We have been playing with our budget since the end of summer and November was finally the month I felt comfortable enough that I could consciously set some debt pay down goals. This month I threw out the idea of putting an extra $1000 down on our debt snowball and trying to make four days a week “no spend” days. Now that November is over I ran our final numbers through my spreadsheets and I’m pretty excited about how things went!
We definitely made that extra debt payment, and then some! We stuck to our grocery budget like whoa, and threw every extra penny from side work into that debt payment and ended the month with an extra $1,300 going towards credit cards. Personally, I think that feels amazing, but Nic is still mourning that tropical vacation it COULD have been instead. He’ll thank me later, I promise haha!
That “no spend” day goal is a little harder to nail down if it was a success or not. See, we definitely hit up some Black Friday sales, but we didn’t put any of that on credit it was all money we saved in our Christmas fund. On the flip side, we definitely overspent on our Christmas budget and we still aren’t done shopping, soooo the overspending shall continue (don’t judge me!!!). I think for a future no spend day goal I would come up with some parameters around what actually makes a true no spend day successful. Is it not spending money at all besides bills, is it staying within budgets, or is it maybe even staying away from a certain group of spending categories?
Overall it was a good month, but it was really, really hard to make it a good month. We overspent in some areas that I kind of knew we would, we like to go out with friends and we REALLY like eating out. We’ve toned it down but we aren’t going to completely eliminate all the fun! We are also working to build some sinking funds for things like kid’s clothing, shoes, home repairs, car repairs. Those take time to build up and when a kid needs shoes or a coat right now you can’t really say, hey, wait three months until the fund is fully funded. Instead, we dig it out of some other budget and make it work.
The process is slow, but we are building momentum and balance. Also, I love to spontaneously overshare on everything we have going on with finances right now and possibly that makes people feel a little uncomfortable. I say possibly because I really don’t notice and I have been so stoked on budgets for the last few months it is without hesitation my favorite topic of conversation. Nic politely listens to my never-ending love speeches about excel and snowballing debt payments and my spreadsheets and money goals. If spreadsheets were a man they would look like Jamie from Outlander and that husband of mine would need to be worried, very worried.
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