nintetieth (personal finance friday [on a saturday])

In the not-so-distant past, I tended to avoid setting savings goals for myself because I thought I was the type who worked better without direct goals.  Sure, I started in on this personal finance thing, but my savings goals were vague and it was more about making myself financially independent.  Who would want to gum up the works by distracting themselves with little goals along the way?

Well, with the recent successes of my Christmas savings and my having finally paid off the credit card that I'd had hanging over my head since I first moved to California, I've finally changed my mind on the matter.  Humans, me being one of them, are goal-oriented creatures.  If we don't start drawing up a game-plan for those little struggles along the way to our lifelong goals, then we're likely to never reach them.  I know this may seem obvious, but my finances have always been something that I seemed to ignore the obvious on, and this whole idea of setting up personal savings goals just wasn't second nature to me.
But now I'm trying to change that.

J and I are planning on taking a trip back to the east coast sometime in August and, with summer gas prices what they are these days, I'm looking at spending a significant chunk of change just on the round-trip tickets.  That's not to mention meeting up with old friends and introducing them to J over a nice meal at some fancy-pants restaurant.  Or a seedy bar - whichever may come first.  Likewise, my good friend, Scio, Scio is going to be married come October.  This is another trip that I'll be in need of budgeting for.
All of this traveling at about the time I'm planning on finding a fairly-priced apartment somewhere closer to my work.  You know, somewhere that I won't have to share a bathroom with eight other grown men.

The W of the past would have seen these massive undertakings on the horizon and merely shrugged his already-financially-burdened shoulders while saying to himself, 'Gee, I sure do hope that I end up saving enough money before all of that happens.'
But not any more.

When I took it upon myself to set out a decent budget to meet my spending goals for each of my above-mentioned expenditures, I realized that, spread out over the next sixth months, the pain of spending all of that money at once is dulled significantly.  Really, I've only ever done any budgeting on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis.  Setting up an emergency fund and working out everything so that I could easily distribute my money throughout the month didn't seem like big goals at the time.  Nothing too long-term.
But I'm actually excited about meeting these goals that I've set.

So, I don't really have anything too terribly heavy to throw at you today regarding personal finance - I just wanted to point out that I've been going about this whole thing terribly wrong.  And things, they are a-changin'.