How Doing a 30 Day No Spending Challenge Helped Get Our Finances Back On Track – And the important lessons it taught me

I’m sure you’ve seen these no spending challenges floating around Pinterest. Although I thought they were an interesting idea, I never thought that it was something that would work for my family. Boy was I wrong. After finishing our first 30 day no spending challenge I can say it’s been amazing not just for our bank account but for our financial mindset.

To be honest, we weren’t planning on doing a no spending challenge. It was more of a knee jerk reaction to realizing we needed to do something to get our finances under control. Over the past year, we’ve lived in three different states, bought two houses, and had our third baby. As a result, our budget was completely out of wack and our spending habits had gotten pretty bad.

Looking over our bank account at the end of May we finally realized the mess we had gotten ourselves into. We decided that we needed to do something to start cleaning it up and fast. We figured the best way to do that was to challenge ourselves to spend only on the necessities for the following 30 days. So we almost accidentally found ourselves in a 30 day no spending challenge.

Although I had been skeptical of the benefit of these challenges in the past, I am now completely on board. We still have some work to do in order to get our finances back in order but we’re now heading in the right direction thanks to the lessons we learned during the past 30 days.

If you want to do your own no spending challenge check out my Ultimate Guide To Doing A No Spending Challenge – With free printable planning worksheet!

Not meal planning was killing our budget

It was eye-opening to realize just how much of our money was going towards groceries. Since I haven’t been planning our weekly meals I found that I was making a lot of last-second trips to the grocery store to buy just one or two items. But the problem was that I never left the store with just those two items… I usually lefts with a bag or two of extra things I hadn’t planned on buying.

I also realized that I was buying items we didn’t end up using because it was on sale or I thought it would be something interesting to try. My kids are in the super picky eating stage so new and “interesting” food isn’t something they’re interested in trying. Which means it ended up sitting in the pantry or getting thrown out.

During our 30 day no spending challenge I made it a point to try and make meals with what I already had in my pantry. I limited my grocery shopping to only the things I absolutely had to buy. Like bread, eggs, milk, and the 90 bananas my kids go through in a week. Doing so allowed me to see exactly what we were using on a regular basis and what we weren’t. At the end of the 30 days our pantry was pretty much empty and any food items that were left that we weren’t going to use were donated.

I spend way to much money online

Being able to shop online and have items delivered within a day or two can be a lifesaver when the last thing you want to do is drag your kids to the store. But that convenience can also make it easy to overspend and buy things you probably don’t need.

I didn’t realize how bad I had gotten at doing this until about halfway through our 30 days. I was bringing our garbage can out for trash day and it hit me that I didn’t have a stack of Amazon boxes sitting next to our trash can like we normally do. Before we did this challenge we were getting things delivered at least every other day. But now that I was being more cautious and intentional with spending, and I found myself questioning every purchase I was about to make, I realized I could make do without most of the things I thought I needed.

Going forward I plan on making a list of the things I think I need to buy online and waiting a few days before I actually purchase them. This way I can see if its something I actually need or if I already own something that I can reuse or repurpose to fit my needs. which leads me to the next thing I learned during those 30 days.

I can do a much better job of repairing or repurposing

Not having the ability to just go to the store (or online) and buy new things made me realize that I can do a pretty good job of repurposing things around the house to fit my needs, or trying to repair anything that’s broken.

It motivated me to get the dust off my sewing machine and make some simple alterations to curtains in the boy’s room instead of buying brand new ones. I also found myself looking for ways to repurpose things instead of throwing them away.

One of my new favorite ways to repurpose things is to turn them into toys for my kids. Something as simple as an empty roll of toilet paper or paper towels can become a megaphone, binoculars, or a tunnel for cars. An old coffee tin can be turned into drums. The options are really only limited by your imagination.

You and your spouse needed to be on the same Page

If you’re doing a 30 day no spending challenge you need to have a have buy-in from your spouse. You’re also going to need to agree on what you both consider to be essential items that are okay to spend money on during this time. This isn’t something that only one person in the marriage can do, you both have to be on the same page in order for this to work.

What I discovered over the 30 days was that by talking about things before we made a purchase we were able to come up with either lower-cost alternatives or we were able to find things around that house that we could reuse or repurpose.

While that might not sound like it big deal it really made me realize that by communicating more about purchases, even small ones, we were able to reduce our spending even more.

We still have a lot of work to do

Although I would love to end this post by telling you that during this 30 day no spending challenge we were so strict with our spending we spent nothing outside of the bare necessities. But unfortunately, we did do some spending that was unnecessary. Despite that, I still consider our 30 day no spend challenge to be a success.

Did we spend on some unnecessary things, yes. But we were still able to save money AND more importantly, we learned a lot about the areas we need to make improvements in and we’re more motivated than ever. We are also excited to do another 30 day no spending challenge. And I know that we’ll be able to cut down our spending even more thanks to everything we learned the first time around.

Are you thinking about doing a 30 day no spend challenge but you’re on the fence or don’t know where to start? Head over to my Ultimate Guide To Doing A No Spending Challenge, it even comes with a FREE printable planning worksheet that will teach everything you need to know to successfully tackle your very own 30 day no spending challenge!

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