I don't know about you, but it just seems like for me spending sprees always pop up when I least expect them to do so. Just when I think that I've been really careful and saving a decent amount of money, I find myself in a span of a few days demolishing that little bit of a buffer that I worked so hard to build up. It is during these spending sprees when I feel like I'm spending my entire paycheck on ridiculous things that I don't really need. Well, it's not that I'm actually purchasing unnecessary things, but when I notice my debit card leaving my wallet and me swiping it constantly, everything that I buy seems like it was a frivolous purchase after I look at my ever-decreasing checking account balance. Thankfully these spending sprees only happen every so often. It's those times where things that you don't usually have to purchase sneak up on you and end up devouring your hard-earned money. Things like oil changes, buying birthday gifts, and purchasing new running shoes are things that we can't really get away from, though it stings a little bit after we make the purchases. I use the three items above as examples because this is precisely my predicament over the past few days. I came up on my three months or three thousand miles mark just a few days ago, so on my day other the other day, I decided that I would make my way down and get my oil changed. While waiting for that to happen, I decided that since I was over on the other side of town near the mall, I would try and find myself some nice but inexpensive new sneakers, since the ones that I had purchased just a short three months ago have already been ruined on account of my wearing them for forty plus hours each week at the store. After finding a pair of shoes that I didn't exactly like at a price that was a little bit too high, I realized that it was a good friend of mine's birthday this coming weekend, and so while at the mall, I decided to continue my shopping experience and find a nice gift to give. Forty dollars later with a gift in hand, I decided that I needed to leave the mall and return home before I spent any more money. Well, on the way home, as my luck would have it, my low fuel light turned on, and so it was a quick stop and twenty dollars later that I had a half tank of gasoline and was finally on my way home. Just in one afternoon span of about two hours or so, I had spent nearly one hundred fifty dollars. That's a lot of money for one day if you ask me, especially for a graduate student who is just working a summer job to pay the bills until my funding kicks back in from my university in August. Days like these are even worse than the times where you have to buy those non-food groceries that I was talking about just the other day in one of my posts. Sure, non-food groceries are a pain to buy and usually end up running about twenty or twenty-five dollars or so for me, but I can tell you that I would rather pay that amount than six or seven times as much any day. I always feel a similar sting from unexpected spending when it comes to the third week of the month where my car insurance, student loan payment, and cell phone bill are all due within just four days of one another. That's shelling out even more money at one time! I'm sure that you can see what I mean when I get a little bit queasy about these unexpected spending sprees. Although I'm not really a betting man, I would wager that I'm not the only one out there who ends up going on these little spending binges once or twice a month and then regretting it or just fretting about it not long afterwards. Everyone has their bills, and the things that fall together for these little spending sprees just depend on the types of bills or where you have them from. I'm also sure that there are people out there who have it far far FAR worse than I do in my own situation. I luckily don't have to worry about separate bills for televions, cable internet, water, sewer, or even pest control. Those bills are all included in my rent, so it's a one shot deduction from my bank account somewhere between the first and the third of month, and then I know I'm safe from that big bill for another thirty days or so.