We have concluded the first month of our new frugal lifestyle, using the Frugal 'Fun Budget' Calendar. You can read all the details about it here, but I'll give a short explanation. I made a calendar with a pocket for each day and we made cards that have activities on them which we randomly distributed throughout the month. Some are for free activities such as game night or a trip to a museum. Others are for dining out - $5 ice cream treat, split a burrito at Chipotle, etc. We also have one card that is the spending allowance for all of us for the month. The point of the calendar is to limit the amount of money that we spend on extra and unnecessary purchases, but to still have some fun. We don't have the exact amount of money that we saved (I'm not a numbers kind of girl anyway), but I'm pretty sure that we saved money and more importantly we had fun this month. Each morning we looked forward to seeing if we had a card for the day. Here is a quick recap of January.
-Our biggest unnecessary spending is on chai lattes, normally from Starbucks. We had cut back to just Wednesdays (my husband's long day at work) and then a pitstop during our weekend long run. However, there had been more and more "we deserve it today" sort of excuses and so one of the main reasons for this calendar was to control that chai addiction. We had ONE card for the entire month for Starbucks. What made that doable is that outside of the FFB Calendar, we were allowed to go to our local coffee shop for drinks and a treat every Saturday morning. It supports a local business, uses more local ingredients (they now roast their own coffee, use milk from a local dairy, and make their own baked goods), and is a slower paced environment to spend some time as a family. I have to admit that we cheated the first week - I forget why, but we really wanted that Starbucks chai. However, we had a gift card for it, so we didn't spend any of our money for it. We also had a Starbucks outing with my husband's parents, but since they were paying, that doesn't count as cheating.
-Several of our cards were for "Game Night" and so we played several lighting quick games of Bananagrams. We don't have much uninterrupted time with the little babe wandering around, so we played the games after dinner while she was still sitting in her high chair. In the past, I have been the Bananagrams Queen, but my husband had great luck this month and beat me two out of three games. We probably would not have taken the time to do this if we hadn't drawn the card, so that was one good thing to come from the FFB Calendar.
-For our $25 Wild Card Restaurant card, we chose Indian food. We love it and it is something that we do not make from scratch at home. We had drawn the card on a Tuesday, but we had plenty of food for the week already made, so we saved it for Friday night. I picked it up my way home from running errands. However, when I was paying for it - slightly over the $25 at $27 - I really felt like it was way too much money to be spending on one meal. It is amazing how quickly your mindset can change. However, it tasted darn good! And actually, we had enough left over for lunch the next day.
-We had two cards for $5 ice cream treats at our local dairy. It is an old timey place that basically hasn't changed since it opened way back when. They sell their milk in glass bottles and their milk is rbst free, so we like to support them with our ice cream purchases. (However, we buy our raw organic milk from another farmer.) We happened to draw our first ice cream card on the coldest day of the year, so there was not a long line! Their prices are really cheap, so for less than $5 we can buy two small hot fudge sundaes. I always feel guilty about eating them in styrofoam, but sometimes you want the full sundae instead of just a cone. I try and make it better by saving the spoons to keep in the car to reuse.
-We drew our spending cash card just this week and we have not spent it yet. I plan on using my little babe's $30 to buy her some art supplies, like chunky crayons. I wanted to use my $20 to buy a knitted cowl - the one I have been living in is a bit too big and lets cold air in around my neck - but I may save the money and try to knit one myself, which might require using the money to buy a new pair of needles, but that would be a better investment.
We actually had so many "fun" things to do that we didn't have enough time to do them. We drew two Redbox movie night cards, but since the little babe has decided that she won't sleep through movies anymore, we can't use them. And we didn't have time to visit a museum on campus this month, just too many things to do on the weekends! Since food is probably our biggest expense after our mortgage, we are trying to really cut that budget down. We have been buying groceries only on Saturdays and then doing most of the cooking for the week on the weekend. Cooking from scratch takes a lot of time, but it is something that we enjoy doing and believe is the right thing to do, for many reasons. (and that is a whole other post)
We feel that the Frugal 'Fun Bugdet' Calendar is helping to keep us on track, drawing the cards each day adds a little fun to our chaotic mornings, and it is making us take a closer look at our purchases. We may have spent less money this month on unnecessary extras, but we have realized that our life is full of goodness.