Get it? Rolling it over? I'm a comic genius.

Last week, admittedly a short week because this week marked the beginning of the Friday-to-Thursday budget accounting, we spent a total of $69.66. That left us a budget surplus of $55.34. We decided (maybe because we were hungry) that we should be permitted to roll any surplus over into the following week, carrying it forward until the end of the month. Besides allowing us to “save up” to treat ourselves once in a while, it also allows more room in the budget for buying in bulk when it makes sense to do so. Now that I’m not hungry, I still think this sounds fair. If we were doing this budget exercise away from the public eye, we’d certainly carry surplus over. But is it not in the spirit of this challenge? What do you think?

Giddy with our extra cash, and, as I’d mentioned, hungry, on Saturday we spent $27 on Lebanese takeout from a place we like. We ordered vegetarian mezza, got it home, opened it up, and decided we could have made it better ourselves. So much for that. All this home-cooking might be ruining us for restaurants.

We didn’t spend any more of last week’s surplus. In fact, we’re under budget again this week, though not as drastically. We spent $111.78, for a surplus of $13.22. If we’re going ahead with the surplus roll-over, that puts us $41.56 in the black. I don’t think I’m going to dip into that, though. Not unless we have some kind of oven fire or pizza emergency. I mean, yeah, things come up. But I’m having fun trying to get that budget number as low as I can, without letting anyone go hungry.

So…rolling over the surplus… Yes or No?

Tags: Lebanese food, mezza, pizza emergency, surplus