Things have been going good so far. Thank's for all the comments in the Part 1. We appreciate all the support!

Step 3: Budget yourself

This step was probably most fun for me. Call me crazy, but anything finance related is fun for me. It' s my major after all! What started as a couple of simple numbers and calculations in Excel quickly grew into an extensive spreadsheet covering almost every part of our lives.

Since my father has humongous Excel spreadsheets for his own finances, he helped me out a lot. Unfortunately, I live at school right now and we barely have enough time to talk about it on weekends. This is where Google Spreadsheets came in. I've never used it before, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out about its collaboration features. Mandy and my dad both got invites to edit the document and right away I started notice changes and corrections.

How to build an effective forecasted budget:

• Start with your projected income.
  
  This was easy for me, a bit harder for Mandy as we had to do some research on average salaries in the area for her profession.


• Make sure you don't forget to take out taxes from the projected income!
  
  This takes out a big chunk of course (~30%), so it's important.


• Jot down every possible expense you may encounter.
  
  Note: Parents know this stuff! So ask them.


• Add, subtract, multiply and pray.

Here's all the things we've noted as monthly expenses:

• Rent and utilities
  
  Some apartment complexes include utilities in the rent, others don't.


• Health and dental insurance
  
  Yahoo! has great benefits.


• Automotive
  
  Loan payments on car, insurance, parking (a lot in San Francisco) and gas.


• Food
  
  This includes going out to eat too.


• Entertainment
  
  Travel, bars, clubs, movies, etc.


• Clothing
  
  Some things here and there... Yeah right!


• Home care
  
  Self explanatory


• Other medical expenses
  
  Tylenol, ...


• School loans
  
  Can't wait for this!

Are we missing anything? Loan payment calculations are fairly easy in Excel (not to mention all dealers have special calculators online). I personally use the PMT function in Excel. It's easy, just write down your principal (car amount minus down-payment), loan rate (the lower the better obviously), loan term (usually 5 years) and you're all set! Make sure you convert the rate and term to months (divide the rate by 12 and multiply term by 12). Write =pmt in Excel and it will guide you through the rest.

Step 4: Apartment hunt

San Francisco apartment search is interesting. In my searches, I stumbled onto this site and it summarizes everything fairly well:

Apartment hunting in San Francisco is unique. Unlike New York, we don't have brokers who control the listings and charge renters a massive fee to lease. And unlike the South Bay (and the rest of America), we only have a few large apartment communities run by billion dollar public companies. Many, if not the majority of rental units in San Francisco are privately owned and barely advertised. Because the market is tight, most landlords can find a tenant within a few days simply by putting a sign in front of their building. For apartment hunters, it's a maddening situation- it can feel like the only way to find a place is to quit your job and stalk every neighborhood looking for "for rent" signs. This is not a life.

Great! I've got my work cut out for me. Fortunately, I've found some good sites. Since Craigslist is the main point of search, HousingMaps.com comes in very handy. This is a basic mashup site connecting Craigslist listings with Google Maps. We've pinpointed which areas we want to live in, so this helps a lot in terms of filtering. Saves lots of time!

I've also kept my eye out for apartment complexes. Although there are not many as mentioned above, some are still attractive. This is where ApartmentRatings.com comes in. This site aggregates a number of ratings for the apartments based on real user input. Every time I find something of interest, I always search for it on this site to get a feel of the management, noise levels, etc. Yelp.com is also useful. Although more broad, it does have some apartment reviews.

Staying within the budget is important. San Francisco is beautiful and it has a lot of good and tempting apartment offerings. Unfortunately, at this stage of our lives, we can't afford to live lavishly, so every time I look for apartments, I try to stay within the budget. Getting a more expensive apartment means cutting some other expenses, which may in turn only worsen our quality of life.

Whew, that's it for now! The rest will probably come in the coming months as we get closer to the date.

• Part 1
  
  Get a job!, Find a good location


• Part 2
  
  Budget yourself, Apartment hunt