Wasting Money

I've decided I can't be trusted with money. I have made some stupid decisions recently that I wish I could undo.

First, I forgot to buy more minutes for my cell phone before last year's minutes expired, so I couldn't roll them over. And it was a lot of minutes. No amount of begging and pleading with the phone company convinced them to give me my minutes back once I realized what had happened, two days after they had expired. Man! If only I had remembered in time! I just wasted the annual salary of a family in India, by letting that slip my mind.

I also got caught by one of those speed trap cameras. I was going 35 in a 30 mph zone and it cost me $40. There's the salary of a family in... uh.. Namibia.

I also seem to go on these spending sprees with food, mostly at farmers' markets where the produce is beautiful but the prices are high. Farmers' market food is a good thing to buy, but I don't need to buy as much of it as I do. My parents spent a weekend in New York and all they bought was a couple of bagels. They literally got by the whole weekend without buying anything else, because the hotel had a continental breakfast and they were "too tired" to bother going out to eat after a full day of activities. I am never too tired to eat. The amount of food that I buy and tote home and prepare for our family and eat, in huge heaping portions, is prodigious. We're only two people and an infant; there's no reason to go to the grocery store every few days or to spend several hours every evening puttering around in the kitchen. I bet I open and close the refrigerator 30 times a day. Good thing our utilities are included or I would be fretting about the electric bill too; as it is I only have to deal with the guilt of adding to climate change by wasting energy.

I also am not very savvy about investments. I just want to lock my money up for as long as possible, in some inaccessible location where I won't be tempted to spend it on organic rutabagas, speeding fines, or unused minutes. I think that really I should just gather up all my savings and give them to charity, before I fritter them all away.