Shop Out of the Freezer and Pantry-No Spending Challenge

Shop Out of the Freezer and Pantry-No Spending Challenge

Thrifty Thinking

Last August we embarked on a little money adventure (or should I say no-money adventure), the No-Spending Challenge. You can go here to read more about it. The following month I followed up with the no-spending results. You can read about the results in more detail here. In those results I talked about how I thought we should have a no-spending challenge twice a year, maybe around January.

At the beginning of this year I gave myself a few weeks to get settled into the new year with our schedule (we have two birthdays in January during the first two weeks of the year, and schools starting up again, blah, blah, blah, etc…). I had been thinking that another no spending challenge was in order.

Currently I am in the middle of the no-spending challenge. Here are my stipulations.

What We Will Do:

• We can buy perishable food. We need milk, eggs, fruits, and veggies, and I won’t compromise those because we don’t have to at this point. I guess I could go really crazy and freeze a whole bunch of those before a challenge to see if we can make it through, but it’s not worth it to me at this point. Using up the goods in the pantry and freezer is a good enough challenge to us.
• We’ll have one 4 days/3 nights trip where we will bring a crock-pot to cook some food, but we will still eat out a couple of those meals. Road trippin’ with the crock-pot is awesome! It’s a money-saver. We can eat healthier and less processed, etc….
• We will eat out of the freezer and pantry as much as possible. We’ve gotta make a little room in the kitchen freezer (see first pic~yikes!).
• We will keep an ongoing list of non-perishables to purchase once the challenge is over.
• We’ll put the money we don’t spend in an envelop for the expected annual grocery-money drought this coming August.
• This will last 4 weeks.
• We’ll pay bills as normal.
• We will record what we spend in a google doc.

What We Won’t Do:

• Stock up on non-perishables when they are gone.
• Spend the money we don’t spend on groceries, elsewhere.

So that first picture is a picture of our refrigerator freezer. I took this photo right before we started the challenge. It needs some serious organization to occur, so this challenge will seriously jumpstart our cleaning expedition.

Anyone else ready for a Shop Out of the Freezer and Pantry-No Spending Challenge? If you want to boost your savings or pay off debt in other areas, this is a great way to ignite your way. Wanna join me? It doesn’t have to be the start of a month. Just do it!

Have you read…

• Getting a Refund for Services Not Rendered
• Our First No-Spending Challenge
• Our First No-Spending Challenge Results
• Know Your Target Grocery Prices: Grocery Prices to Meet or Beat
• When You and Your Spouse Don’t Agree About Money

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