Return of the Social Life October 7, 2008

I might not have ever mentioned it, but one of the things that BF and I both love to do with our friends is to sing karaoke. For the better part of a year, it was a nightly ritual on Thursday nights – a huge group of our friends would meet at the local karaoke bar, and have a great time. Of course, its pretty much impossible to go to a bar and not have a few drinks, which always meant that we were spending money. Plus, it always seemed like it was someone’s birthday, or there was something to celebrate, which meant buying drinks for other people.

Towards the end of Spring, we got pretty good at limiting Thursday night to $20/each – I would give my $20 to BF and just put him in charge of getting us beverages for the evening, because if I were in charge, I would be much more likely to have a drink or 2 and overspend. Then, there was a huge friend crisis, and the karaoke place stopped having karaoke on Thursday nights for the summer, and so, we stopped going. We both miss it a lot, and have been talking about how and when we could get back to our fun habit.

We considered going last Thursday night, but heard through the grapevine that the particular group we don’t want to deal with anymore would definitely be in attendance. So we stayed home, had people over and played Wii. It was fun, but nothing is quite the same as getting up there and belting out a song.

There is a restaurant/bar about 1/2 a mile down the street from our new place that we have recently disovered has karaoke on Thursday and Saturday nights, and I think we are definitely going to check it out this week. Lets hope that the book is good, and the drinks are cheap.

Upheaval May 12, 2008

I think today was the first Monday in a long, long while that I was legitimately glad that the weekend was over, and normalcy was returning. It was seriously that bad of a weekend.  I don’t want to get into the specifics (nor are they really that interesting, I promise), but suffice it to say, there was a lot of misunderstandings and hurt feelings that are only now starting to sort themselves out. Not a lot of fun.

I’ve also been thinking about my lifestyle a lot, and realizing that some of my patterns of behavior are totally unhealthy – physically, for my body, mentally, for my sanity, and financially, for my grander life plans. Its time to make some serious changes, and try a little bit harder to become the person that I want to be.

BF and I pretty regularly check craigslist for apartments that might potentially meet our criteria, for the future move-out plan of September 1st. Today, however, there was a place advertised that we hadn’t seen listed before, in a great location, meeting nearly all the requirements on our list – and at a very reasonable price. The problem is that it is already empty, and the landlord is most likely looking to rent sooner than we will be ready to move. I think we are going to take a look at it anyway, though, and maybe a discussion can be had.

Being frugal has turned me into a Sports Fan May 8, 2008

No, seriously – it kind of has.

I’ve never been the sporty sort of girl. I was on the swim team in high school, solely for the fact that I could hang out with my friends and still legitimately put a sport on my college applications. Despite living in New England, I’ve never been one to buy into the whole sports mania that consumes everyone here. Its just not my thing – I’m a girly girl. I also don’t have any brothers, or any sort of close male friend of a child, nor is my Father a huge sports fan. It just wasn’t my world.

Since getting serious about cutting down on my spending habits, though, I’m finding that at least a night or two of the week, a perfectly acceptable activity is to hang out with BF at his parents house, watching a Red Sox game. My pseudo-fandom started last fall, when they won the World Series, and we watched every game (mostly from a bar, where huge amounts of money on drinks was spent). Really, though – its not a bad way to spend an evening, and I’m even starting to find it sort of enjoyable.

You are never going to catch me in a pink Red Sox shirt, though – even I have my limits!

Just say no to chain food! May 2, 2008

One of my pseudo New Years resolutions was to stop eating out at chain restaurants so much – places like Chili’s, Uno’s, etc. For a while, it seemed like BF and I were grabbing food at one of these places at least once a week, which wasn’t doing anything for either our wallets or our waistlines. Since making the resolution, we’ve been largely successful, and honestly – the food at non-chain places is just so much better that it really does seem worth it.

I mentioned earlier that it was BF’s best friends birthday this week. Well, last night the four of us went out to dinner before heading to our karaoke place. We ended up at this restaurant that we had been meaning to try, called the Fat Cat. I’m a big fan of reading the reviews on Yelp, and they were pretty positive, so I was very much looking forward to our meal. We ended up having to wait about 45 minutes, so we trekked over to another restaurant to have a drink. We each got a margarita, and then we each did a shot of Patron, which put us all in a very festive mood. I paid the tab for the drinks, which was about $72, including tip.

We then headed back over to the restaurant and soon were seated. We all had another specialty drink (mine was called a Hello Kitty), and ordered some appetizers – fried pickle chips and pulled pork nachos. The portions were huge, and we were all pretty satisfied after snaking on the apps as well as the corn bread, sweet butter and black bean hummus that they bring to the table. I ended up having a chicken philly sandwich, with hand-cut french fries, BF and T had burgers, and the birthday boy had some sort of seafood dish. We were all very impressed by the quality and presentation of the food. The bill ended up coming to around $110, which T and I split.

