The No-Spend September that wasn’t…

This was an interesting month for sure! For the past seven years, our family has done a “No-Spend September”. You can read about some previous years and installments here, here, or here, just to get an idea of what we do and why we do it.

We planned to do it again this year, but were unsuccessful for so many reasons: my dad’s illness, The Boy lost some football equipment, unexpected company over for dinner, an unexpected potluck we needed to bring something for. Quite honestly, the list of reasons and excuses could go on and on.

We went into No-Spend September with the best of intentions, however we didn’t PLAN for it. In years passed we have meal planned and wrote down schedules. We knew what days we needed to use the slow cooker, what days needed to be “quick” dinners, and what days we had extra time. We made sure The Kids were bringing their lunches to school every day. We planned. This year we fell into the category of “failing to plan was planning to fail.

During No-Spend September, we usually set a grocery budget $100 less than are normal monthly grocery budget of $600, so it would have been set at $500. We also really try to check our gas consumption. We don’t buy convenience food. We don’t buy clothes or shoes. We don’t buy toiletries or the like at Target. We really curb our spending and send all extra monies toward debt.

This year we were beyond unsuccessful. We had so many different mishaps we needed to take care of throughout the month. This was by far our least successful No-Spend September. And it hurt.

We definitely curbed our spending and were actually able to send a good chunk of change towards our credit card debt, to the tune of almost $2500 this month alone, but if we had been more diligent with our planning and in our spending, we could have paid off even more this month!

Next year, we will try again. We should be in a less precarious family situation and be better able to plan.

This month wasn’t all bad, but I guess the tough part is that it wasn’t all good. We did make progress on our debt. We actually made pretty good progress on our debt, but I can’t help thinking how much we could have paid off if we had really had a No-Spend September.