Excel Has Pretty Colors

So I’ve been working on my budget this week.  I’ve been looking forward to the rest of the spring and summer and how the unemployment will work for me throughout the summer months.  The past couple of months have been pretty rough; brother needs a vacation!

I have been surviving very well recently, but I have been working over the past months.  So it always sort of worked out.  I was actually making more money and doing better than I had been when I had constant employment.

It was very strange, but a very empowering feeling.   I would collect my weekly stipend when I didn’t have gigs.  However, when I did have gigs I would suspend my stipend and go pull my day rate and walk away with a very nice paycheck. 

So I wanted to see how much extra I would have every month.  I had started putting some money in savings.  I am being cautious of all my 1099 work and the taxes I’m going to owe in next April.  I would be lying if I said it hasn’t been pretty tight over the past couple months, but I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.  

Honestly, the hardest part for me was keeping my head about me when I had a surplus of savings.  I always want to clear off my credit cards and spend a bunch of money on stuff, like jeans and sneakers. (the moms would never buy me that pair of Jordan’s)  However, being the learned man that I am, I knew that the rent and bills were always coming right around the corner.  So I did what every reasonable person would seemingly do and save some of the money I made for the next months bills. 

But I was sick of living like that and constantly saving a few hundred to hope that my bills would be covered the next month.  I have had some work, but one of the gigs I worked is already over for the year.  I have survived these first few months, but I know that I must be smarter about all this. 

So I added up all my rent and bills in a neat little spreadsheet.  I only did house and personal bills like phone and medical Insurance.  I left off food and credit cards on purpose because I knew that was going to fluctuate more than the rest of the bills.  This way, I can change how much I am going to save and pay off some of the extra bills that show up.  (This plan is foolproof, I can’t believe I ever complained about being unemployed!)

Then in the other column I put all my unemployment payments and added all them up.  Excel is a really neat program because I could both of these columns next to each other and that made it easy to then take the difference of the bills and the Unemployment benefits.   However, I’m pretty sure I’m doing something wrong.  The difference came up in red lettering and in the middle of a parentheses. I don’t know what happened because it didn’t do that when I added the other columns up...

I mean, I didn’t change the colors or use any parenthesis.  I didn’t want to make it too confusing, you know?   Obviously something is desperately wrong with the programming (it’s the new version, and we all know it takes “Icrosoftmay” at least 2 years to get it right)

So if someone could do me a solid and call up Microsoft and let them know about this programming error that would be awesome.  I tried it on google docs too and got the same problem, so I’m busy trying to get them to fix it on their end. 

It’s a rough life being a technological Samaritan for these big companies, but it’s obvious this recession is hitting everyone hard.  I know that my position I should be worrying about myself, but I can’t help but be heartbroken over all those beta testers that seem to have lost their jobs…