Rule #15: Enjoy yourself with a budget for pleasure

[amdda01]

Gang,

A two-part question:

1) What percentage of income do you budget for pleasure?
2) What do you consider pleasure? For example, is "Eating Out" considered pleasure, or would you categorize this under "Food"? How about Cable TV -- "Household expense", or "pleasure"?

[Storm]

Personally, the wife and I plan on at least 1 long vacation to a foreign country per year.  This usually will run us about $5K or so, but we are DINK (dual income no kids) so our budget might be a lot different than yours.

Regarding cable TV - I cut the cord over a year ago and couldn't be happier.  Our media hub right now is a Sony PS3, which has turned into the swiss army knife of digital video.  I used to pay over $150 a month for cable TV plus all of the movie channels, but now, our home entertainment budget is like this:

One-time (fixed) costs:

$299 - Sony PS3
$1800 - LG 55" LED TV
$500 - Onkyo 7.1 surround sound receiver with speakers
$79 - Logitech Harmony One universal remote
-------
$2678 total one time costs

Monthly costs:

$29.99 - Cablevision Internet only - 20 megabit down/2 megabit up
$22.25 - Netflix subscription with 3 out at a time, Bluray upgrade and online streaming
$9.99 - Hulu Plus subscription - I heard they will drop this price to $4.99 soon
$3.33 - PSN plus - Forgot to add this earlier - it is $49.99 right now for 15 months of PSN plus which gives you access to Hulu Plus.
--------
$65.56 total monthly costs

This has dramatically improved our entertainment while cutting costs.  The PS3 now has Netflix with 1080p/5.1 dolby digital streaming as well as Hulu Plus with 720p streaming.  It's great not to have to worry about whether the DVR recorded your show or not, but still have access to all seasons of past shows.

We get Blurays of the latest DVD releases from Netflix, which look amazing on a nice TV set, and what's even more important - with a decent universal remote even the wife can figure out how to turn everything on and watch her Desperate Housewives reruns without my help.    They weren't kidding when they called it the Logitech "Harmony".

To more specifically answer your questions - I would say I consider vacation and entertainment expenses as "pleasure"  This includes eating out, travel, and things like movies or TV.  We budget for them and don't have a fixed budget, but it probably ends up being about 4-5% of our total income.

[Coffee]

One big problem with this set up: No current "Sons of Anarchy" episodes. 
And what do you watch CNBC on?

[smurff]

One big problem with this set up:
[snip]
And what do you watch CNBC on?

Coffee, HB said set aside a budget for pleasure, not torture. 

[Coffee]

CNBC... not MSNBC. 

[Storm]

One big problem with this set up:
[snip]
And what do you watch CNBC on?

Coffee, HB said set aside a budget for pleasure, not torture.   ;)

Haha...  To be honest, I don't really watch CNBC, except when it is on in the break room at the office.  Every time I do watch it, I find it very difficult not to laugh at whatever their commentators are saying at the moment.  PP sure gives you a different perspective from the main stream news.  The same goes for CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and other cable news.

As a side note, have you ever noticed how blatantly optimistic all mainstream news (including CNBC) is?  Housing numbers could be the second worst month in the last 25 years, and the headline will be "Housing recovers - new home sales increase by 20%" - never telling you that 20% was from the last month which was the worst on record.

With my setup, you can also run an OTA antenna on your roof if you want to pick up local HDTV channels free of charge.