Ok, so after crunching the figures for bit, I've decided to do the following:



* Pad the grocery budget a bit more, upping it to about 120/mo
* Drop a shift at the Souk, freeing up one night
* Use part of the money from there to snowflake my car
* Use the rest of the money for a freedom account money and a "slush fund"
* Redo the budget in 6 months


I know that I should budget so that I don't need a slush fund, but that hasn't worked well for me. With this set up, $50/mo goes for discretionary spending. I'll consider it as "use it or lose it" so if the $50 doesn't get spent, it goes into the emergency fund.

The goal for the emergency fund is 6 month's operating expenses, which for me, can be rounded up to 4,500 or down to 3,600 depending on how close to the wire I can go. Looking at that makes me realize that if I lived in "gazelle mode" I could cut another $100-$150 from the budget a month. But I don't know how I can trick myself into doing that. Maybe I should. Hopefully, I won't have to find out the hard way.

In any case, the new budget is more workable. The freedom account will take care of intermittent, but required expenses like holidays, car servicing and clothes purchases. The biggest chunk now is car servicing: I want to change my tires for winter.