You know those little things that you might spend money on through a week. An amazon purchase here, a coffee there, eating out because you just don’t feel like cooking. Put it all together and at the end of the month you’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on top of you necessary expenses.
That is NOT a good game plan when you’re living on one income or if you’re just trying to live frugally in general!
Despite all of my meal planning and budgeting, our family is definitely not immune to getting an uptick in unnecessary spending every now and then. The good news is, when it happens, we recognize it. Then we reset out spending habits so that it doesn’t happen again the next month.
How do we do this?
A spending freeze.
What is a family spending freeze?
Every few months, we will stop all extra spending for a month. If it is not a grocery or household necessity we do not buy it. End of story.
There is no reasoning through the reasons we “need” to have a clothing item or random product on Amazon. We don’t get it. If it’s still something that we feel we should buy in the next month we think about it then.
Guess what usually happens. If we have a spending freeze in September and we feel like we “need” an item on September 10. By the time October 1 rolls around we’ve either improvised or completely forgotten about the item. That $50 purchase never happens, which saves us money in the long-term.
What can you buy during a spending freeze?
You can set your own rules about what you buy during your family spending freeze, but here are our limits.
- 3 grocery hauls that match our meal plans (check those out here!)
- 3 eat outs (we have to do this as a family)
- 2 household goods hauls
That’s it!
How much money do you save doing a spending freeze?
This would totally depend on how much you spend on “extras” in a normal month. If you frequent Starbucks and make a purchase at Amazon and Target everyday, you’ll be saving a lot more than someone who just spends extras about once a week.
Either way, you WILL save money.
We usually save several hundred dollars every time we do a freeze.
Do you ever get to “break” a spending freeze?
Nope. If you break it then it’s not a spending freeze.
What if there is a deal too good to pass up?
For me, it’s not worth breaking the principle. For example, we found an armoire just like what I’ve been looking for during our month. It was $100. Crazy good deal! However, we decided it was not worth breaking our freeze to buy it.
It’s kind of like once you break it once, then you’re going to “cheat” a little bit again. There aren’t any deals so good that I have to buy it whenever we’re on a spending freeze.
How often can you do a spending freeze?
You could do a spending freeze as often as you want! We usually end up doing a freeze about twice a year. That’s what works for us.
Why would you do a spending freeze?
You can do a spending freeze just to save money or to break bad habits! We usually lean more towards the freeze when we have some bad spending habits that we want to stop.
If we’ve gotten in the habit of getting coffee or going out for ice cream (those little spending items that add up FAST!) then we’ll do a spending freeze and by the end of the month we don’t even have the habit anymore!
How do you limit your grocery visits during a spending freeze?
This one is so simple. By MEAL PLANNING! I’m a huge believer in meal planning and I share all of my meal plans and grocery hauls for my family of 4 with you all every 10 days! Check those out here!
[…] This month we have been on a spending freeze. No extra eating out, no quick snacks while we’re out an about and no grabbing little “extras”. We save a TON of money by doing this. Read all about it here! […]