Can you believe another month has gone by? I feel like I just wrote February’s post on this topic. Well, I’m 86 days (at the end of March) into this challenge and I’m feeling pretty good about it. To recap, I (and my family by default) am doing a 100-day challenge to spend less money on stuff so we can save money for more intentional purchases, like experiences and travel. Which is a little weird right now since we can’t go on outings or travel excursions because of the coronavirus stuff happening in the world. But nonetheless, there’s still a future to save for.
If you haven’t already, you can read this post about the start of my 100-day challenge and this post on my February update. My parameters for the challenge are:
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
Its funny how some of these parameters are laughable now since COVID-19 has infiltrated our lives. Eating out with others? Ha. Walking aimlessly around Target? That’s a distant memory. Preschool? See you in August (hopefully). I will say, this situation helped our restaurant budget a lot this month (however, our grocery spending did increase…). A few other things that helped our bottom line this month was one of our Costco rewards checks (wahoo!) that came in the mail and a few bucks Andrew made from performing handy work for our neighbors.
Also, remember last month when I was so proud of myself that I remembered to check my “stash” for hand soap and I found two bottles under my bathroom sink? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t regret depleting my stash before the quarantine happened. That’s a hot commodity now and not always in stock at our local grocery store the last couple of weeks!
This month we had the added challenge of birthday spending. And what I mean by that is, figuring out how much could/should we spend on our child’s birthday. March is the start of birthday season in our house – our youngest daughter and myself have March birthdays, our middle child has a birthday in April, and our son’s birthday is in May. So having 3 birthday celebrations in 3 months can add up fast without any ground rules. We typically have backyard celebrations with games and activities for the kids. This saves us from having to rent a space, so usually our largest expense is food for the party.
I wrote this post about our daughter’s first birthday last month and how I spent less than $100 (with some help from family) on celebrating her special day. DIYing the decorations helped to save money along with borrowing serving pieces and other party supplies like tables and chairs. I plan to reuse tablecloths (after we wiped them clean they were good as new) and plan to borrow/up-cycle as many things as possible for upcoming parties. I’ve already picked up a few items from our neighborhood Buy Nothing group for Julianne’s birthday. You never know what people have lying around their house they don’t need anymore until you ask!
Progress
After fulfilling all of our required payments/expenses, here’s what we chose to spend money on in the month of March:
- Restaurants and take-out coffee: $153.60 (I had a “treat yo-self” moment on my birthday #noregrets)
- Home Improvement and Projects: $209.61 (Andrew just finished up a project for a family friend so some of this will be reimbursed)
- Birthday Party Supplies: $99.83 (If you are wondering why this number doesn’t match what was spent on Kate’s party, I didn’t buy all of the materials for her party in the month of March. So this number includes some of the things I bought for Kate and some things I bought for Julianne.)
- Wii supplies: $52.35 (We pulled our old Nintendo Wii out of the attic, #quarantinelife, and turns out we needed some new cords to be able to use it with our *new*, AKA not 10 years old, TV.)
- Gifts: $120.32
- Craft Supplies: $11.92
- Clothes and shoes: $112.14 (The majority of this was new work rain boots for Andrew – its been raining a bunch here and he is outside most of his day at work.)
- ESPN+: $54.11
That last one hurts the most. Ya’ll, we’ve been debating for a long time whether to purchase ESPN+ or not. We have ESPN but the majority of KU games get pushed to ESPN+ and we were super frustrated we couldn’t watch our Jayhawks. So, right before the basketball conference championships started, we bit the bullet and signed up for ESPN+. I think you know where this is going. NOT TWO DAYS LATER, they started to cancel basketball games and within the week, the rest of the season was over. How’s that for timing? We have been able to watch a few interesting documentaries but, dang if that one didn’t sting a bit.
As for our bottom line, after subtracting our spending from our income, we saved an extra $1,892.84 this month, some of which we have the coronavirus to thank for. As I mentioned earlier, we are 86 days into this challenge and so far we have saved $6,426.96! Tell me, how is the COVID-19 pandemic helping (or hurting) your wallet? Comment below or connect with me on instagram @elleandjaydesign.
