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I have decided to make October a No Spend Month. I’m already talking it over with the kids. Hoping to make it a goal driven game of sorts as they are very much bought in to saving money these days on wants over needs.

There are several reasons for this No Spend Month:

We are planning to drive to Texas for the week of Thanksgiving, all 5 of us. And I need to create a bigger buffer to afford that trip. Even though I do not have to take off work, it will cost me more than a regular week. (History Buff will be coming to GA from VA to drive with us. We will be spending the week at my parents I think I wrote about this back in June when I committed to it. But with my mom’s health declining, my dad is trying to get all us kids and grandkids there for a last family photo.)
The kids time-consuming sports will end. School football and volleyball will be over the first week, so practices, games and nightly carpool commitments will end. So other than a weekly trip to gymnastics, we will be home all the time which makes it much easier to not spend.
While we do get food stamps this month, it will be the last. So I want to make them stretch as far as possible. I believe I can make the groceries we have plus one more good shopping trip last through the month of October with just a small budget to replace perishables.

Planning Ahead

When I’ve done No Spend months or weeks in the past, they’ve been kind of last minute things. This time, I’m planning for it. And I’m hoping this planning will help us do even better than we have in the past.

These are the things I’ve thought through so far:

Personal hygiene – making sure the littles and I have what we need to get through a month. Gymnast is currently out of deodorant and I’m about to be.
Sundries – I need to stock up on some laundry detergent and purchase a back up bottle of dish soap. I’m watching the weekly news ads for specials on this in hopes of keeping the cost as low as possible. Our toilet paper will be restocked on Sept. 12 (subscribe and ship from Amazon every quarter.) Other than that, I think we are all set in this area.
Food – we will be able to use food stamps, but my goal is to shop at the end of September based on a meal plan of what we currently have in the house and buy as little as possible. It would be great to get to the end of October, rather beginning of November and still have food stamps. We are now halfway through this month and still have over 1/2 of August’s resources available. My goal is to clear the deep freezer and pantry over the next 6 weeks.
Gas – with very little driving needed in October, I think we will almost be able to cut my weekly gas budget in half. Woot, woot! That will really help with the extra driving we will be doing in November to go to Texas.
Change in the Weather? We’ve spent this week cleaning out closets and checking on what people need as far as cooler weather clothes. Everyone has everything that NEED, not saying there are no wants, but I do not anticipate needing to purchase anything for October clothes-wise even if the cooler temperatures appear.

Saving for Trip vs Paying Off Debt

The real challenge is going to be balancing saving for the Texas trip and putting all my extra monies toward debt. We should start having significantly more “extra” monies in October as 1) we cut our spending even further and 2) my work continues to increase.

It has been a lot of fun to start paying extra on debts. It feels really good to see those numbers dropping and even better that I’m not having to stress over every single payment.

My thought is that I need to create a budget for the trip or savings goal. And then once I hit that, put any extra towards extra debt payments. Thoughts? What have I missed in planning for a very serious No Spend Month?

Hope

Hope is a creative, solutions-focused business manager helping clients grow their business and work more efficiently by leveraging expertise in project management, digital marketing, & tech solutions. She’s recently become an empty nester as her 5 foster/adoptive kids have spread their wings. She lives with her 5 dogs in a small town in NE Georgia and prefers the mountains to the beaches any day. She struggles with the travel bug and is doing her best to help each of her kids as their finish schooling and become independent (but it’s hard!) She has run her own consulting company for almost twenty years! Hope began sharing her journey with the BAD community in the Spring of 2015 and feels like she has finally in a place to really focus on making wise financial decisions.

Hope’s Actual Spending and Income – Week of 8/31

by Hope

You can see last week’s actual spending and income report here. This was a good week. I know the table looks like we ended up in the red, but in actuality, we are mostly living on last month’s income so there is a buffer behind the scenes.

Because I brought in about $700 (before taxes) more than I anticipated, I went ahead and paid some additional monthly bills and made some debt payments. Right now, I am not really sticking to focusing on any particular debt, it’s more whatever strikes me. Yes, I know that’s not the best plan. I need to focus on a new plan soon. Maybe after my next debt update.

Actual Spending and Income from this Past Week

Without further ado, here’s how our finances looked this week. Bear in mind that these numbers are after taxes and without business expenses. The BOLD items are items that were either not anticipated for this or I was off in my planning.

Actual Spending - Week of 8/31

Description	Anticipated	Actual
Income *after taxes	$1235	$1706
Gymnastics	($100)	($62)
Rent	($650)	($650)
Reimburse Grandmama	($16)	($16)
Life Insurance *quarterly payment	($67)	($67)
Utilities - Gas, Water & Trash	($92)	($92)
Utilities - Electric	($170)	($170)
Gas	($40)	($20)
History Buff *loan replayment	$50	$50
Cost of Girdle for football		($25)
Amazon		($158)
Utilities - Internet		($61)
Tax Debt		($500)

Total	$150	($64)

Spending Notes

There are just a few things to note:

Gymnast is actually going to continue with both football and gymnastics. The football team does not practice one day per week AND the season ends in less than a month. He will continue going to gym 1x per week. My monthly fee was offset by selling part of his competition uniform this past week. Right now, he will not return to competition this season.
Gas was 1/2 the normal cost this week since we are really not driving much at all. Other than 1 trip to gym, everywhere we go in less than 5 miles from the house. Woohoo! Not to mention, Sea Cadet is driving himself again.
My Amazon Prime membership renewed and I hadn’t checked into the discount BAD readers had told me about. We use Prime all the time, but it charged to my old Amazon account (paid off 11/2017) which remains open but no balance is carried. So I wanted to get it paid off ASAP. (There were a couple of things purchased by the kids/grandmother which were on this bill, they paid for all of those earlier.)
Internet – on my taxes, I split this cost between business since I work from home 100% of the time and personal since we do all use it for leisure and schooling. But figured I would put it here rather than keeping it out in business expenses. Thoughts?
Tax Debt – the monthly payment on this debt is $246, due at the end of the month. I wanted to get ahead and I’m thinking this may be my next target. But we can discuss another time. But I really just went with my gut with my extra income and decided to get ahead a bit. This pushes my due date to the end of November and drops by balance below $4,000. Yeah!