Ok, well as you can imagine, making a budget wasn't as easy at I would have liked. The problem is, a lot of my expenses are still up in the air, or very flexible, so I don't even know where to start. For instance, I've never bought groceries for one person before (I've always shared with roommates). How much will I end up paying for them? The same for utilities: I've never not shared this expense with others, and I have no idea how my new apartment is going to hold up in the winter. How am I supposed to budget for this?

I've been in this situation before, when I just graduated from college and lived in my first real apartment with some friends. We had no idea what we'd spend on anything and was just going on the fly for many months. What I did to finally create a budget, though, is something extremely anal and annoying (but overwhelmingly helpful): for those first three months, I wrote down everything that I spent money on. Everything.

Afterwards, I used a personal budget that I found online (there are trillions that you can use, but Richard Bolles has a couple good suggestions on his site) and categorized every purchase (food, transportation, entertainment, etc.) and added it all up. Then I looked at places where I could cut out extraneous things or find ways to cut down on costs (I believe this is where I stopped buying clothes for 6 months!).

It's extremely tedious, but worth it, so I think I'll do that again. Not that I won't be a careful buyer in the next two months, but I will be sort of blind to a few deals or cost-saving measures. Someday I'll come up with a better way of doing this, but for now, this works!