No Spend September

… has officially started. With today being the first day of September, our family has begun our annual spending fast for the month. We all participate: no buying Starbucks, no buying lunch, no new clothes, no new nothing that isn’t an absolute necessity!

Being that September actually started on a Friday, we saw the first real impact of No Spend September today: no Starbucks. Usually a girlfriend and I meet at Starbucks with our kids every Friday before work; this week we bowed out.

Normally, we would also buy the kids school pictures, but in a neat twist of fate, their pictures were today so I actually paid for them yesterday because I paid on-line.

Our goal for the remainder of the month is to spend as minimally as possible and to send all the extra towards our credit card debt. I am really trying to bring our balance down to under $9000 by our next statement, but that’s going to be a stretch.

Over the course of the month, we will try to decrease our food bill by about $100. Instead of budgeting $500 for food, we only budget $400. It’s going to be tight, but I think we can do it.

Our meals are planned for the entire month and we based most of those meals off of what we already had in our pantry and freezer. There was a lot of meat and frozen meals already in our freezer so we were really able to work with it!

Wish us luck and debt payoff progress as we embark on another no spend month!