Life is hard, take it easy

I know we haven’t been so good reporting about our No-Spend End of the Year, but we have been very good practising it! It’s been over a month now, and we’re 100% on track. I won’t lie, it hasn’t been an easy month. Not at all. But in some aspects, it has been easier than we thought it would be. But the most important thing is that we’re learning A LOT, which, after all, was our ultimate goal. 

We want to share a few things we’ve learnt this first month and hope they’ll help you if you decide to give this a try:

DO:

- Plan your meals. No more buying everything you normally eat. Just buy what you’re going to need to cook the recipes you’ve decided to cook this week.

- Check the unit price. So often we’ve found out that a certain product wasn’t as cheap as we thought. Check the price per item, per weight, or however you divide the item you’re purchasing and see what’s cheaper.

- Cut in half the detergent and softener you use. We haven’t taken the plunge -yet- to make our own detergent or to skip softener altogether. But during this month we’ve discovered that using half the recommended amount in each load was giving us the exact same results for half the price! Some more tips about greening your laundry, here.

- Cook in batches. Right now there’s a huge pot of broth on the stove. A couple potatoes, some celery, two tomatoes, two carrots, a handful of chickpeas, some chicken bones we saved ages ago and half a pork rib. It’ll give us at least 10 servings of soup with noodles and all the veggies will be blended into a nice vegetable soup, all for less than 5€. Yesterday we froze 10 servings of pasta sauce (with meat and everything) that costed us 4€ total.

- Make the most of your resources. A distant relative of mine has hundreds of navel orange trees. Yesterday we offered to pick some of them in exchange for some oranges. We gave an hour of work and got the equivalent of 15€ in oranges. 

- Stop using paper towels. There’s something decadently nice about fabric napkins, and cloth rags clean just as well as disposable. AND since you just toss them in the washing machine, they are replaced for free. Oh, and don’t tell me you’re losing money because you’ll have to run more washing loads. A napkin or a rag fits in with any load, no matter how full the machine is (and since this is about frugality, I hope it is full before you run it!). Some more tips about greening your laundry, here.

DON’T:

- Buy the cheapest option no matter what. I know that a certain brand of spaghetti sauce may look cheaper, and maybe it’s still cheaper than another one even after you compare weights, but if you need to use twice as much in order to taste it, it’s not worth it. And, of course, always check nutritional values. The point of this experiment is to cut back as much as you can regarding money, not health.

- Go more than once a week to the supermarket. Make it a rule and live by it. This will force you to plan your meals AND you’ll only have one chance a week of buying useless things. It has made a dramatic difference for us. Also, trust me, you spend the exact amount of time in there if you’re buying for a week than if you’re buying for a day, so this way you’re also saving lots of time!

- Think it’s all over when you go over your plans. Always remember the difference between a budget and a No-Spend experiment. Life happens. In a budget, you can’t go over because you don’t have more money than this. Here, the point is to stay withing the limits you’ve stablished, but the point here is to see how low can you go, and maybe your limits were too ambitious. While I was sick and Eric working extra hours I bought some “comfort food” (fancy soup, cookies). This put us in a difficult situation regarding our goals, but with all we had learnt up until then, we were back on track the next week, and when I bought that I saw it as a luxury and was very careful as what to choose. Before, I would have tossed anything that looked good in the cart and go out without thinking it twice.

- Go crazy once your stablished timeframe is over. The point of doing this is to learn. To learn to see what’s necessary and what isn’t. To learn about ourselves and our limits, what we’re ready to give up and what we aren’t. If the day after your month/year/week is over you go shopping, order food and whatever, you’ll just have spend some very hard time, and that’s all. If you think about the experience, what you’ve learnt and what you’re ready to keep up with, you’ll end up saving lots of money, enjoying other aspects of your life other than material purchases and loving, savouring and enjoying much more than before any treat you give to yourself.