Keeping Track of My Finances

Last year, while I was living in The Netherlands off of a FAFSA Stafford Loan, I decided to be more responsible and keep track of EVERYTHING I spent (yes, everything), organizing it all into categories and averaging out my daily expenditures so as to have a better idea of how much money I could afford to spend. Although this was kinda neat, all it ended up doing was making me really uptight with money and therefore less inclined to be social.

So, this time around, I'm still keeping track of my finances, but only from the other side of things: I keep VERY detailed records of how much I've earned, including how much time I've worked and all sorts of averages. My favorite recent development in these records was my realization that I could average out my students' lesson consistency percentages to give me a more accurate sense of how much money I'll probably make off the current maximum income. See, when teaching privately, I essentially get paid from gig to gig, and the downside to this is that sometimes students skip a week, which at an average of $50 p/hour hits me kinda hard, especially if a few of them do it in one week. The good news is that their consistency amounts are adding up to being about 98% of what I am expecting to earn (were they to take lessons every week without skipping). I know this may seem like a lot of math for nothing, but this is about as close to job security as I'm going to get, so I welcome it.