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Can you believe we’re already almost through February?? I feel like January usually goes by so slow but this year it flew by!
This was the first full month of my no spend year. I wanted to give you guys the full honest recap of how it’s really going. I meant to post this a lot sooner, but honestly this month did not go as planned and writing about it was pretty discouraging.
I’ve had two purchases that were not on my no spend list and decided my weak spot here is definitely spending for my son.
I purchased a train table I found on marketplace that I posted about a couple weeks ago!
I also went out to lunch with a good friend who was in town and we were near the closest Build-A-Bear to us, which is about an hour away. We’re in a big stuffed animal phase with my son, so I decided to take advantage.
He had so much fun and was so excited!! He loved the whole experience and picked out Chase from Paw Patrol. I felt guilt the whole morning about making this purchase but seeing the excitement from him was worth it. I also realized in that moment that if the spending is for him, I’m going to have a really hard time saying no.
We also have spent a lot more money on take out this month than usual. This has been the downfall that I’ve really beat myself up about. This was not a category I was cutting out spending completely, as I felt it was too restrictive for an entire year and we usually only eat out once a week at most. This month has been a little chaotic personally (I’ll share more on that later) and cooking at home hasn’t been happening as usual. We’ve definitely spent more money on ready-to-cook meals as well. For February, we’ve started getting our weekly Every Plate order again which has helped a lot on this category.
Life has gotten in the way of my minimalism journey of throwing things out. I did give away several items for free on marketplace that we no longer used and a bin full of my son’s old clothes to an expecting friend. I’ve started to organize but, the amount of things we have and haven’t seen in the time between selling our old home and moving into our new one have been incredibly overwhelming. I’m planning to give myself an entire day just to sort through things in the near future.
We have been able to make some significant headway paying down debts with the money we’ve saved! It’s exciting to see those balances go down faster now that we’re allocating more funds to it. I’m actually excited to do taxes so we can use our refund to put a huge dent in our debt balance.
I didn’t expect this challenge to be absolute perfection and am more than willing to admit the slip ups I’ll make along the way, no matter how disappointing they can be. The end goal is to be more intentional with how I’m spending money and I’ve definitely found myself being more cognizant of where our money goes.
