30 days of no spending-week 1

Week one is OVER!!! I can't tell you how happy this makes me.  I feel like when we do a "no spend" the first week is always the hardest! So, I'm sad to say we weren't totally no spend, but we did make a pretty good go at it. Here is the week one run down. The first "offense"' happened Saturday. Ryan packed his lunch for work but forgot to put it in the fridge when he got there. By the time he finally got to eat almost 8 hours later, it probably wasn't safe so he ran to the cafeteria and got some grub. I'm saying good call on this one. He avoided food poising and his blood sugar crashing! A must both ways when you are charge nurse! The very next day came instance #2. Getting ready for church we realized that my kid who is going through one crazy growth spurt (an inch and a half taller in only 10 weeks!!!!) had no church shoes that fit!!!! Fantastic.  Thankful I used Payless' BOGO and 10% off plus a credit that I had with Paypal and now there are 3 pair of church shoes and Hannah's replacement boots (1/2 off) on the way for only $33 out of our pocket.  Those were the only two bad things.  One of the things we budgeted for was the State Fair, which we had tickets to prior to deciding to do a no spend month. This was a family outing with the in laws so we were going to go. In the spirit of money saving the kids and I opted to eat dinner at home and go for dessert at the fair. Ryan lives for fair food and it the main money maker in our home so I really encouraged him to enjoy it and eat dinner and dessert at the fair! It wasn't hard to convince him...like, at all. We shared things and had bites of each others, so we got samplings of everything we wanted and for our family of five, we rang in at $42 on food. That was $18 less than our goal! I've also spend only $152.85 on groceries for the month. That's almost 3 weeks of food, 2 freezer meals for a friend that is (hopefully) just about to pop, and a couple desserts for things! All in all I think week one was a success. A little more than we planned to spend but the hubs needs to eat on what ended up being a 14 hour shift and said child can NOT go barefoot to church. (Although she sees nothing wrong with it!) Here's hoping week 2 goes off even more smoothly!