February Challenge Weeks 3 & 4

Eek! Sorry I've been slacking on posting about the remainder of my February Challenge...I'm sure all 3 of my readers have been waiting anxiously for the results!

Week 3: Not so great :( We would have only spent 66% of our budget during week 3 but we found khaki's on sale and Tom desperately needs new khaki's so we bought 3 pair...making us spend exactly 100% of our budget.

Week 4: We still managed to save SOME money, but spent 56% of our budget.

Overall I think I would call our February Challenge a success! While I didn't save 2/3 of the budget like I was originally hoping to, we still saved some money every week (except for week 3). This is a huge improvement because (like I mentioned in my first post), we consistently spend 100% of our budget every single week. If we can turn this February Challenge into a monthly event, I'm hoping we can sock away more money every week and reach our goals a little faster!

February Challenge: Week 2

Well, we didn't do as well this week as the previous week, but the good news is we still had some money left over! We spent 72% of our weekly budget. I'm glad that we decided to do this Challenge this month since we spent some "unplanned" money last week at Ikea. The good news is the leftover money from this month's challenge should cover it! So we don't have to touch any money that was budgeted toward our savings!
This coming week has the potential to be right on target...we shall see!

February Challenge: Week 1

We are at the end of Week 1 in my February Savings Challenge. As a reminder, I am trying to cut our weekly spending budget (which encompasses basically anything we spend money on in a week except for bills) by 2/3.

This week we spent 38% of our weekly budget. So slightly over the 33% I was aiming for but still pretty awesome considering we usually spend 100% of it!

Short month = Extra money?

So, for years now we have had a set amount of money that we can spend every week. This money can be spent on groceries, dog food, toiletries, household items, eating out, going out, stocking up on sale items, clothes, shoes, etc, etc, etc. Basically, we only try to spend this set amount of money every week, regardless of what our needs are.

For about 6 months now I've been inconsistently trying to cut this weekly amount by 1/3. But it never happens. We always end up spending exactly what we have budgeted (or maybe a few dollars more, in which case it just comes off the next week's budgeted amount).

Every February, I find myself thinking about going on a "spending hiatus" for a month and only buying things we really, really need. And every February, I never actually do it. This year I thought about it, and thought it would be pretty hard to not stock up on sale items, etc if they are a rock bottom price. So instead, I've decided that I'm going to cut our weekly budget by 2/3 for the month of February only.

My hope is that by setting a goal to only spend 1/3 of the original amount, even if we go over we still won't be spending more than 2/3 of the budget, and either way we end up saving more money this month.

I'll let you know how it all turns out!