The thing about quantizing my budget is that I can take the opportunity to increase my gaming budget. I've already been keeping track of some expenses for the last few months, and my gaming budget used to be $100 a month with a double penalty if I went over $100 (i.e. any amount over the budget counts double). With those rules, I was more than $100 over budget. But increase the budget to $125 and now I'm a bit under budget. So obviously my spending pattern for the last 6 months is a bit under $125 a month.

But even with that, I'm still quite a bit behind. I did catch up with Star Fleet Battles purchases, but GURPS and related are way behind. Steve Jackson Games puts out a lot of products each month, easily enough to swamp my budget unless I ignore miniatures and cardboard heroes, which I have decided to do just to keep afloat. It'll probably take me a few months to catch up on GURPS and keep up with Car Wars and Ogre (thank Goddess that they're production is low). Then I have to work on GURPS linked items like White Wolf and Weird West and Cthulhu, not to mention keeping up with SFB and Prime Directive and the upcoming DecipherTrek line.

Add to that the fact that I moved my wargame purchases from unbudgeted to the gaming budget and $125 is not more than $100 as previously thought. A conservative four wargames a year (and it'll probably be more like six) at $60 each is $240. That extra $25 a month is only $300. But the extra $25 means that I'm not going over budget as much with its resulting budget penalty. It remains to be seen whether $125 is good enough. Well, it's not but as long as I can keep with my core games that should be good enough...

So what are my long-term financial goals? Let's start shorter term. In the next year I'll have paid off my sister's loan and then I'll be able to pay back my Mom at $500 a month. That still means another couple of years in addition to pay back my Mom for both cars (so no, the insurance for a car is not as nice as getting more use out of it). If somehow I can pay off my Mom quicker then I can really look for a house (though who knows what other major expenses I'll have by then).

If not a house then I need to buy a condo. Some place that I can be happy living in for 20-30 years. In the long run it's better to own. Note that with a loan you end up paying double the loan amount, ameliorated a bit with tax breaks. But then your monthly payments don't go up every year as would happen with an apartment or other lease. I will say that with the downturn in the economy my rent went down to $895 (from $1075). But now rent doesn't include water and garbage, which probably will be another $50 a month so rent is only down a bit over $100.

I actually do like my apartment, even though it has some annoying drawbacks. No insulation, it traps heat like crazy. Fridge is practically dead. Next to a busy street so it does get noisy. Next to the parking lot so it gets noisy there too, especially when the garbage truck rolls in at 06:30 (though that's sporadic, usually it's 11:00). If it was my condo I'd spend money on fixing it up a bit since it's gotten a bit rundown. But since I keep thinking of it as temporary I just live with the broken things.

It's kind of strange that I make all this money and yet I can barely make my payments. I realize that I'm not nearly as badly off as many people -- I just have way too many luxury expenses that I could cut out if I really had to. It's just kind of weird to me that even now I'm worried about my ability to buy cool things, just like when I was working at West Coast. Only now I'm putting away $20k a year in retirement funds and such. And of course I've bought like three computers (two for me, one for my brother) and gone on a couple of big vacations. As the saying goes, the more things change the more they stay the same.