Our "No-Spend" Month

I alluded to having a "no-spend" month in my last post about camping in Fort Bragg, so I figured I would explain.

We are living on a tight budget so we can put as much money as possible toward law school debt.  At the end of May, I mentioned to Mike that when the garden is in full swing, that it would be fun to see if we could go a month without buying food.  He said, "I bet we could go a whole month without buying anything."

We both are competitive and enjoy a good challenge, so this made for a fun adventure with a good cause.  The rules were simple, besides gas and other monthly expenses like insurance, we wouldn't spend any money.

Here are a few notes from our experience:

~Baked homemade bread-  I have done this off and on since we've been here.  Homemade wheat bread tastes so much better than store bread, but in the past sometimes laziness would win over yumminess.  Baking bread consistently for a whole month has really made it part of my routine.  We haven't bought bread since.

~Powdered milk- I had couple of gallons of milk in the freezer, but for the rest of the month we had powered milk from our food storage.  My kids don't mind it at all.  I am not a big fan of it though.  Adding a little squirt of honey and splash of vanilla helps (though since my kids drink it without, I usually didn't add anything to it).

~Food storage-  We have a pretty good store of food, from canned goods, to rice, wheat and beans, to frozen produce and fruits and veggies we bottled ourselves.  They are all items we use regularly anyway, so it didn't feel like we were experimenting with weird ingredients.

~Avoiding temptation- Since I didn't want to be tempted to buy anything, I deleted any advertising emails.  It didn't matter if The Children's Place was offering free shipping on any order, or if everything was 75% off.  I wasn't going to even browse.  I also stayed away from the stores (living in the boonies made that pretty easy).

~Patience- Rural living has been helping us develop this virtue, so patience wasn't as much of a challenge as it otherwise would have been.  When I would think of things that we "needed" I would make a list.  Then in July, I started researching on Amazon, or browsing craigslist/ thrift stores as usual.

~Involving everyone-  All the kids knew about the no-spend challenge and were excited to be a part of it.  When we ran out of tortillas, instead of getting upset, they said, "We'll have to wait until next month to get more tortillas."  They also provide a measure of accountability.  If I had even tried to buy something, they would have stopped me and reminded me that I would have to wait until next month.  It helped that they knew the purpose of our challenge (to help pay for Daddy's school).

~Gratitude-  We were especially grateful for fresh produce from our garden and fresh eggs from the chickens.  We were glad to have a good food storage, some of it we brought with us and some of it we were given by an older couple who moved away.  We were reminded that we have been richly blessed