Finance Blog
Money Management: Try a January No-Spend Month
After the spend-spend-spend frenzy of December, you may be worn out. Shopping might seem like a chore rather than a pleasure. You may be yearning to do something more meaningful than add “stuff” to your home and wardrobe. And your wallet may be raising a white flag, too, begging you to let your credit cards cool off after more than a month of heavy use.
So why not practice your money management skills and make January a no-spend month?
Money management rules for your no-spend month
First, consider this project a little break from shopping, rather than a punishment for overspending or breaking your budget. You’re not trying to whip yourself back into shape with the financial equivalent of a crash diet. This experiment can be much kinder.
Give yourself this month to notice how many things you buy out of sheer habit, boredom, or an “it’s on sale so I should get it” urge. See what creative ideas you come up with to not spend, just for 31 days.
Some families may keep this challenge a bit loose. They might head into January with a goal of simply spending as little as possible on non-essentials. But to make it really interesting, consider giving yourself an uncomfortably tight but doable budget for buying essentials. For instance, blogger Rachel Meeks of Small Notebook recently set a screamin’ $400 monthly budget for her family of four to cover food, gas, household items, and entertainment.
A tight budget like this means you’ll need to plan on using up all the food you have on hand. Those forgotten cans of beans or tuna languishing in your pantry? You’ll soon be happy to have them. The mystery meat in your freezer? Time to defrost it. Buy only the food items you really need to get by, and get creative about planning your meals around less expensive ingredients for four weeks.
Since you won’t be going out to dinner or movies this month, look for new ways to spend your time. Could you work on some neglected home repair projects? Great—but only if you already have the necessary supplies on hand. Or maybe you’ll find that this is the month to finally finish some half-done craft projects, organize your basement, or check out some extra DVDs and books from the library. If friends want to get together, invite them over for tea or coffee instead of meeting at a restaurant or coffee shop.
The hardest part for some folks is missing out on all the January post-holiday sales—so don’t tempt yourself. Don’t even set foot in a mall or look at the sales flyers. Visualize all the holiday-related items piled up messily on sale. You’re not missing much.
Other budget tips for a buy-nothing challenge
Blogger Leo Babauta over at ZenHabits created a similar stop spending project in December—his “Buy nothing until 2013” challenge. He suggests simply putting off your “wanna-have” purchases until your no-spend period is over. Jot them down in a wish list and look at it in a month. If you still really want or need a particular item at the beginning of February, buy it. However, pushing that pause button on your purchase might help you rethink it. Do you really need it? Could you find a cheaper solution for it? If it’s something you need only occasionally, could you rent it or borrow it? Get creative.
A few words about temptation: If you cave in and buy something during your no-spend month, don’t beat yourself up. Chances are, you’re still spending much less than you normally would. Small slips are really OK. Move on.
The fun part comes at the end of your month, when you tally up what’s actually left in your bank account. According to some financial experts, you may wind up with at least $500 extra at the end. Now you get to decide how to use that stash—to fund an upcoming family vacation, pay down some debt, or bolster your rainy-day fund. The choice is yours. And it will feel very freeing to know that you earned it by simply stepping off the consumer-spending treadmill for one month!
Teri Cettina is a mom of two daughters and freelance writer who specializes in personal finance and parenting topics. She blogs at Your Family Money. Follow her on Twitter: @TeriCettina.
6 comments
Leave a Comment
We welcome your interest and participation on this forum, but be aware that comments will be published at Equifax's sole discretion. Please don't use this blog to submit questions or concerns about your Equifax credit report or raise customer service issues. Instead, you should contact Equifax directly for all such matters and any attempts to do so in this forum will be promptly re-directed.
Some other factors to consider when commenting:
- Registration and privacy. While no registration is required to visit our forum, participants wishing to post a message must register by creating an account. All personal information provided by forum members incident to registration is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
- All comments are anonymous. We'll delete your name, e-mail address, and any other identifying information, including details about your investments.
- We can't post or respond to every comment - As much as we'd like to, we can't post every comment, nor can we guarantee that we will respond to each individual message. All questions or comments about your Equifax credit report or similar customer service issues should be handled by contacting Equifax directly.
