No Spend Month: Mid-Month Update

I decided that the month of August would be a no-spend month for me. I have spent money on essentials like bills and groceries, but nothing else. I wanted to update you on how it has been for the last 12 days, and what I would do differently next time. You can see the guidelines I set for myself here.

Some observations I have had:

I realized last night that I have cooked every single meal Aaron and I have consumed, except for two, in the last 12 days. That’s a lot of cooking, guys.

I used to eat lunch out a lot or buy a pre-made salad, and we used to order in dinner or go out once or twice a week. I made a real effort to meal plan this month, and plan for a few meals that would provide leftovers for lunch. The days I don’t have leftovers I go home and make a sandwich, or some yogurt and fruit.

Do you know what comes along with cooking all those meals? Extra dirty dishes. So. Many. Dirty. Dishes. I feel like I am running the dishwasher twice as often as I used to, but I am so thankful I have a dishwasher.

My grocery bills have also been much higher in the last two weeks. I am buying extra snacks and ingredients for meals that I didn’t buy in the past. It will be interesting to see how the grocery bill compares to the bills from lunch and dinners out at the end of the month. The first two weeks I have had to buy a lot of ingredients for the dinners I am cooking, the next two weeks I will repeat some meals so the bill should go down.

I should have planned ahead for free activities.

I finished the book I was reading five days into the no-spend month. I should have planned ahead and purchased some books before the month, but I didn’t think about it. I did find a gift card in my purse and used that to buy a new book that will hopefully get me through the rest of the month.

Weekends are hard.

I didn’t realize how much money we would spend for no reason on the weekends. If we didn’t have anything to do we would walk around the city and end up shopping. Or we would go out to dinner or grab drinks with friends. I almost bought tickets to the zoo last weekend, then remembered that I didn’t “need” to go to the zoo.

You get creative to buy the things you want.

I wanted a glass of wine last weekend and we didn’t have any, so I added Drunkin Noodles to the meal plan for this week because I need dry, white wine for that recipe. I only need one cup of wine, but you can’t just buy one cup of wine, so I had to buy the whole bottle.

I haven’t been perfect, but Aaron has been worse.

Aaron got a massage on August 1st. Day one of the no-spend month. His back was killing him, and the massage helped, but I laughed at him. He is on the road a lot with work so he has purchased a few lunches, which I expected. I did buy two products at Ulta yesterday, but that is ok too. My skin was really dry last week out of nowhere, so I bought some undereye patches and some Rose Hip oil. I will review them after I have tried them a few days.

I really REALLY miss Starbucks.

As I was walking to work today I remembered that I would not have a fresh, hot coffee waiting for me in the lobby of our building and was sad. I genuinely like the taste of coffee, just not our office coffee. Will I go back to buying coffee every day? No, I don’t need to do that. I will o back to treating myself a couple of times a week to coffee I actually enjoy. Plus, you know my favorite coffee season is coming, and I will have to have at least one PSL.

Overall thoughts:

A month is a long time. When I do this again I will probably do one week at a time and be more strict. Maybe I will do a week on then a week off and repeat. That way I don’t have to second guess self-care products. I also would set aside a small “fun money budget” to be used for either weekends or lunch with coworkers. We are still fairly new to this city and trying to build friendships, so when coworkers invite us to things we need to be able to go and build on those relationships.