This February We are Doing the Spend Zero Challenge

I can hear you now. "Spend zero? How are you going to do that?" Well, we are doing the next best thing, taking the challenge to pare down our spending for nonessential expenses. It's actually pretty cool. We make the rules ahead of time. What is allowed, what isn't, and in what cases we can break the challenge. We have done similar things before, including the cold turkey, freeze your credit cards and lock yourself in the house plan. While surfing the net, I came across www.livingwellspendingless.com and was impressed. Not only is the plan mapped out but you can print out all the resources you will need. It's a great site with coupon strategies and nifty DIY stuff too. So, Here goes... We did a meal plan ahead of time and equipped with my 6 inch thick coupon binder, I headed off to the grocery to try and stock for an entire month while still cutting costs. This is a unique challenge since we will be eating in and brown bagging almost all of our meals. At the same time, We want to rotate our stockpile and use up the odds and ends in the pantry. After an hour in the store, I emerged with two buggies of goodies and a bill of $217.00. Sure hope I estimated and planned well because feeding two people all meals and snacks for a total of $7.75 per day seems awfully low. That's $3.88 per person, per day! I'll be checking in to share how the challenge is going and any insight or pointers we come up with. We have been seriously homesteading in an urban environment for the last 10 years with fantastic results. Dealing with the damage from 3 major storms, serious illness, and career changes have given us new resolve to make even better use of our resources. Along the way, we'd love to share the hows. I'm sure you have your own whys. Tomorrow, I will share some of the rules we set down for the month and our biggest concerns. The Super Hubster will be enjoying the first free entertainment of the month--the SuperBowl--and eating a special meal to kick off (couldn't help the pun) the challenge!