- Don't offer specific legal, tax or financial advice. All of the materials on this Site are for information, education, and noncommercial purposes only and this forum is not intended as a means of expressing views or ideas regarding any specific legal, tax, or investment advice. While offering general rules of thumb is both permitted and encouraged, recommending specific ideas or strategies regarding investments, taxes, and related matters is prohibited.
- Credit Repair. This blog is not intended as a venue for the discussion or exchange of ideas regarding credit repair or other strategies intended to assist visitors and community members improve or otherwise modify their credit histories, ratings or scores.
- Stay on topic. Your comment should be concise and pertain to the specific post in question.
- Be respectful of the community. The use of profanity, offensive language, spam, and personal attacks will not be tolerated and egregious or repeat offenders will be banned from future participation. We encourage disagreement and healthy debate, but please refrain from personal attacks on our WordPresss and contributors.
- Finally: Participation in this forum may be terminated by Equifax immediately and without notice for failure to comply with any guidelines or Terms of Use. As such, you should familiarize yourself with all pertinent requirements prior to submitting any response through the blog or otherwise. All opinions expressed in this forum are solely those of the individual submitting the comment, and don't necessarily represent the views of Equifax or its management.
Equifax maintains this interactive forum for education and information purposes in order to allow individuals to share their relevant knowledge and opinions with other members and visitors. We encourage you to participate in discussions about personal finance issues and other topics of interest to this community, but please read our commenting guidelines first. Equifax reserves the right to monitor postings to the forum and comments will be published at our discretion. Do you have questions or comments about your Equifax credit report or customer-service issues regarding an Equifax product? If so, please contact Equifax directly. All opinions and information expressed or shared in blog comments are solely those of the person submitting the comments, and don't necessarily represent the views of Equifax or its management.
RSS Feeds
$400 a month for 4 people is not a no spend month it’s slurging. I read that artical/blog before finding this one. Her family’s spending must have been way our of control. She doesn’t count rent/hydro/ect in the budget for no spend. so thats $400 for Food and entertainment. Which is just insane. We don’t even live all that frugally and spend openly. still topping out under $200 and food is included. Our no spend budget. ( not including rent, because everyone seems to be leaving that out) Is $100. For the month. ( oh i should mention, that will include books my husband buys for his studies. he wouldn’t agree to lay off for a month.)
*splurging ( i see other spelling errors too, eek)
Aly, good points. Since bills like rent, utility bills and car payments still need to be paid on-time to stay on good terms with your lenders, they weren’t considered part of the No-Spend month. This is to cut out all of the “extras” in your budget, like eating out or shopping for extra clothes. These impulse purchases can really add up. Try going a month only spending money on the necessities and you could see a difference in your monthly budget. Thanks for posting.
She also does not include
Rent, insurance, and bills,*Health expenses, *Work expenses, Savings and investments, Tithes and gifts
Which are all things We include in our no spend month.(except savings.. obviously all the money you are not spending goes to savings) for 2 people $500
if you don’t include them our No spend month is $25
* i don’t know what she means by this… We don’t have monthly health expenses we also don’t have work expenses.
She includes
Groceries & eating out,Gas, Clothing, Household items, Entertainment in the no spend.
And why doesn’t she include the phone bill. We pay just $30 a month for our phone (its a cellphone) but I know people (i.e. my sister) who pay more then $150 a month for one line.
I guess its a do what you will. But we plan to spend the bare minimum. We tend to do that anyway, but we’ve been a bit loose recently and a challenge like this could help us get back to where we where. ( i bought oreos yesterday… like a crazy person haha)
Karin, A no-spend month is a great challenge, but shouldn’t keep you from paying your essential bills like rent and insurance. It’s fantastic that you can cut down your extra expenses to only $25/month. It’s a great opportunity to build up your savings and shift your budget to the essentials. Let us know how it goes and how your savings improves. Thanks for posting.
Other ways that help ease the transition are what we have called “No money Mondays”, where we do not spend anything AT all on Mondays. There are 52 of those crazy days in a year, so nearly two months of no spending. Once you get used to Mondays or Thrifty Thursdays where you make yourself dig out and defrost, you can go to one week a month of no spending. If you do that once a month, you will have actually not spent during three months of the year. Of course, you can’t not spend on Monday only to splurge on Tuesday or save for a week and binge the following week for this plan to work. The idea is to put a pause on the purchase. Frequently, if we forgo the impulse we will realize we can do without.