Spending Fast - Months 2 and 3

Like any good behavior modification program, there are bound to be some bumps in the road and a reversion to bad habits.  I'm going to blame the mystery baby I'm currently growing. Once I explain, you'll agree, it's all his/her fault.

Shopping episode number 1: The baby is making me fat, and that necessitated the purchase of some maternity clothes.  Luckily I had budgeted for this expense, and managed to purchase necessary items that I can actually still wear long after the baby is born.  Thank goodness for the forgiving cuts of women's fashion right now.

Shopping episode number 2: The incredibly expensive baby stroller we had decided to splurge on went on a crazy sale, so we had to go ahead and buy it.  We saved about $125 by opting to buy it now. Again, that expense was budgeted, so no harm no foul.

All good so far, right?  Yeah, maybe not.

Shopping episode number 3: My husband and I work from home frequently, and have separate offices set up for this purpose.  Unfortunately, one of those offices needed to go away to accommodate the baby.  We decided it was a great time to upgrade our office furniture for the new arrangement.  For future reference, the word "upgrade" should be a clear sign that what you're doing is not necessary. We picked out some new bookcases and a desk (that we love, but that really weren't necessary in the grand scheme of things).

At this point, our shopping urges had been fully awakened.

Shopping episode number 4: Remember that vacation we had planned and paid for already? Yeah, pregnancy ruins everything.  At the last minute, my doctor wouldn't release me to take the cruise we had booked to the Bahamas. Zika virus be damned, I still wanted to go, and we were way too late to get a refund.  But cooler heads prevailed and we decided to cancel it.  We got some money back in cash and the rest in the form of a credit towards a future cruise - not exactly an ideal situation since we had non-refundable flights booked a week apart leaving out of Charleston, SC. We decided to turn lemons into lemonade and ended up booking additional hotel accommodations in Myrtle Beach for the week of our cruise. The only downside is that instead of eating amazing food free of charge, we would now have to spend a lot of extra money just to eat every day.  In the end we decided to just enjoy ourselves.  This was our babymoon after all, and I'm happy to say that we had a great time (even if we spent a little more money than we had planned).

Shopping episode number 5: Being in Myrtle Beach for the week made it hard not to shop since we had to fill our days somehow.  We both ended up buying a few non-budgeted items that we will really enjoy but were totally unnecessary.  Oh well, you only live once.

Now that we're back home, I'm eager to get back on track with our spending fast.  I guess the lesson here is that when you fall off that wagon, you have to get back up, pay off your credit card, and get back on track.  I am happy to report that the other pieces of our budget have been really solid.  We seem to have our food spending under control (even though I know we'll fight this battle continually), I was able to replace another expensive skincare product with a $6 Aveeno brand find, and we were able to deposit an extra $97 just from rolling our spare change.

So how did we do...

For April, we were able to pay an extra $1591.64 on the mortgage!  We did even better for May, paying an extra $1975.10 on the mortgage!

Even with our shopping binges, we still managed to make good progress on our financial goals. Since we started working towards total debt-free living, we've paid off over $5,000!  Based on our current mortgage, that's the equivalent of about a full year's worth of payments. I'm excited by our progress and can't wait to see how the summer goes!

Spending Fast - Month 1 Review

The first few weeks of a spending fast tend to feel like starting a really restrictive diet.  You end up fighting temptations to spend money on things you obviously don’t need but somehow in the moment feel like essentials.  Add in the fact that everyone you know will start selling some revolutionary product that you just have to try and you really start to feel like an outsider. I’ve put myself on spending fasts enough in the past to know that these urges will come, and luckily, I’m not as susceptible to them as I have been in prior years.

This time around, I haven’t really felt tempted, and I’ve had a pretty easy time keeping myself away from the stores.  Luckily, I haven’t had to go to the mall or Target and I’ve avoided any unnecessary stops at stores that are purely for shopping, like Hobby Lobby or boutique clothing stores.  And honestly I haven’t missed it.  The only thing I’ve struggled with is turning down invitations to shopping parties like LulaRoe, Cabi, and Plunder.  Those events are as much about the social as they are about the shopping, so I hate to miss out.  For this first month, I thought it was best not to put myself in that situation, but in future months, I may be able to venture out without buying.  Isn’t that what they teach you in rehab?  Test yourself, go hang out with all your old buddies who are still addicts.  What could possibly go wrong?

I will admit I still have a twinge of embarrassment when I tell a friend I can’t go to their event because I’m on a shopping fast.  I can see the sympathy in their faces.  People probably assume I’m in way over my head with bills, when nothing could be further from the truth.  This is just something I need to get over.  I should be proud to be on a shopping fast.  This small act of sacrifice will pay huge dividends down the road.  Short-term chagrin is a small price to pay.

