Week 3 was a bit slow! There were both set backs and small wins… here goes:
Goal #1: Declutter. I didn’t do much in the ways of decluttering/cleaning this week. I made one trip to Savers but it was a light load (just a bag.) I sold two items through my Mercari account. I’m feeling like I’ve hit a peak of now just needing an actual dumpster to make any more progress. We have some big furniture that needs to go and it’s all blocking the bins I want to go through. It’s making it impossible to get around down there! We did end up going through our basement pantry and updated our home inventory… so that felt successful!
The one area we improved this week was Sean’s music station. It looks pretty good!
Goal #2: No new stuff/No spend challenge. Another week down! It’s been three weeks without any non-essential purchases. No online orders. No ridiculous must-haves. No impulse buys. Sean commented that our recycling bins were empty as he wheeled them to the curb!
We did have two scheduled orders that arrived: one was cat food and one was a book subscription kit the kids got as a Christmas gift. And then, in order to sell my stuff online and ship the items I need a working printer… so I had to buy printer ink. But I’m not counting these things! If I’m being totally honest, I found a $20 bill last Saturday (benefit of cleaning out old purses!) and we went to Taco Bell. Our order came to $19.85 and we rounded up to donate the difference to whatever charity they were collecting for. Other than that transaction… we were able to stay the course!
I do feel the urge to buy though. I’m not sure how much longer I can go without a trip through the Valentine’s Day aisles at Target! (Full disclosure: I did go INSIDE Target this week and I immediately walked out because I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist!)
Goal #3: Save $20K. This week, we didn’t do so great in the SAVE $20K department since we didn’t have any money coming in. It’s hard to save money you don’t make 🙂 but I tried to save what I could.
I’ve also been trying to make sure I’m not wasting our money. Like when the grocery store gave us expired meat in our pick-up order this week… rather than just toss it and ignore, Sean called them and they refunded us the $11.
Or when our printer annoyed me for the millionth time by not working, I ripped it out of the wall (literally) threw it into a box and submitted a return on Amazon! They said I had until January 31st to return the thing, so I took them up on it! I was refunded $80 as soon as UPS picked it up from the house the next morning! Then Sean found our older printer in the basement and got that working for me!
Or when the ramp broke from Eva’s birthday gift, I snapped a picture and submitted it to the Etsy seller and they got back to me within minutes saying they’d ship an entire new ramp!
These are all things I would have otherwise just accepted as losses but now that I’m trying to watch where our money goes… I’m being more intentional. Tomorrow, I’m going to return tortilla chips that Walmart just delivered that were totally open! $2.24 back to us. 🙂
Week 3 savings: $160
Total saved: $1000 (5% at goal)
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