No Spending Challenge

MomAdvice has a great playdough recipe with several links at the bottom for other flavored recipes. I'd love to try this with the kids, as soon as I get their table cleared off.

She also just completed 28 days of a No Spend Challenge. And this gave me thought. I wondered how she could still make things with buying milk or eggs in the middle of that. I found her blog on the tail end of her journey, actually just yesterday. I saw that she did in fact give them a $250 budget for food/essentials (like diapers) and did shop. While I'm up for the challenge, I'm not quite up for doing without milk or eggs. So I decided that what John and I could take away from this is that we would need to set our own rules, but still working to be true to this challenge.

In the past I've seen families do pantry challenges, usually for a week at a time. A Pantry Challenge is just that, challenge yourself to feed your family out of pantry...no quick trips to the store for something forgotten, just relying on what you have in the pantry, fridge, or freezer.

We've not ever done this before, but given that we just got our first reduced paycheck, the rumor mill still buzzing about something happening April 1 at John's job, what better time than now, right? So here we go. I've decided that like Amy, I'm going to give us a budget of things we need, not want, for the month. The main things I'll be buying though are milk (because we drink it raw), eggs (because you need those for baking), and fruit (because it keeps the family fortified with vitamins and healthy.

We blew it for today, because while I thought about this yesterday and figured John would agree to it, we scored some kolaches from The Donut Shop and a tiny trip to Walgreens for more supplies for the boys recovery. We could have continued making due with our current "supplies" but I realized something yesterday that would work much better for Jace.

So that said, March 1 (11am) - March 31 will be "spend as little as we possibly can month". My goal is to post daily, though honestly, we all know I'll probably fall short, about what we ate, and what if any money we spend. I will not be counting monthly bills, gasoline (since we're careful with that anyway).

where's your $$?

Interesting article that my brother sent me, right on the heels of us discussing this today. We made the move yesterday to stop some of the "bleeding" as John and the 401K guy said. But our Edward Jones guy thinks differently. He thinks we should leave all of our money where it is because the market will come back up. I don't agree with that so we're having my IRA shifted to safe funds/investments, basically something like a savings account. We've lost $40,000 since March. That's a lot of money to the average Joe and Jane. We're average. I don't want to see our money dwindle to $2000 and then have nothing to rebuild from. I don't care if that $2000 gets us 6,000,000 shares in company X, if X goes bankrupt then we're toast. So I'm curious...what are your gurus telling you? Cause I think one of ours is nuts. I'd love to see what his portfolio looks like!