Super Frugal September

Image courtesy of r-z

I have joined a challenge on a message board I post on to try and have a Super Frugal September. Since October, November and December are looking to be pretty tight months financially, buckling down in September and putting as much money away as possible seems like a pretty good plan to me. I've talked to Zach and we've decided to see if we can keep our non-food and non-bills spending to about $100 for the entire month.

I decided to break our spending down into categories and see what we need and what we can come up with to save money.

Transportation

We really only need to drive on a regular basis to church (twice a week) to preschool and on Friday nights to my friend's house for Girl's Night. The bus will take Cheyenne to and from Kindergarten and the grocery store, pharmacy and bank are all within easy walking distance of our house. On nice days Zach could actually bike Isabella to preschool too. I suppose I really could bike to my friend's house, but I usually leave there after dark and I'm not so comfortable riding home from there at night as it involves a busy street. My goal is to try to make it an entire month on one tank of gas.

Toiletries/Household

We are actually pretty well stocked here. We will need toilet paper, diapers and possibly laundry soap, but we have plenty of soap, dish soap, shampoo, razor blades and conditioner. We're low maintenance people on this sort of thing. Diapers will be about $20, toilet paper about $10 and laundry soap (cheap stuff) will be about $5.

Entertainment

This is one of the areas I enjoy spending money on, but realistically there's no reason I can't go a month without spending money in this category, especially when school starts. Not spending so much time on fun stuff will also give us a chance to tackle a few projects we really want to tackle, like organizing the garage, for example.

I have my Friday Night Girl's Night which consists of hanging out at my friend Martha's house and watching movies or talking about everything from politics to Vampire theology on her back porch and occasionally having a bonfire. Other than the gas to get over there, it's entirely free.

We'll continue to use the park to go fishing, bike riding and walking and we'll attend the free Grand Opening. I will, however, bring my own coffee and avoid the brownies. That will be good for my waistline anyway and it won't cost any money.

Saturday nights my dad takes the girls to Perkins to see the clown, get their faces painted and have Rainbow pancakes so DH and I can have a date. Instead of going out to eat for our dates I will cook and we'll go for a walk or rollerblade or something.

I'm going to do some stash busting for my crafts, which is good. I have a lot of stash to bust in fabric, yarn and embroidery. It's time to tackle some of that anyway. DH's main hobby is games, from video games to chess. These are free.

Miscellaneous

This is the category we'll be spending the most money on. We have some odd one-off expenses in September.

-$6 for earphones purchased through the school for Cheyenne
-$40 to replace our lost birth certificates

That's all I can think of right now.

My goal is to make this Super Frugal September as pleasant as possible. Now that I've written it all out, it doesn't seem like it should be all that hard.