| Category | Budget | Actual | Difference |
| food | $350.00 | $385.97 | ($35.97) |
| housing | $550.00 | $450.00 | $100.00 |
| entertainment | $200.00 | $102.69 | $97.31 |
| transport | $200.00 | $144.03 | $55.97 |
| clothing | $100.00 | $6.50 | $93.50 |
| travel | $1,000.00 | $797.47 | $202.53 |
| health | $300.00 | $5.18 | $294.82 |
| beauty | $50.00 | $4.42 | $45.58 |
| education | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| misc | $300.00 | $211.36 | $88.64 |
| total | $3,050.00 | $2,107.62 | $942.38 |
I did rather poorly on food. There are a number of reasons for this, visiting the boyfriend for his birthday, taking a friend out to dinner for her birthday, spending a weekend at Penn State, etc, but those are just really excuses. I should be better about this in the future, but I also need to work out some way to merge food and entertainment. Sometimes dinner isn't just dinner. Aside from being bad with food, I did go ahead and buy both a plane ticket to Hawaii for the July wedding and a ticket to Boston for graduation, which made the travel category high. There was also a donation back to my college's alumni gift contributing to the miscellaneous category, but my charitable giving is just going to get worse before it gets better.
At least I did manage to put some more money into my grad school savings this month.
A general note on my budget: I set my budget at the beginning of the month based on what I think I will spend, not my net pay. Everything is then tracked and entered as soon as possible after purchase. All purchases are recorded on a cash basis, meaning that if I paid for it in a given month, it's in my budget for that month, hence the plane tickets. I do try to be frugal, but I also try to budget for things I know I'm going to do.
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