March was like most months – same old bills, same old surprise expenses.  We started things off with an emergency trip to the vet for our fur baby Willow.  $157 later, her bum leg was magically healed through the powers of time and a dose of probably unnecessary anti-inflammatory meds.  Then, wouldn’t you know it, our $99 yearly membership fee was due on our Southwest card.  You might be asking why we bother with a credit card that has a yearly fee, but we don’t carry a balance and we rarely, if ever, pay for flights.  Case closed.  That was a charge I should have anticipated, but I dropped the ball.  Bills that come due on a regular schedule should never catch you off guard!  By March 5, our slush fund was cut completely in half and we had nothing to show for it.  I felt a little discouraged, but since I knew I wasn’t going to spend any money, I figured we’d still be okay.  And for the most part we were.

Where we really struggled was with our food budget.  We have a healthy amount budgeted for groceries and eating out – more than enough to not feel limited.  But even still, we blew the total by almost $300.  I’m really hopeful that we can exercise more control here.  Now more than ever it’s important to get our finances under good control, because…

I’m pregnant!

We found out mid-March, and my mind has been reeling with the cost of daycare ever since.  This was a planned pregnancy, but that doesn’t mean you feel any more equipped when it actually happens. The only symptom I’ve really had so far is an intense craving for all things junk food related.  I’m pretty sure this is the root cause of our grocery budget issues, but it’s getting better week by week.

I have a chunk of money set aside for just this scenario – both for medical costs and baby supplies, and this month we used part of it to purchase a recliner for the nursery as well as some much needed book cases for the office so we can begin the task of setting up the nursery.  We were almost swayed by the appeal of a customized fabric recliner at the La-Z-Boy store, but before we pulled the trigger, we visited the discount room of a local furniture chain and found the exact same recliner in a very practical beige leather for literally half the price.  Score!  The bookcases were a decent deal but still a hefty expense.  At least it was a budgeted expense.  Even though we are just getting started with the nursery set-up process, we are trying to clean out closets and donate/recycle/trash unwanted junk.  I’m already amazed at how much stuff we’ve accumulated over the years that we don’t even see or use.  It’s a valuable lesson to not overbuy that I hope to expound on in future posts.

Our last major purchase for the month was a final payment on our upcoming vacation.  I had set aside the money for this trip back in January, so this didn’t really eat into our budget for the month.  I have all our spending money set aside as well, so we will be vacationing guilt-free!

My only true test came when my favorite face wash finally ran out.  Per the rules of the fast, I could technically replace this item since I truly do love it, but I’ve decided to try out some new brands to see if I can be satisfied with a drug-store brand.  My face wash is about $50 per bottle and lasts me about 4 months.  I picked up a bottle of Neutrogena face wash for $6 but failed to read the fine print and ended up with a harsh exfoliating scrub that really dried out my skin.  I had decided to suffer through until it was used up, but my face had finally had enough and I picked up an Aveno product yesterday for $4.50.  After one use, I’m more than satisfied.  And even with a waste of $6, I still saved myself about $40 by not repurchasing the expensive brand.

After all bills were paid, we were able to make an extra principal-only payment to our mortgage for $1,561.25!!! Here’s the great thing about being down to one debt item – all your extra money goes towards it.  Every dollar you pay is a dollar you never have to pay again!  That is so exciting to me on so many levels.  Our ultimate goal is to pay down enough of the balance to eliminate primary mortgage insurance by the end of the year, and then pay off the entire mortgage by 2021.  It’s actually doable, especially if we continue to make steady progress this year. We plan to celebrate each 10% of equity achieved.  We should be able to celebrate our first milestone at the end of April!

Here’s hoping we can stay on track and build even more momentum!

Fast Spending or Spending Fast?

Well, I’m back on the blog to tell you about my latest project of sorts.  First, a little recap…Remember in my last post where I mentioned that I got laid off in 2015, and then I found a “great” job in 2016?  Well it turns out that “great” job wasn’t as great as I would have hoped.  I don’t want to sound dramatic, so I’ll just say it was sort of the single worst professional experience of my life.  I made it work for as long as I could, because you know, I like electricity and the ability to buy food and stuff, but it was clear from just a few months in that this was not going to be a long-term career opportunity.  I left in November for a very different kind of role with an oil and gas company that provides client-based services and solutions.  It’s hard to describe exactly what I do at this company, except to say I have clients and I provide services and solutions related to oil and gas exploration and production.  Sexy huh?

The good news is I’m really enjoying the freedom and flexibility at this company. The owner is great and has treated me with the utmost respect and kindness.  The bad news is it doesn’t pay nearly as well as my prior jobs.  The salary is split about 50/50 with bi-annual bonuses, so the potential to make my typical income is definitely there, but I have seen a steep decline in my monthly pay.  But, as has been the theme in our lives since Milton and I met, the Lord is taking care of us and the pay is sufficient to meet our needs and then some.  The bonuses will just be icing on the cake.  Fingers crossed.  I love icing.

