Tracking my expenses over the course of a week.

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When I started tracking my expenses over the course of a week, I had no idea I would come to the conclusion I did.  While writing this paper, I discovered a lot to do with myself as a personality and a consumer, in today’s economic world.   When one buys something small everyday, it adds up, and the figure only becomes a significant amount once it is totaled.  This will become evident, as this experiential assignment is discussed in detail.  

There are two recurring expenditures that I need to account for.  Over the course of the week, I bought 13 cups of coffee, and 5 packs of cigarettes.  If each cup of coffee costs $1.32 and each pack of cigarettes costs $8.89, then in a week, combining the two, I spend of total of $61.61.  That means per month, on coffee and cigarettes, I spend $246.44, on average.  The sad thing I realized, after doing this assignment was that even knowing this, I will still drink two cups of coffee a day, and I will still smoke nearly a pack of cigarettes a day.  To make it worse, the week that I recorded my expenses, wasn’t even too bad a week, work wise.  These frequencies go up during midterms and finals.  However, those figures wouldn’t be an accurate representation of my spending habits.  What motivated me to buy the cigarettes?  That’s a question I ask myself every day.  Smoking is a habit I’ve been trying to kick since a year now.  I’ve been smoking for three years now, and I am used to having that certain level of nicotine in my blood.  It shows a weakness: knowing how much I spend on cigarettes, but buying them anyway, especially as they are not particularly healthy.  I can safely say it has become an addiction.  The coffee, in its own right, has also become one, granted a less harmful one.  I need two cups of coffee a day, at least.  Even though a single cup of coffee isn’t expensive, if you add it up, per month, or even per week, the money adds up.  Coffee has the addictive ingredient of caffeine.  Again, knowing that a habit like coffee is easy to break, I know that I will drink it till I graduate.  What makes it easier to buy both is the fact that the building in which I live has a 24-hour depanneur in it.   So cigarettes and coffee is available to me all the time.  However, having said that, I would like to point out that I only buy one brand of both: Benson & Hedges Special Lights, and Van Houtte French Vanilla coffee.  If either of these isn’t in stock, I skip it all together.  This implies that I would rather not smoke at all, than smoke anything apart from Bensons.  I found this interesting, because as a smoker, one would imagine that you would need a cigarette no matter what.  On a personal level, I know how I deal with stressful situations.  I need some sort of outlet.  In most cases, the stress reliever is cigarettes.  This particular weekend however, I chose alcohol.  

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Some friends of mine and I went to Upper Club.  We got a table there, and three bottles of alcohol.  The total there came to $600, but because there were 20 of us, I had to pay $30.  This expense to me was well worth it, because I had a really good time.  I usually go out clubbing once a week, and spend a lot that day.  To me, this seems to be fair enough, because my friends go out clubbing every other day, weekend or weekday alike.  My conscious decision was to avoid the clubbing during the week, ...

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