Final Tally

We were on vacation this week so I wasn't able to post the final tally.  But here it is!!

Made: $560 selling things on a combination of craigslist, neighborhood online garage sale and ebay
Saved:  $2040 (Nope, not a typo-two thousand forty dollars!)

The savings comes from our average Discover bill the past 2 years.  That average is pretty typical and accurate (I calculated it a bunch of different ways-median, average, throwing out the highs and lows, etc-and it was always the same).  We put about 90% of our spending on the Discover.  About the only thing that never goes on there is mortgage and shopping at Aldis (because they don't take credit cards).  So that savings is based on what I typically spend versus what we did spend.

So that grand total is $2600!  Wow!  That is incredible!  Who knew we spent so much cash we didn't need to!  That's over $30,000 a year!  Granted we could never keep this pace up because I simply could not not spend on food, but we certainly could cut down significantly.

The plan from here on out is to spend the next week or two stocking up (we almost literally have NO food in the house-I am serious man-zero!) and "treating" ourselves to things we didn't have this past month (like pizza tonight after traveling 8 hrs to get home and zero food.....we hope to spend the last two weeks of the month in another no spending pattern and perhaps get a second significantly low Discover bill.  It'd be nice to get our savings back up (from zero), get ahead on some bills (like student and car loans), and put some into getting a few necessities worked on in the house (mainly having Libby's floor checked for stability before we switch up rooms and paint walls, etc.)

It feels VERY good to have completed this goal and to have done so well on it.