Expect Less

I have just a few days left in August, and my $160 has been reduced to $2. I have enough food at home to make it to the 29th without issue, but this was definitely a challenging month.

There’s nothing wrong with eating well, and if you enjoy it and can afford it I think you certainly should, but it’s something to keep an eye on, or else things can quickly get out of control. I was fortunate in that I had a lot of food at home already - dry goods and frozen foods. I’m not sure how I would have gotten by otherwise, having those resources around really made things easier.

It’s mind blowing how much it costs to go out, especially for drinks. I went out 3 times this month, twice for birthdays and once with friends. I had a total for 5 drinks during that time, and that accounts for nearly $45 of my spending. That’s nearly 1/3 of my money for something unnecessary that I could have done just as easily at home or, more importantly, not done at all. Of course, the birthday events were a chance to spend time with friends on a day in their honor.

One of the biggest changes in my own attitudes was that I never suggested dining out. If someone wanted to get together, I would offer to cook for them at my place, offer a beer that I already had in my fridge, or offer to open a bottle of wine. Cooking for two or three people pretty much always cost me less than it would to join them out for dinner, and it was always a fun experience to cook together.

That said, I really miss eating out. I think, however, that I need to make a much stricter dining out budget for myself, and stick to it. Awareness of your spending is one of the best budgeting things you can do. Credit cards make it so easy to be detached from what you’re doing, so I plan to use them much less too. A few purchases here and there to keep the account active and maintain a credit history, but I’m planning to put more energy in to building up a reserve in savings and use that money to make purchases only when I can afford them.

I encourage everyone to try a No Spend month, and let me know if you do it. It’s a challenge in many ways - knowing where your money goes, turning down invitations out, letting go of vices that caused you to spend more than you realized when you weren’t actively aware of their true impact on your finances. But the end result, at least for me, has been a clarity about how I use my money and about how I want to use it in the future.