It's over, but is it really?

So, the blogging students are done blogging and are back to being just plain stupents. In conclusion, can one live healthily on $7.50 per day?

Students: No.

Me: For the love of Pete, yes!

That we've come to radically different conclusions will come to no surprise to anyone who's been reading along. I've ranted on this a whole bunch in my previous postings, so to make the end of their challenge as anti-climactic as possible, I'm going to completely ignore it until perhaps my next posting. Let's focus on something more interesting instead: me.

This is the last day of my two-week challenge. To revisit the idea, I took the budget for two weeks of groceries, $105 dollars, and bought groceries with it (see what $105 in groceries looks like here.)

Two weeks later, my consumption of those $105 equals about 2/3 of that total, that is, only $69.18. I want to draw particular attention to my consumption today. I ate out for lunch. A modestly priced Korean meal cost me $8 even, including tip. With the rest of my day's consumption relatively similar to previous days, I neared $12 for the day compared to my average of under $5. Clearly, if I were to keep to budget, eating out is something to be restricted. If my consumption ($5/day) and spending were to hold, I could be able to afford bulgogi about once every four days.

If I do say so myself, I made the challenge harder and more interesting than it would have been for those students. When I started my two-week challenge, I also made it a "start-up" challenge. I pretended I had nothing, like it was school the day after Labour Day. (Although a real student would have put three cases of beer in the fridge with $105, instead of groceries.) Now is just the point where it should become interesting, and where it is more comparable to where those bloggers and I actually were on March 8 when it all began - at a point where we had already accumulated a certain supply of foodstuffs to work with. So here I am. Sure, I could call this my last posting and shut 'er down. But wouldn't it be interesting to see what happens if I keep living on the budget, but without the crazy start-up expense? I mean, I was consuming only $5 of the $7.50 budget! I still have A LOT of food left from those first two weeks, which means that if I were to go on, I would continue to consume the food from those two weeks without consuming the money from those two weeks. This would hypothetically mean I can take further weekly budgets and spend them on things like booze, cigarettes, porno mags, and things that add variety and character to my diet. Enough hypothetics. I'm doing it.

Same conditions as before but, in the spirit of budgets, I'm forcing this past week's spending overage of about $15 to shrink next week's budget just to see what happens. As always, follow along here.