No Spend Month Take Two

Some of you may remember two years ago when Louis and I did a no spend month.  Here's that post if you want to go read it.  Louis and I had been talking a few weeks ago and decided to do another no spend month in August!  With my family being in town and going out to eat more often and spending a lot of money on gas, it was a perfect time!  As a reminder, no spend month means we spend no money!  Except for bills, we will hopefully spend no money.  We had three pay checks in July so that was nice to be able to use some of that third pay check to stock up on diapers, formula, paper towels, etc.  We also did our grocery shopping for August with that third pay check.  We were able to only spend just over $100 as well on those groceries!  This time around we have decided to give ourselves $50 of "just in case" cash.  So here we are day 1!  We shall see how we do!  In 2013 we resorted to making our own bread, which included grinding our own wheat, making our own tortillas, going without q-tips, Ziploc bags, and more.

I thought I would share our menu for the month.  It is filled with super simple and cheap meals which are always nice to have every now and then to save on grocery bills!  I will post some of the recipes through out the month.

No-Spend Month

A few months ago Louis saw this post on someone's blog about a family doing a no-spend month.  Louis thought, "we should do that"    So last month, we did!  It was an adventure!
What is a no-spend month?  It is a month where you don't spend.  You pay your bills and that's it!
I didn't know we were for sure doing it until the day we started!  We had talked about doing it, but hadn't decided for sure.  On the first Monday of June Louis said, "Are you ready for our no-spend month."  Um, I guess.  So we didn't really adequately prepare, but I figured we had a pretty good food storage so we'd be okay.  We ran out of quite a bit of stuff!  Q-tips, trash bags, cotton balls, bread, paper towels, yeast, dishwasher detergent, whole wheat flour, butter, gallon-size ziplock bags, chicken, sunscreen and more!  We did without most of them for the month.  My brother Ben gave us some dishwasher tablet things which we were very grateful for!  My mom gave me a picture from her house and packaged it in a large trash bag so that saved us!  Josh also bought us a few groceries when he was in town  We did end up buying a few things.  #1-birthday presents for Joel and Sterling.  #2-Chicken, butter, paper towels, and bread.  #3-baby food for Mary!  Can't go without that!
Before I broke down and bought bread we had made our own.  We even ground our own wheat for flour!  That is quite the arm workout by the way.  Then we ran out of yeast so couldn't make anymore bread!  The homemade bread was tasty though and I've made more of it since then.

Isn't the flour beautiful!  You better all say yes, because this took about an hour to make!

I also resorted to making my own whole wheat tortillas, also with my homemade wheat.  They turned out very tasty, but not so soft and foldable for burritos.  I'll have to try a different recipe next time.

I think this last month was very good for me.  It gave me the discipline that I have not had lately when it comes to spending.  We were able to save almost $600 which was really nice to see go into our savings.  Even though it's going to go straight to school in August!  I think if we do it again, which we probably will, I would give us a $50 allowance for "just in case" purchases.  Other than that I wouldn't change anything.  It gave me a chance to try new things which was really fun!