No Spend August Day 18

Screenshots courtesy of the Daily Budget App which I highly recommend.

So it’s day 18 and I’m more than half way through our August no spend. To recap, the goal was to only purchase necessities, such as food and medical. I budget for gas so I don’t include items like that in my variable expenses, although I could.

I’ll tell you this…..not spending is hard. Especially in a city like Los Angeles. We tend to spend the majority of our variable cash on food and drink.

So how are we doing so far?

Medical added up this month but usually we rarely have medical expenses. I was on business travel so I spent some money on restaurants. The good thing is I will be reimbursed for most of it, regardless, I kept track of it.

We haven’t done as good as we expected on the restaurant and drinks categories. However, it is significantly lower than past months at this point. We aren’t going out this weekend so I don’t expect much to change.

Lessons learned!

-we love eating out. Going forward we won’t eliminate it but we will start sharing one entree and only having one drink each.

-we have not spent money on clothes but we decided to add $100 each per month to spend on improving and managing our wardrobe. That’s another blog post.

-we have projected enough savings to pay for our AirBnB for our 14 day vacation to South America.

Not spending isn’t easy but it can help change habits and improve your overall savings rate.

I like the surplus of cash and the fact that I am in the green and not the red. See below.