January-No Spending Month

Happy second day of 2016. Like many people out there, I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to invest early. But I use the excuse "oh, my employer doesn't offer a retirement account." I wish I would have sock away at least a $100 since the day I started working 7 years ago at my current job. That would have given me a good $11k today if that money was growing at 8%. It was my first real full time job and I wasn't making much. There was credit card debt and the fact that I was young, I wanted to do things like going out to eat, make trips to Vegas and buy a nice Coach purse or two. I remember how I was budgeting my money so I can spend, not save. I guess I was trying to make it look like I was an adult and  I have money to buy things. But now I realized, the more adult thing to do was to invest and secure my financial future. 

I've learned now that the only person I need to impress is myself. I want to start my family to a solid financial future. The first thing we're doing is making January a no spending month. This isn't an effort to save money, but I'm pretty sure we'll save a good penny. It's more of an effort for us to be conscious consumers. Besides the usually necessities like food, toiletries and diapers, we won't buy things that are wants. But we're not going to do this cold turkey neither, we're still allow to buy some things like lattes because we have a gift card for it.  
We'll do our best to recycle more too, I just can't stand that we're throwing out a big pile of trash every day or every other day.