We then headed out for the usual Thursday night festivities, where I had a few more drinks that I didn’t have to pay for – BF bought at least one, T bought me one, and I think another friend of ours might have bought me another. All in all, it was an expensive, but very enjoyable evening. I would so much rather spend that kind of money on interesting food, shared with good people, then on mediocre food eaten out of necessity.

Is it possible to be both social and frugal? April 16, 2008

As I’ve mentioned, one of the biggest obstacles to me actually saving money and paying down my debt and getting ahead in the world is my rather active social life. I’ve got a pretty amazing group of friends who like to go out and have a good time – and who often seem to be willing to do it Thursday, Friday and Saturday every week. For a while, BF and I were just going along with the flow of what others wanted to do, and really not helping our own financial situations in the process. But, we’ve put our (collective) feet down, and decided that we just can’t go out as much as we would like to.

That being said, we do have a farily busy social calendar for the next 2 weeks. We’ve got our usual Thursday night karaoke, which is the one social event that we’ve decided is a must go, for us. We’ve got next Tuesday, which is a celebration of a monumental life decision for a very close friend of BF’s. We have tickets to a Red Sox game next Thursday. A friend of mine is having a toy party that Friday. Then, the next week is BF’s friend’s birthday, and we know in advance that he is looking to make a big night of it – dinner someplace nice, then drinking. It looks like a lot, but I think I’ve figured out how to handle it all, and not spend crazy amounts of money. How, you may ask?

1. We’ve decided to limit our collective budget for Thursday nights to $20 each. This is easily 4 beers for BF and 3 Vanilla and Diets for me. Since I like to send him to get the drinks, I will give him $20 at the beginning of the evening. This has the added bonus of ensuring that we don’t overdo the drinking, which is another something we are both trying to watch.

2. Some of these events are parties at people’s houses. The Tuesday celebration, and the toy party are both drinking/hanging out at home situations. We’ve already contributed a fair amount of alcohol to BF’s friend’s collection, so I think we are probably good on that front. And I can probably spend less than $20 to bring something to the party at my friend’s house. Another thing I think we will try to do is eat at home before we go, saving that cost.

3. BF’s friend’s birthday is going to be expensive. This is kind of a given. But I think if we curb our own going out to eat habits for the next 2 weeks, and just consider that our night out, we will be fine.

There is an additional complication, and that is a friend of mine who I don’t get to see very regularly, and who I’ve been putting off, asked us to go out with him and his girlfriend next weekend. I’ve tentatively said yes, and told BF that I would pay for that, because he isn’t too fond of my friend to begin with. I know they are also trying to save, so I think we can suggest someplace fairly cheap for dinner, and they will be ok with that.

The costs of an active social life April 7, 2008

One of the things that I’ve really been trying to get more of a handle on lately is how much money I/we spend on socializing with our friends. Before BF and I got together, and even for the first few months, I spent a lot of time out with my friends, and he spent a lot of time in playing video games with his friends. As time went by, we’ve managed in a lot of ways to really integrate our friend groups, and now, its not uncommon at all to have a group of 15-20 people out, some of whom are his core friends, some of whom are mine. Its usually a ton of fun, and despite the expense, I can’t really say I regret all the nights out, but we’ve both agreed that we need to work harder at prioritizing the nights out, as well as the times we blow significant amounts of money on dinner out together because we are too tired/lazy to think about cooking something.

The situation hasn’t been helped by a rather bizarre confluence of events the last month in a half. My birthday was 2/26, my best friend’s birthday was 3/7, another friend’s birthday was 3/21, BF’s birthday was 3/22, and finally, another good female friend of mine’s birthday was 4/4. It seemed like every time we turned around, there was another excuse for a huge, over the top night out, and you just don’t want to say no when its the people that you care most about. Adding to the dilemma was the fact that BF’s best friend lost his job 3 weeks ago. Now, he is by trade a chef/restaurant manager, and, despite the fact that he and his girlfriend are some of our very favorite people to hang out with, the opportunities for socializing were often few and far between due to his work schedule. So, having him around and available for the last few weeks meant that we got to spend a lot of time with them, and that we also spent a lot of money going out to eat. Luckily, just today he got word that he is starting a new job on Wednesday, so that particular extravagance should be over for a while. We also don’t have another birthday looming for over a month, so I’m hoping that we can really cut back this month and entertain ourselves at home a bit more often.

It’s definitely an ironic turn of events, because when we first met, I was very much the party/go-out girl, and he was the stay at home guy, but we’ve managed to sort of temper each other a bit, and will hopefully come to a better understanding. I’m shooting for a schedule that has us going out maybe twice a week – drinks on Thursday night at Karaoke, and either dinner or drinks/cover some other night of the week with friends. Hopefully, we can have more nights like we did last night, where we went to dinner with B&T (BF’s best friend and his girlfriend) but weren’t terribly hungry and split an entree. We also had drinks at B’s apartment both before and after dinner (we’ve provided our fair share of alcohol and mixers there!) and saved on that cost as well. All in all, we each spent $11, which I certainly can’t complain about.