Live Simple

Simple living is having less without being deprived. Why would you want to keep up with the Joneses? They are carrying tons of debt and fight about money all the time. Better to have less and actually own it.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

End of Week One


After a week of living on the jars we are completely hooked.  It does take some thinking before you leave the house in the morning.  “Am I going to be spending money today?  On what?  How much?”  You really become responsible for where your money goes, and there is less chance of frittering away all your hard earned cash on senseless things.  Living on a cash budget doesn’t completely kill impulse buying but it does put it into a pretty deep coma. 

After a week of spending cash only this is what our jars look like:

Transportation: $19.50
Food: $16.45
Entertainment: $0.00
Clothes/Gifts: $10.00
Everything else: $23.00

You may notice the only empty jar is the one for Entertainment (there may have been some change left that we misplaced), this includes eating out.  This is one area of budgeting we have always had trouble with, usually we overspend.  But running out of money this time means we had to stop spending.  Hello victory!  Since the majority of it goes to fast food we don’t feel all that great about it, bad for the budget and the belly.  The expression “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” pretty much sums up why we end up spending so much money eating on the go.  Packing a lunch and snacks means you get to eat healthier and cheaper too.  I have been trying to build a repertoire of homemade “fast food” lunches to make this simpler.  In a future post I’ll list a few of the ideas I’ve come up with.

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