no spend january

have you heard of "no spend january"? this is a trend on some blogs i have read in the past years, watched on youtube, and i've even seen it on facebook and pinterest.

the ideas are mixed as to what defines "no spend", but the gist of it is to spend as little as possible and use what you have.

for some it may mean don't eat out, buy new clothes or gadgets, travel less, etc. but i plan to take it a little more "extreme" than most i have read or watched. i rarely eat out, buy new clothes or gadgets, so those aren't challenge for me.

my goal is to only spend money by paying the monthly bills and prescriptions.

we live on the "envelope system" and have since we first heard of it as a newly married couple. the idea is that you budget for misc, food, fuel, etc. and put that amount of cash in an envelope and only spend what you have budgeted for that month. when the envelope is empty, you can't spend anything more or add money to it.

as we are now empty-nested, some of the categories have changed, but we still have a misc, food, and fuel envelope. plus we each get a small personal amount every month (and i do mean "small"!). we use this for clothes, snacks, personal interests. christmas and birthday monies are added to this, so we've never been lacking in that area.

we do our own butchering and have some beef (though we are very low at the moment) in the freezer as well as some chicken i had purchased a few weeks ago when it was 1.88/lb on sale.

we have canned goods and frozen fruit from our gardens as well as lots of dried fruit and full cupboards and pantry.

i will be making meals from what we have and not spending any money on groceries (i hope) or misc items as we are stocked for a month or more on those items...toilet paper, toiletries, laundry detergent, etc.

so i thought i would take you along with me and post what we are eating from the pantry/cupboard/fridge/freezer and let you know how it goes.

i am hoping to take the money that we would have normally spent for these two categories (food and misc) and use that for things we need to get done around the house (repairs, replacements, etc). our budget is very low, but i'm hoping that maybe i can do this challenge for more than just one month this year.

one allowance i will let myself have and that is if there is a super "cheap" (i use that term loosely as nothing is cheap anymore) deal on food that hasn't been for a long time. this would be less than a dollar a lb on pork and/or less than .69/lb on chicken hindquarters, less than $3 for butter, and if i can find whipping cream at walmart when i go out of town on the 25th of this month (i use a lot of cream and butter for my baking business and haven't been able to get any and it's too expensive locally).

in the case above, i would stock up for future months. not use in january, but it wouldn't be frugal of me to let those kinds of deals (should they exist) pass.

i think i will post each sunday how the week went and what my menu looked like. i will tell you we don't eat breakfast. i have tea and bruce drinks coffee or chicory (that he roasted using what grows wild on our place) and has toast and/or dried apples. the bread i made and the apples are from our trees and we have LOTS of.