NSM: How's It Going

So far, for No Spend Month, I have spent:

$10 on food to donate to the homeschool fair (good deal since what was left over got to be brought home and fed to my family as a nice little snack!)

$33 on new shoes for JJ. Now that he is growing, he finally needing new shoes. Of course this prolly could have waited if he had not lost one of his shoes. We looked EVERYWHERE! It is GONE! I think he threw it out the window of the car while we were driving.

And what a temptation shopping at the mall is!! Who puts chocolate covered strawberries (yummo!) in the children's shoe section?!?! And Vera Bradley was having a 50% off sale!! I will admit I did look! But I was good and did not buy!

$48 diapers. This might have been able to wait too, except for the fact that the diapers were half off!! I was not looking for this bargain, but with the fact that JJ is not even near being potty trained, and the prices of diapers keep rising, I had to stockpile. I did not take as much as I wanted though, I was good.

------

$209 left

I am frustrated that I have so little left and we have not even gone a week into this. Thankfully I have a lot of food already stockpiled. I might have to double the $250 used by Small Notebook to $500 instead of the $300 I had originally set out to spend. We will see. I am going to try my best to keep the spending under $300. This is much harder than originally thought!

I know beloved's birthday is this weekend and he has taken work off (a 4 day weekend) in order to celebrate. So I am not sure what money he plans on spending there. I know one of the days he wants to spend taking pictures (free except for the gas to get there). Another day he wants to go out to eat. All 6 of us.

It is also frustrating that the month we decide to do this, we have extra bills. I guess that is a good thing since we will have extra money to put towards the bills. But I was really hoping to put money into the ER fund.

I was reading a blog the other day where this family is trying to save 100 Dollars A Day in order to have $36,500 in savings by the end of the year. When you read her getting started post, you will realize that it is not as difficult as it sounds. :)

So I started thinking about it. I wonder if we really could do it. I mean, if we really changed the way we lived. I know we definitely could if we had not moved into this house. Our new house payment is stupidly three times what we were paying. We did it before our Dave Ramsey introduction, before our son's health issues and while in a mindset of needing more room and not thinking how can we make this house fit our needs.

I will have to think more about it and talk to beloved about it. I do know that this No Spend Month thing has really got me thinking about money and spending and SAVING in a whole new way. Which I think, if I am not mistaken, is the main purpose of No Spend Month.