No Spend Days

I like to read various frugal/personal finance blogs. I can usually find new information or motivation, and it's nice to read about other folks' journeys to financial freedom. One concept that I have wanted to try is a no-spend period. Many bloggers are spending the month of February spending only what is absolutely necessary, food, utilities, mortgage, and gas, but nothing else. I have tried to do this but something always seems to come up, and I get discouraged. The cat has to go to the vet, or the kids need something for science fair at school or suddenly go through a growth spurt overnight and need new jeans, you know how it goes. I have been successful at the occasional no-spend weekend but not on a recurring basis. So I have decided to try something a little different.

I'm declaring no-spend days each week - Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. There's no reason why I can't heat up one of my freezer meals or even leftovers for dinner instead of running through a drive-through or calling for pizza. There's no reason why we can't rent the videos from the library on Tuesday when we are already there (DD stays for the teen coffeehouse each week), and there's no reason not to be more organized in my shopping trips. I've become really lax with this over the past few years. When we lived in the country, 20 minutes from town, I HAD to be organized with my trips; it's a lot easier now to just run to Krogers when it's only 5 minutes away. That needs to change.

Especially with trying to keep my survival mode mentality with my job situation, implementing a regularly scheduled no-spend day seems like a good first step. Hopefully I will be able to add another regularly-scheduled no-spend day over the next few months.