We’ve officially been dong the More Money Challenge for two weeks.
Based on our calculations, we’ve saved $303. That’s mostly thanks to skipping a coffee out, cooking a few times when we normally would have caved for takeout, skipping on after-work beers, and putting the brakes on a few random purchases we probably didn’t need in the first place.
The full breakdown is below, but you can scroll past that if you don’t care about the line-item view.
| Day # | Money Saved | What We Didn’t Buy |
| 1 | $5 | Coffee at Starbucks |
| 2 | $101 | Souper Cubes, beer, dinner out |
| 3 | $82 | Returned candles, Didn’t go to the brewery, didn’t buy an airfryer |
| 4 | $20 | Dinner out |
| 5 | $0 | |
| 6 | $10 | Brewery (again…) |
| 7 | $50 | Thai food |
| 8 | $0 | |
| 9 | $20 | Didn’t drive to Tampa |
| 10 | $0 | |
| 11 | $0 | |
| 12 | $15 | Cassie didn’t buy something, but she literally can’t remember what it was. |
| 13 | $0 | |
| 14 | $0 |
I also returned an item that didn’t work, but was only a few bucks — I probably wouldn’t have bothered with returning it if we hadn’t been doing this. But hey, now I have that $6 back!
While $303 is what we’ve tracked based on things we almost bought, I also know we’ve saved more than that if we compare our usual grocery and dining out bills at this point in the month. We’ll see how that all shakes out at the end.
The good thing is I haven’t felt restricted or bummed out about not buying the things. Though, I’ll be honest — following the “no dining out” rule has been made much easier, because we had two celebratory family meals out that my parents paid for.
One thing that’s been a bit surprising for me is that in the first week, I was having to stop myself from buying things more than Cassie. As the days have gone on, I’ve found that we’re both less likely to want to buy something in the first place. In the second week we had a number of days where our “money saved” was $0 — not because we spent money on things, but because we didn’t have the urge to in the first place.
I’m excited to see how how numbers roll out at the end of the month, and I’ll keep posting updates as we move on through!
Butch On a Budget 