With our new income situation weighing heavy on me, we made an effort over the past couple of months to pay down all non-mortgage debt and set aside extra savings for upcoming one-off expenditures like planned vacations or deductibles for unanticipated medical issues.  We didn’t actually have any debt besides a car loan, so we worked hard on that and paid if off last week!  Yay us!  It feels good to be out from under that payment, especially heading into what will feel like a lean year.  Now we can focus all our extra funds on the mortgage, which sincerely feels like fun to me. I’m not sure Milton shares my enthusiasm.

We already live with a very formal budget, but we have routinely blown through the discretionary spending categories over the past year simply because we were very flush with cash and we could.  It’s a problem of being financially lazy, since our needs are easily met.  We’ve let our wants get totally out of control. Our next life goal is to start a family, and with that comes additional expenses like increased health insurance and daycare.  I want us to start living like we have these obligations now so that when those bills really do kick in, we won’t feel the shock.  The best way to do this is to exercise more rigid control over our budget starting today.  Ergo, we are officially on a spending fast for the remainder of 2017.

What is a spending fast?  I’m so glad you asked.  It’s simply a refrain from all non-essential spending for a set period of time, in this case 10 months. Here’s how it works:

First you establish ground rules -

1. We will spend our current allotted budget on our “normal” expenses: mortgage, utilities, phone, insurance, etc.
2. We will continue to tithe on 10% of our gross pay – this is one of our largest monthly expenses, but you don’t get ahead by stiffing God. Ever. 
3. We will continue to contribute 10% of our gross pay to retirement savings. This amount does not include our company matches that bring total retirement savings to 15%.
4. We will still budget the same amounts for gas and groceries/restaurants, but I have reduced our cash and miscellaneous spending to just $500/month.  That probably sounds like a lot, but this is the category that gets plowed through every month on nonessentials, so this is where the challenge lies.  I feel like at that amount we should still be able to exercise some discretionary spending on experiences and unforeseen items without making ourselves feel like we live in a prison.
5. We are keeping our gym membership since we actually use it and health is important, plus it’s an activity we enjoy.  We will also still get professional haircuts, although I will be switching the frequency of mine to every other month instead of every 6 weeks.  
6. We will not spend any money on electronics and other “toys,” clothing, jewelry, make-up, or hair-care products outside the replacement of a product we have used up completely and love enough to buy that exact item again.  If we don’t love that exact item, but we sincerely need a replacement, we will seek out a cost-effective alternative.  I have cleaned out my bathroom drawers and cabinets and condensed all my sample items, lotions, creams, etc. into a few boxes with a goal of actually using those items up this year.  It’s amazing how many high quality products I had just sitting around the bathroom collecting dust.  
7. We will still purchase gifts as needed but with a significantly reduced budget – we will also be making gifts or re-gifting as much as possible, as well as shopping sales.
8. We will allow ourselves to replace work required clothing items if the prior item is beyond repair or professionalism, but in those instances, we will shop sales and only replace the exact item needed.
9. We are currently trying to have a baby and in the event that I become pregnant this year, I have set aside a modest but reasonable budget to prep for baby/nursery supplies.  

Next, decide what you’re going to do with the extra money you save – 

We already have a 6-month emergency fund and a healthy balance in savings for a rainy day or an unexpected expense, so all our extra money at the end of each month will go directly to the principal on our mortgage.  I can’t wait to see that debt shrink!

On your mark, get set, go (or I guess, stop) - 

I’ve researched the idea of a spending fast quite a bit over the past few weeks, and I found some helpful advice that said to go ahead and purchase anything that will help you feel more secure prior to beginning the spending fast.  This is not a license to buy gift cards or go nuts with the credit card, although it does feel a little like having one last party before you go to rehab.

I thought about what I really needed, and I purchased a year supply of my favorite non-store brand shampoo and hairspray at a very good sale price.  This is something I hate buying because it’s so expensive, but since it was on a huge sale, I figured stocking up for the year made sense.  I have also purchased a new pair of black office heels using a gift card to cover part of the expense.  My old pair went in the trash, so this was clearly a necessity.  My husband purchased some new Tennis shoes at a steep discount as well as a few pairs of work trousers on sale.  I'll be honest here and admit that he is not the culprit when it comes to overspending, so I won’t be monitoring his purchases as closely as I will my own. We also used a Visa gift card we received when switching our cell phone plans to cover all but $160 of our season tickets for the OKC Broadway performances in 2017/2018!  This was an obvious splurge, but it is an activity we really enjoy and should provide us some very cost effective dates this year.  Being able to use the gift card saved us almost $450, which I think is a huge win.

I’m excited to live on less and prove that we will not just survive but actually thrive.  Join me, won’t you?  Or don’t, I mean, it’s not for everyone.  But either way, I look forward to keeping you updated with our progress.