2020 – New year, new you. Right? Well, I started off this year with a bang! A 100-day challenge to be precise. Back in the fall of 2019 I read this book about a spending fast, this book about living with less, and listened to this podcast episode about saving to make work optional. My gut was telling me that a spending fast was in my future but I didn’t know what it would look like yet. Then I listened to this podcast episode about a 100-day challenge (completely unrelated to money, I might add) and the pieces started to come together.
Although we don’t have any debt to get rid of (besides our mortgage), I was feeling compelled to start saving money and spending less on stuff. You know, the stuff that just accumulates and you wonder why you bought it in the first place. Also, I think it’s important to model behavior that you want your kids to exhibit, and since they basically want me to buy them everything they see, I thought it might be nice for them to see me refrain from buying also. And if you’ve read this post, you know I like a good challenge and an all-or-nothing kind of gal.
And so the 100-day (spending fast) challenge was born. I modeled my spending fast on Cait Flander’s fast she describes in her book, where she refrains from spending on non-necessities for a year. I have 5 people in my household, 3 of which had no choice in this matter, so it was unrealistic that we will spend zero dollars on unnecessary items (my kids still want to be social and hang out with their friends at Chick-Fil-A). But the goal is to spend less than we were in 2019. Here are the general guidelines of my challenge:
Acceptable Spending/Purchases:
- Necessities (mortgage, utilities, insurance, groceries, preschool, etc)
- Kids activities (such as our son’s soccer league)
- Eating out – with company
- Gifts
Spending to think twice about:
- Take-out coffee and Sonic happy hour
- Eating out – without company
- Household Decor Items
- The target one-spot
- Items in which we already own a suitable replacement
- Clothing and shoes
Obviously, we have to pay our bills and feed our children, but, when we sat down and looked at our other spending, we found we were spending mindlessly on take-out coffee, eating out and buying things that weren’t really adding any value to our lives. Leading up to this, we were saving money (we have a weekly auto-draft that puts money into our savings account), but without any vision, it didn’t seem like it was amounting to much. Andrew, my husband, and I started to talk about intentionally saving money and thought it would be nice to have a goal in mind. While we don’t need a new car at this moment, we decided to start saving our money for when we do need a new car, so that we can pay for it in cash. Because nothing is better than not having a car payment (okay maybe a few things, but you know what I mean)!
I’ve found this intentionality to be key for my 100-day challenge. It’s much easier to pass up that take-out coffee when I ask myself “Would I rather have Starbucks, or a new car (with no payment)?” Ya’ll, the car wins. every. time. Eating out was another activity that was sucking us dry and as I’m sure you can relate, sometimes you do it out of pure laziness. You get up too late to make your lunch before work or you just don’t feel like cleaning up one more meal after your kids. We didn’t want to have to give up seeing our friends (often times this is over a meal while our kids run around on the playground), its one of those things that fills our cup and sparks joy in our life. So, we are trying to limit our eating out to this type of situation – if we are in community with friends or family, thats worth the dollars spent, but otherwise, we’ve got plenty of food at home. With that being said, a friend invited us to lunch at Chick-fil-a last month and while I bought my kids a meal, I brought my own salad from home. The competitiveness in me is showing up strong.
Also, on the topic of eating out, we are trying to be more conscious of the amount of food we are ordering. Andrew and I and/or the kids share a meal when we can, or we’ll order 2 orders of french fries for the whole family instead of everyone getting an order. We have also cut back on ordering sodas (for me) and juice/milk (for the kids) when at restaurants, which might not sound like a lot of savings over one meal, but over time it really does start to add up.
The other things on the list are fairly straightforward – refrain from the black hole that is wandering around target and walking out with $200 less in your pocket. In other words, if I don’t have it written down on a list as something I need to make a trip to the store and buy, it’s not going in my cart (literal cart and figurative “internet” cart).
Then there’s the ‘we ran out of x, we need to buy more’ trap. Did I check under the bathroom sink to see if we had more hand soap in my stockpile? Did I check the fridge to see if I have another salad dressing I could use instead? Did I check the laundry room to see if we have an extra Kleenex box? I’m determined to be more cognizant of using up what we have instead of buying more.
Progress
We didn’t officially start this challenge until January 6th (we were traveling and just coming off the holiday craze), but I’m lumping all of our January purchases together for ease of comparison. Even with the wonky start after new years, here’s what we ended up spending on non-necessities in the month of January:
- $30.68 on Take-out Coffee/Breakfast (all in the company of friends)
- $64.21 on Household decor and organizational containers (I’m human, okay?!)
- $32.83 on Gifts
- $39.13 on Home improvement items (think Lowe’s and Home Depot trips – we had a minor issue with our washer and dryer that needed fixing)
- $54.34 on New tennis shoes for our kids (they outgrow stuff SO fast)
- $235.78 on Restaurants (all in the company of friends)
Just for comparison, we spent an average of $430/month on eating out in the 6 months leading up to this. Also, in order to aid in the saving process, I modified our car insurance plan to save on our monthly premium, sold a few items we rarely used on Facebook Marketplace, and used a few gift cards that have been burning a hole in my pocket. All in all, when I subtract our necessity and non-necessity spending from our income, we SAVED $3,911.75 in the month of January!!!!!
Okay, I’m sorry for all of the exclamation points. And Andrew would give me the eye roll if I didn’t point out that January had 5 Fridays, which means we got 3 paychecks, instead of the usual two. So, I’m not counting on posting numbers like this next month, but with the nature of bi-weekly paychecks (or 26 payments a year), this happens two months out of the year (based on my calculations, it will happen again for us in July). And I’m going to take that momentum and run with it!
We are a little over a quarter of the way through the challenge so this was a good gut check to see how well we are doing and to see our actions (or inactions) pay off. It’s not a perfect system and we aren’t perfect people. We are adding to and adjusting the guidelines as things come up but so far I’m very proud of our progress. I’ll let you know how next month goes!
Have you done a 100-day challenge or spending fast? I’d love to hear your experience and any tips and tricks you might have. As always, you can connect with me on instagram @elleandjaydesign.
