We've decided to do the spending fast so that we can make a dent in my graduate student loans. We had at first decided not to aggressively pay them off, because they're "good debt", right? Well, we are now in the mindset that any debt we have is annoying and we want it gone. The only other debt we have is the house, and I'm not sure if we'll ever be aggressive about paying off the mortgage, but that's a different story that I'm going to touch on later.
So what are the rules for our spending fast? Here they are:
- Only one meal out each month as a family
- Only one lunch out each month at work
- Only one coffee shop outing each month
- No buying any convenience food or drinks, like from vending machines or fast food joints
- No buying alcohol (it's a good thing we have a healthy stock of wine!)
- No buying new clothes
- No entertainment purchases (although we did get multiple gift cards to the movies that we will be using, so thanks friends and family! And we're going to see The Book of Mormon next month, but we bought those tickets in November;)
- No buying books, although we've been pretty good on this one for awhile
- No buying gifts, except for our kid, nieces and nephews, baby showers, weddings. I know that doesn't seem like we're cutting out that much, but we give a lot of gifts to family and friends, which we love to do, but cutting that out will help us save a lot. And for the baby showers and weddings, we feel we've got to give back to those people who were so generous to us when we hit those milestones.
- No buying any toys for Evey. This might seem heartless and contrary to what the last rule stated, but our kid has enough, and by that I mean too many, toys, and I'm sure she's going to amass some more this year. For Christmas we didn't get her a single toy, and instead we got her books, two shirts, a training potty, and a months's worth of music classes.
Things we're going to spend money on:
- We've got two weddings coming up this year and we're planning on visiting my Nannie at some point, so we'll pay to travel, but we've been racking up Southwest points with our Southwest credit card.
- Parties! We love our parties and we would be pretty bummed if we cancelled them, but I'm going to get creative and scale back a bit, ha! No, no, I really will, and we're planning on hosting four parties this year, so I've gotta start planning now! I'll post my money savings party tips when I've come up with them;)
I'm very excited about The Spending Fast! It's only been a couple weeks, but I can already feel my priorities shifting. I've been meal planning and freezing food and so we haven't felt the need to grab a bite out. We don't really go out all that much, and so the outside entertainment thing won't be a big deal, but when we get bored we've got Netflix, Amazon Prime, video games, wonderful friends and family to hang out with, a house that still needs some purging, the park, The Discovery, not to mention any other virtually free thing we do that I'm forgetting.
I definitely don't feel we're going to miss out on anything, and I'm so excited to start our journey to aggressively pay off my student loan debt and be debt free, minus our mortgage, of course.
What do you think? Would you ever try a spending fast?
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