My partner and I have taken to doing periodic no-spend months.
The idea here is to commit to not making any purchases outside of necessities for a full month to increase your savings rate.
If you haven’t read my post about no-spend challenges, go read that first then come on back.
When we do a no-spend month at our house, we allow ourselves to purchase food from the grocery store and necessary household goods like cleaning supplies and toilet paper. We can buy refills of our toiletries and we pay our bills.
And that’s it.
We cut out all other spending – no take out lunches, no afternoon cafe purchases, no clothing purchases, no late-night Amazon buys, and no dinner and drinks at restaurants.
This is our 3rd time doing the no-spend month challenge. We love them for the one-time boost to our savings, but we also love how much they put things into perspective. Once you realize you’re still very happy not spending money, you become more thoughtful about purchases in general.
So they’ve been very successful in the past but whenever I tell someone about them, they ask, “So?! How much more were you able to save?!”
Until today, I haven’t been able to give them an answer.
This is the first time we actually measured how much more we were able to save with a no-spend month, and I’m sharing the results here.
Surprise Expenses
This no-spend month might have been our easiest yet.
We’ve had a little practice at this now, which helps us be more prepared to tackle what comes at us.
The most frequent surprise expense that pop up for us, generally, are food related. Because of that, we knew in the month of January we had to be even better about keeping the fridge stocked with food.
We were very disciplined each night at making our next day’s lunches while we made our dinners. For the nights we were on the go and ate eggs for dinner (a staple in our household), we made sure to have those convenient bagged salads in the fridge that we could easily throw together in the morning before running off to work.
For the first time since elementary school, I also started carrying snacks around with me wherever I went. I used to stop in at a cafe or convenience store to grab a pastry or bar when I was out and getting hangry. This month though, I bought a big box of Lara bars for much cheaper at my grocery store. I often buy them on the go anyways, so instead I carried one on me at all times that cost me half the price I’d pay at a convenience store.
Through the month, I was sure to carry a water bottle with me at all times, which is very typical for me. But I also was better about preparing coffee and bringing it in a travel thermos rather than buying it out if I was spending the day running errands.
Shopping is another bad habit we love. We found avoiding shopping was pretty easy though as long as we avoided shopping malls.
As you do your first no-spend, make note of the areas you had a hard time. Remember that this isn’t about perfection. If you mess up and buy something you weren’t supposed to, just move on. Make note of where this happened though so that in your second and third no-spend months in the future, you can find a way to prevent it from happening again.
The Social Aspect
Just like the recently popularizes Dry January (no alcohol for one month), a lot of people have a hard time with no-spend months because of the social aspect of it. If you’re anything like me, most of your social plans include drinking on some level which makes it tricky not to lose your social life entirely when you do these challenges.
That’s why we doubled up and did both in January though, to kill two birds with one stone. January especially we’ve found was a great time to run these challenges because most people’s wallets are hurting from the holidays, and a lot of people aren’t itching to make plans because they’re coming down from the busy holiday season.
Between that and the fact that I ended up telling a lot of people that I was doing dry January, I didn’t actually have many social invitations coming my way which made this all a lot easier. I was really only asked to do things in the latter half of the month.
For those that did ask me to grab drinks, I just blamed dry January. I told them I’d love to but that I was on dry January, so let’s wait until Feb.
If you don’t feel like sharing your challenge with others, you can also say you’d love to but that you’re busy the next couple weeks.
If you aren’t also doing a dry month at the same time and someone asks you to hang out, I see another couple options. You could say, “Sure!,” but invite them over to your place. Grab a bottle or two of wine and some snacks. Most guests I’ve found will bring a bottle of something over, but even if they don’t, you’ll generally still come out ahead of where you would have spending the evening at the bar. And your guest will likely supply the wine and snacks next time. Win win!
The other option is to tell them about your no-spend month. Over time I’ve really opened up to talking about money (as proven by this blog) and it has had a positive impact on my life and my relationships. By now I’ve probably told 10 or 12 friends about how we do no-spend months and not once have I gotten a weird look. The large majority of the time, I’ve been met with, “Oh that’s great! So impressive!” And at least 4 or 5 of our friends have come back within a couple weeks to tell me they’re also now doing a no-spend month which is awesome.
THE NUMBERS
Now the good stuff.
In a typical month, I save on average about 40% of my take home pay.
Now I’m fortunate to have a job that pays me pretty well which makes this savings rate possible, but I’m also generally already pretty good about saving money.
I crunched the numbers from our no-spend month, and found that in January, I achieved a savings rate of 64%!
That’s an extra 22% of my take home pay that I was able to put away towards my house fund. I’d already felt like I was pretty good about saving money, but reaching this savings percentage showed me just how much more I can be doing. I feel awesome about what I’ve achieved in January, but now also motivated to better month to month going forward.
My partner did this challenge alongside me. While I’m happy to share this information about my own financials, he didn’t sign up to be part of this blog so I won’t be sharing what he was able to put away this month. I will say though that we did calculate the increase in his savings rate for the month of January and he too did quite well.
No-spend has been an awesome addition to our life. As we save up to buy a house, doing a couple of these per year gives our savings account a nice little cash infusion and boosts our motivation to keep going.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes in the comments below!