No Spending Month: Preview

Well, additional expenses (i.e. taxes) are prompting us to start our October No Spending Month 3 days early. Not that its a bad thing. With our shower project nearing completion we will be able to take the month to think through what we are doing next without jumping to buy things we may regret later. We have flooring, vanity and closets left to go, so no small expenditure. The shower is really gorgeous though - the tile guy did a bang up job! I will post pictures as soon as the final grouting is complete.

For our upcoming "official" October No Spending Month I will be tracking our progress day by day with what we spent outside of bills and gas and what we saved. I went through my bank statements for the last 4 months and tallied up day by day what we spent (gasp!), so I have a good comparison to determine our savings. Now we had a pretty expensive summer with vacations, a wedding, and house projects so 3 of the months are pretty inflated but regardless those are dollars we don't plan on spending in October so still a savings for us to squirrel away.

One expense we know of outside of our regular bills is an order for meat from a local farm that arrives Oct 7th. My plan is to use this with my freezer supplies to purchase no more meat in October. So look for that one on the 7th and see how we do with our groceries next month - good quality local food is my biggest weakness so this will be a huge challenge for me to keep costs down.

I have to say i am pretty excited for October but we'll see what I think in a couple weeks!

I Wanna be...

We recently traveled to Jackson, Michigan for our niece's wedding. At the reception I started taking pictures of the kids with my brother-in-law's sunglasses and from that a wedding video concept was born. I had a blast getting random folks to put on the glasses, many of whom I did not know but they all had fun with it!

Not Buying it in October

We are gearing up for a family No Spending month for October. I'll be tracking here how we are doing and what we are saving compared to our average monthly expenses for the last 3 months. We had some extra curricular activities this summer with vacations, wedding, etc but I am still using those months - the money always goes somewhere!

Big Spender and I are working out the rules now and I know I'll need to do a little pantry stocking up to be ready to go Oct 1st. This is pretty daunting!