The Great Spending Freeze

We are twenty-six days into our 31 day spending freeze.  I have been reading about it a lot and wanting to try it.  There is a handy dandy printable guide/worksheet/list (you know how I love a good list) at Living Well Spending Less.

I talked it over with Matt and he agreed to do it.  We went into it knowing that we had to plan for a wedding and a graduation.  We had just been to Sam's Club and stocked up on toilet paper and a few other things and figured we could totally do this. 

We knew that "spending zero" as in no dollars at all outside of bills was not going to happen.  We still have to buy feed for our critters, and a few basics like milk and bread.  I've been keeping every receipt for over 3 weeks to be able to tally up exactly how much we spent in the last month. 

The rules have been pretty straight forward.  No grabbing a pop/snack  at the gas station.  No Starbucks, no rummage sales, no visits to the greenhouse for great end of season deals on annuals.  I did barter for some new perennials this year from a local garden exchange group on Facebook, so that's cool.  We have stuck pretty close with not buying groceries other than perishables.  Funny thing is that we still have several meals worth of meat in our freezer and enough canned peaches to last until the Rapture.  Otherwise, side dishes are requiring more creativity.  I tried a brown rice/quinoa pilaf night before last.  (A friendly tip, brown rice takes far longer to cook than quinoa.  You might want to give the rice a head start.)

We have been pretty careful up until this past weekend. See, what we failed to plan ahead for was the 4th of July.  Independence Day is a pretty big deal in our hometown.  Everybody turns out for the festivities.  We didn't spend a lot (we usually don't anyway) but, we still bought some things.  Like $5 arm bands for the kids to go to the bouncy houses (unlimited jumping for 2 days).  And the kids each got a small item from the flea market.  We also went to a BBQ/birthday party at our friend's house. I don't know why I didn't set aside a little bit for this each week up until now.  It's not like July 4th is this brand new holiday or that I didn't know the kids' birthday party was going to be this weekend.

Some things I have learned from this experience:  I spend way more money than I thought on impulse purchases.  Random crap that I didn't need when I went to the store, but suddenly couldn't leave without.  We actually do make enough to be putting money into savings every month.  I truly didn't realize this before, even though I have always had a basic budget.  It seemed like something always "came up" and we'd just make it through the month.  This challenge comes with budgeting worksheets so you can write everything down and see exactly where your money is going.  Along with seeing that we have money for savings every month, I also regained hope that we'd be able to do some of the things we want to do to our house.  I also learned that I like iced coffee made at home, and it costs way less than buying it anywhere.

One of the other things that is part of this challenge is a full house clean/de-clutter/organize.  I printed the checklists, but did not do all of them.  I did do the bathroom one and threw away a bunch of old stuff out of there.  Otherwise, there isn't a whole lot of homeless stuff floating in our house.  We're both way too particular about keeping things put away and not keeping stuff that has no purpose. 

I did come up with a few things to sell as per the challenge.  Not a lot (see above), but some.  I also came up with some free things to do.  As it happens, our local library has free passes for several area attractions so I picked up some today when we made our weekly visit.

Now that our challenge is almost up, I'm really getting excited to go grocery shopping. I'm also wondering how long until we could feasibly do this again.  How often do people have "no spend" months?  I think I'd like to do this again sometime in the winter.  I wonder if my family would think I had really lost it if we made this a quarterly event.

While we didn't make a month without spending any money, we did do pretty well.  So, I'll call it a success.  Does anybody else out there do a spending freeze from time to time?