spring tastes so good

Thanks to mint.com, I realized I was exceeding my budget for eating out, whether quickly or slowly, alone or with friends, and conversely, that I wasn't spending enough money at the grocery store. Based on this analysis, I concluded that if I took the money I was spending in excess at restaurants, and, frankly, Rumbi Island Grill, and put it towards groceries, my budget would be balanced, and so would be my diet. For me that literally looked like spending $9 more per day on groceries, and $5 less per day on eating out, on average, approximately. I finally put my dissatisfaction into action, and have been preparing bright and delicious meals all month.

I also downloaded an application from Whole Foods that, when I input the ingredients I have on hand, outputs a recipe into which I can incorporate those ingredients. I have buttermilk in my refrigerator, and I didn't know what to use it for, and so I am going to make buttermilk potatoes.

This is all based around the idea that, the more information you feed into, essentially, an algorithm or an application, the more meaningful it will become. The Whole Foods application took unrelated ingredients and related them into a recipe for a meal. Mint turned all of my individual transactions into a chart that graphs my spending patterns. And based on the information, I was able to modify my behavior, and improve my life.

Thanks to direct deposit, a debit card, and free personal finance software, my life is becoming almost as smart as my iPhone. It's just one of the ways I have been "living by numbers."