A Money Experiment: A Week Without Spending

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Remember 7th grade and the science experiments? Ah, good times. Well, today I’m not going to make you dissect a frog. We’ll be looking at more of a monetary experiment.

Just a few more days till the end of the month, right? I’ll get paid and we’ll have a little more breathing room in the budget. You see, Mrs. PT and I have been saving aggressively over the past few months for some upcoming goals. We do our saving automatically, a few days after we get paid. That way we have the rest of the month to spend the remaining funds on whatever. This month, however, our aggressive saving and spending finally got the best of us. Now we’re running a bit low. So, instead of dipping into our savings or using debt, we are challenging ourselves to not spend any money this week.

One exception: If we make extra money by selling something or by returning something and getting a refund we get to use that money however we like.

Because of the exception above, I made some moves over the weekend. I grabbed a few items around the house that we didn’t need anymore and listed them on Craigslist.org. Two have sold so far, giving us $38 dollars. We also brought some of our old clothes by a consignment store, which gave us an additional $10. That’s almost $50 to spend this week without having to dip into savings. And if a few more items sell, we’ll have even more cash. Sweet!

More thoughts going into this week:

1. I don’t pretend to think that this is going to be easy. We’ve gotten into the habit of spending when we feel like it. Especially dining out for lunch or dinner. So, believe it or not we normally spend a lot more than $50 on food in a week. It’s our biggest frivolous expense, you could say. Plus, we have all the other normal expenses to avoid: groceries, personal care, and convenience items. Although, I think the groceries will be easy since we have so much in our cupboard already.
2. I know some of you guys are a lot smarter with your spending, do this sort of thing all the time, and are probably laughing at me right now.
3. Hopefully we can do it successfully and get more in tune with our needs vs wants. I see it as a chance to get back to the basics.

I’ll report back on Friday and let you know how we did.

If you’d like to take on this experiment with me, let me know in the comments below. You can also follow along on Twitter for more timely updates.

If you’re tweeting too, use the hashtag #weekwithoutspending

Carnivals from the last two weeks:

Economy And Your Finances, Pecuniary Delights, Money Hacks, Frugality, Money Hacks, Twenty Somethings

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