No Spend September

Well, it’s that time again… No-Spend September. It’s a time when we reset our finances, pay close attention to where our money actually goes, and try to only buy necessities: food and gas.

I have a love/hate relationship with No-Spend September. I love the amount of money we save or are able to put towards debt, but I hate how it reminds me how mindlessly I usually spend.

Each year we determine a set amount of money we want to spend on groceries, usually $100 less than what we normally spend. As we recently upped our monthly grocery budget because we were continually going over it, the amount we want to stay under for No-Spend September this year is $500.

We will also continue to pay all of our bills and any necessary expenses that pop up during the month. The idea is not to stop living our life or to fall further into debt by making poor choices, but to reexamine how and where we are spending our money; making sure that we are sending any “saved” money during the month towards debt.

We had to make an exception already this month and that kind of drives me bonkers!

We took The Boy to get his haircut on Labor Day… in September. We had originally planned to take him last week but between school, football, and homework, there literally weren’t enough hours in the day. He went to school and from there went straight to football. He got home from football at 6:00, ate dinner, did homework for 2 to 2.5 hours, then took a shower and went to bed at 9:00. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t squeeze in a haircut for him before September 1^st so we made an exception and took him in on our extra day off. I was annoyed but it couldn’t be helped.

I (try to) plan our dinner meals out for the month. It makes our life easier and more organized. I did sit down and plan for September, so over Labor Day weekend we went grocery shopping for all our non-perishable needs for the next month. During September, we really try to use up foods/meals we already have; another way to help keep our grocery budget down in September. We have several frozen meals in our freezer and several pantry meals we are going to eat this month so our initial grocery shopping trip wasn’t too bad.

Our first trip was to Winco where we spent $63.46. We bought fruits and vegetables for the week, several packets of dried mashed potatoes, pasta, some dairy items, and a few odds and ends for the rest of the month. We also stopped by Safeway (because apparently I’m a string cheese snob and only like one brand) and bought string cheese for $7.99. We still need to make it to Costco to buy milk (10 gallons) and tortilla chips.

Of our $500 grocery budget, we spent $71.45 and still have $428.55 to last us the rest of the month. As always, I think it should be doable, but who knows? I always think it will be doable and then I’m always very carefully counting my pennies at the end of the month praying to make it under budget!