Yesterday, my dear mother accused me of paying more attention to the sentiments of my fraternity brothers than to her own requests. I won’t bother to comment on the validity of this statement, but I am here to say that, in one aspect, I’m going to try to listen to you: the budget.

I have never been good at or one to budget – I would go to work to earn money for a specific goal (buying new computer parts, buying a guitar, buying a car, etc) and once I amassed enough money to purchase the particular item, I immediately spent all my money on that one thing. Apparently this isn’t the way things work in the real world.

Last summer I got a new job making a significantly larger amount of money than I have ever earned at any prior job. My mom’s first statement was “you need to budget” and of course I was thinking “oh my goodness, money! I can buy new toys!” Which is exactly what I did. In fact, I managed to burn through almost all of the money I earned over three months within a month of starting classes. This resulted in another semester of living from one random paycheck to the next (I don’t work steadily during the semester), and several occasions where I just plain didn’t have any money. Thankfully, toward the end of this semester I have gotten another job that provides a little bit of side money to help me make it through, but it’s still not enough.

Thus, with a bit of mom’s advice and a bit of painful “mom was right again,” I’m gonna “do mo’ betta” this year and actually create (and stick to as best as possible) a budget of some sort. The trouble comes in that I actually have no experience doing this… and I need to get this one figured out before I graduate and get into real trouble (there’s a reason I never got a credit card). Hopefully with these goals in mind, I will be able to maintain a balance in my account that will hold me through all of next year.

Being a computer nerd, I’m off looking for software, but if anyone has any suggestions on how to go about this feat, I’m all ears!