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RPG Deals 5/31 – 6/6

By Russ | May 31, 2009 at 6:54 pm

There are no deals this week, so let’s talk about budgets.

There are a lot of you who have good jobs, so budgeting is not a special concern. I only bring it up for two reasons:

1) Many of the deals talked about here are for a limited time only.

2) They are also impulse purchases.

I will be honest; I do not have a large disposable income. Many of my purchases are planned well in advance with the use of release dates and the ability to budget out games I am looking forward to playing. In truth, I plan out my spending for just about everything. One of the problems with my original system of doing so was the lack of impulse cash to spend. More importantly, planning out everything left me without a backup for emergency situations.

I instigated a new plan a little over a year ago for my cash flow. Most of my money still goes toward living expenses but I started to sequester five percent a paycheck for emergency situations. As time went on and the emergency fund grew, I allowed myself a percentage of the emergency fund to be spent on impulse purchases.

There were a couple conditions. Restraint is necessary for this to work. I limited myself to deals that were too good to miss. The money had to be replaced within two pay periods for impulse buys. If I exceeded the amount I buckled down on the rest of my spending drastically. Getting into debt with yourself is too weird to consider.

It is a handy system. Money is always in the account in case I find myself in trouble, and there is a little to allot myself if I find a great deal outside my normal cash flow. After all, what’s the point of being offered a great deal if you can’t accept it?

Happy Hunting.

Disclaimer: Deals may not be available in all stores. Prices in each store may differ. You can try different stores to mitigate this, and always ask if a store has it before writing them off. You might be able to get a raincheck. A lot of these deals are in-store only, except where specified.

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