personal finances. And I need not remind you, making love with money is my favorite kind of romance.

Do you automate your finances? Why or why not?

Last month I asked for PDITF readers to submit stories about how they’re doing. I was amazed by the feedback I received, overwhelmed even. Far more people expressed interest in contributing to the series than I anticipated. I couldn’t keep up with all the emails and submissions I was getting, so I avoided them instead  (Haha, like a true Ninja right?). I added the emails to my “To Do” list and haven’t paid much attention to them. I’m just now taking the time to look ‘em over and get things worked out (sorry for the procrastination).

Today we are kicking the series off with  BR, a woman who doesn’t necessarily agree with her husband on how their six figure income should be allocated…

My name is BR, and I have been married to DH (dear husband) for about 18 months.

Together, DH and I make $100,500 before taxes. After taxes, 401(k) contributions, insurance and all that come out of our checks, we usually take home just over $62,000 a year. We both can get yearly bonuses (last year, I didn’t get one, but my husband got $8,000) and my husband gets a Christmas bonus at the end of each year, usually the amount of one paycheck, but again, this isn’t guaranteed, so I don’t count it as income.

Our debt:

• Car loan- about $12,000
• Truck loan- $16,000
• My student loan- $8,900
• Husband’s student loan- $26,700
• Total debt: $63,600

When we got married, we had about $15,000 of credit card debt between the two of us. We set a goal to pay it off before our first anniversary, and actually did it two months ahead of schedule (thanks mostly to my husbands bonus)! We were both really relieved to be out from under that debt, but we completely disagreed on what to do next.

If I had my way, we would never go out to eat or buy anything that we don’t NEED until we have everything paid off. It would only take a year and a half, and then we would be free and clear! My husband feels like this is not reasonable, since all the debt is low-interest (what he calls ‘good debt’) and both our vehicles are worth more than what we owe on them. His bigger priority is saving for a house, since he feels that paying rent every month is throwing away money. He also thinks that going out to eat is fun and relaxing (I think he’s just trying to get out of doing the dishes ) and he loves to go to the movies.

So, we compromised. We put $900 a month in our house fund, and then I pay whatever extra I can find in our budget on my student loan. We go out to eat once a week, and we each get $20 a week to spend on whatever we want. My $20 usually goes toward my student loan, but I also use it to thrift shop or get a haircut occasionally. While I would love to have my way, I am able to compromise with this, because our debt is no longer at a point where it keeps me up at night, like it did when we first got married. If push came to shove, we could sell our cars and reduce our debt to only student loans. Also, watching the balance on our savings account go up is super fun, and it is comforting to know that right now we could live for two months with what we have.

Really, we are not in a bad place at all. We spend much less than we earn, we save a decent amount, and we are working on paying off our debts. I get impatient, and really want to ‘punch debt in the face’, but at the end of the day I would rather have a peaceful marriage than no debt.

Ninja’s comment: If you want to submit your story for the “How you doing” series, shoot me an email.

I like to consider myself a pretty good manager of money. Money comes in, and money goes out. It’s a simple process really. But no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get a handle on the Ninja household average food budget. This one category is totally throwing my whole game off. Take a look at this ridiculous graph of how much eating costs us each month (groceries and dining out).

How the heck do we go from $400ish in the early part of the year, to a low of $280 in spring, to the mid $700′s in late summer? Our average food budget is as crazy as Britney Spears was when she cut off all her hair….

Leave Britney alone (anyone get that joke?).

Britney’s right, the Ninja’s food budget IS crazy and I don’t know what to do about it. Girl Ninja and I both agree that there is no reason we should be spending so much. In a perfect world, we’d be dropping about $250-$300/month at the grocery store and about $150-$200/month dining out. All in we’d love to keep our food spending to about $450/month. WHY CAN’T WE DO IT!?

Food is the thorn in our side, or I guess the thorn in our budget. It’s the only category that fluctuates on such extreme measures. We plan to limit our dining out to weekends only, pay better attention to what is on sale, and throw in a few “cheap” meals during the week (tomato soup and grilled cheese, black bean soup, etc). We obviously can manage just fine on a $450 average food budget ’cause I don’t remember starving in January, February, April, or July. It’s just gonna take a little more discipline and planning, but I’m confident we can figure something out. Worse case scenario; I stop eating altogether. Oh and don’t worry. We wont turn in to extreme couponers. I hate those people.

What item in your budget always seems to throw ya off (food, travel, clothes, gas, etc)? How much do you spend each month on dining out and groceries (dollar amount and number of people in family)?