I have lived in four different places in the past year. One result of this nomadic lifestyle is that I'm slightly less organized than I'd like to be (as evidenced by my recent inability to find my car title) I pay most of my bills online, so I am always up-to-date on those, but the paper statements I continue to receive have just been accumulating in precarious piles on my "dining room" table. I hate this.

Having decided I want to move in the direction of home ownership I sat down to make a budget, a difficult task when your finances are a jumbled mess of papers. So my preliminary step was to organize every piece of paper in my apartment. I'm about halfway done and already feeling quite relieved. But my apartment is horrible messy, which is driving me crazy.

And now I'm off to buy food. According to my budget I can only spend about $100 a month on food, which sounds ridiculously low to me, so I may be quite discouraged at the grocery store. Luckily I don't spend anywhere near the $200+ the budget suggested for entertainment, so I should be ok.

Soon, very soon, I will throw a dinner party for my Chicago friends (not sure if that's the food budget or the entertainment one). Just need to clean up the apartment a bit first so that people fit in it. I'll keep you posted.