It has now been 33 days of logging the extra things that I spend money on and looking back I am actually surprised. I honestly thought I never spent money on anything extra but after tallying it all up, my total for food,gas and my daughter’s birthday (which fell within the 30 days) came to a total of $607.65. I anticipated maybe a couple hundred because when I imagine my expenses in my mind, that’s honestly what they total.
The most unnecessary expenses usually occurred on the weekends when I was hanging out with my daughter. I need to research cheap and free things to do with her. I also noticed that we still spend money on food PLUS the groceries which can rack up quite an amount also.
Granted, my daughter’s birthday was a large added expense, but in any given month there’s a good chance that there will be an extra expense of $100-200. One month it’s the car. Another month it’ll be an emergency medical bill. There is always something. To me, this means that I not only need an emergency fund but a birthday/holiday gift fund as well. Someone’s birthday is always right around the corner.
The one expense that I can’t do anything about is the gas. I could be more diligent about finding cheaper gas and using the coupons for pennies off and that would save me some money. Otherwise I basically drive to work and home–no excessive spending there.
The purpose of Operation WITHIMMG was to find out how much money I actually spend in order to figure out if it would be worth trying the no spending at all for a month experiment. $600 would definitely be worth trying it, there are a lot of bills and things I could’ve used that for. The only thing is, there’s no way I could try the experiment around the holidays. I would definitely have to spend money in the next couple months on holiday stuff.
I’m considering maybe the beginning of the year since around February I can have my dish canceled also. I’m foreseeing 2010 as a very frugal year for me with spending being very minimal.
All in all, it was a great experiment to try out. You’d be surprised how much extra you spend, even for someone that is very conscious of saving and budgeting.