Confession: I mismanage my money

When you write about money, sometimes people think you are above making stupid mistakes and overspending. But I am here to inform you that personal finance columnists are, in fact, mere mortals who ignore carefully laid out budgets, buy more Christmas gifts than they intended, go out to eat too much and make stupid decisions that result in the equivalent of money being thrown down a black hole.

Because I'm normally a good saver and reasonable spender, my recent spendthrift ways won't result in credit card debt. But I will have to tap the family slush fund, which has been growing to afford a spring break vacation. And I won't be happy to see that money disappear thanks to overpriced pasta kids meals ($5.99 for buttered noodles, really?) and plastic toys.

I started December with plans to restrain myself. There are layoffs coming and who knows what 2010 will bring. I downloaded a gift planner for my iPod Touch to keep spending in check. I'm not sure how useful it is, since I never tried it out.

The floodgates opened after Thanksgiving when we purchased a new mattress. Once we laid out big money on that big ticket item, spending $75 here on toys and $289 there on a Playstation 3 for Mr. Kablog's birthday didn't faze me.

Everything I bought was either on sale or with a coupon. But sometimes, as I wrote in a recent column, money-saving devices can trick us into spending more.

You'd think laying it all out on paper would help me to avoid such traps in the future. But after I wrote the piece, I spent a good 10 days obsessively visiting blogs such as Pocketyourdollars.com and Dealseekingmom.com. While they can save you money, their listings for killer deals on BluRay discs and toys at Amazon.com sent me on another spending spree and set me back another $100.

It will take a lot of the printable grocery coupons I find via these sites to make up for that unplanned spending.

Note to self: Never make quarter-of-a-cow-sized decisions after midnight.

So as we enter the last couple of weeks of 2009 and the height of the holiday season, don't feel badly if you go a little overboard one day. But it's important to get back on track as soon as you can, even if that means returning purchases or lowering budgets for other expenditures.

It's pay day and the credit cards are almost due. So this weekend, I'm going to take a close look at the month's spending and decide whether I should keep all of the holiday gifts or return a few.