January-No Spending Month- Update: Week 4 and February forecast.

January's No Spending Month challenge is finished! I think we did pretty good. No new pieces of clothing were bought with the exception of pants for my daughter (less than $5, bought with a gift card); and also the free leather cleaner I bought for free with a surprise store credit. I needed socks, but if we wash our laundry on time, I can get by with what I have. Haha. I also needed pants. I have two pairs of jeans that I can wear during the weekend. But I only really wear one pair because the other one is ripped jeans(the only pair of pants that still fit from my pre-pregnancy days and I'm not sure how to style it). Ever since I had my baby, I've gone up a pant size. oh well, no one noticed that I've been wearing the same pair of pants every Saturday. 

We finished off the month with a huge dine out expense; $204 for my birthday dinner last night. In our house, birthdays are a big thing. I invited a few friends to a fancy restaurant, where we dined on delicious food and have fun conversations. Life isn't about accumulating things, it's about cultivating relationships and creating memories. 

We spent another $70 on grocery in the last week of January, this includes the $30 at Target. I think we did pretty good in this area. I thought we were going to hit $400 total for groceries but we didn't. Yay!

February Forecast: February is going to be a huge spending month for us. 
1. Lunar new year ( 02/8/16), as a married couple we are expected to give out red envelopes. 
2. We're driving up north to visit family.
3. We are getting the Disneyland annual passes ($849 each with the 2 wk black out date).
4. A snowboarding trip to Mammoth. 

I will document every dollar spent in February. 

January- No Spending Month- Update: Week 3

It's the third week of no spending month. I somewhat broke the rule and bought something. I didn't spend any of my money though. I got a $10 credit from Wilson's Leather from when I bought something with them last month. This came to me as a surprise and I used to it buy some leather protecting spray and wipes.

So far, we're at $176 for grocery and $43 for take outs. I want to round off the grocery bill to $200, because I bought some stuff with cash but do not remember how much. I feel good about my progress. Before, shopping was something to do when we're bored and felt like we have to do something. Setting challenges really changes things up for us and makes saving money fun.

I'm happy to report that I've only hit up Target once so far. But baby girl is growing fast and has outgrown most of her pants. Just score two pairs of pants on the Target website for $4.66 :) Not a bad deal. 

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.