No Spending-Day 1

Yesterday was day one of no spending and I spent....ZERO!  Pretty easy since it was a holiday and snowing so neither of us left the house.  (Although there was still internet where we can spend a pretty penny if we want to).  I was so excited to do this challenge that I started on the first goal/step early.  It was to inventory all the food in your house.  No admittedly we do not have a huge stockpile of food b/c that just isn't my nature.  I get anxious and antsy when I see piles of stuff and I have to use it up.  So I'm already in the habit of using up what we have.  Plus the past 6 months or so I have been on an even bigger kick so I was making an effort already to use up stuff that had been sitting there for a while.

Still, even with all that it took me probably 2 hours to inventory everything.  Then another hour to organize it into what as usuable for dinners and meals for the month.  I have our entire month of meals planned out.  About half of them are straight from the house with no extra ingredients needed.  The other half have minimal ingredients to buy.  I am allowing myself $50 cash each week to spend on groceries so I can and will buy ingredients I need.  But I am going to make the effort to only use cash-maybe even leaving the credit cards in the car so I can't fall back on them.

Here's what part of our pantry looked like:

This was just the baking section of the pantry.  I had 6 FULL bags of chocolate chips!!  What the heck??

This was our biggest indoor storage space.  All those squeezies equal one a day per kid all month long.  At least part of our fruit intake is accounted for!  In this pile were several things that I could just add meat to and have a complete meal.  That's nice to know I have that to fall back on.

There's also the freezer which I didn't photograph.  That had the bulk of our food.  10 (or so) complete meals already made and frozen.  Plus 9 packages of meat which-adding ingredients to that is a complete meal.  And 12 frozen spaghetti sauces from the summer. So lots of food!

Today we head out to Jamie's gymnastics class and to the library. Hoping we can continue to spend zero!