July Gray Hair Update and... Mission Impossible

Well blogfriends, it's July. Hard to believe, considering I have felt "summer hot" exactly one day so far since May. Oh, and Chicago got golf ball-sized hail barfed all over its north side it last night (thanks to our official sponsor of summer - Freaky Weather). But even if I have to squint at my calendar and rub my eyes in disbelief, my roots know that another month has passed....

Lots of you who know about the G3 Experiment come up to me and say things like "But I don't really see that much gray!", which is true, weirdly - you don't notice it so much from straight on...

Me in my office cube!

You would, however, see a growing epicenter of kinky, chemically unscathed white if you were tall enough to view my head from above...

My gray hair + florescent overhead lighting. Unnaturally extra white, but realistic for where I spend most of my day.

So, progress. There were only a few days in June where I wanted to sneak incognito to Target and buy a bottle of dye. Those days are fewer and fewer every month.

That was the hair update. Now, on to MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Les and I decided (actually, I decided for us, since I am the CFO of our household) that July 1 was going to mark the start of our new Fiscal Year. We need a fresh start. A realistic picture of our sitch-ee-a-shun, now that we are officially a one-income family again.

We'd both sort of lived it up last year for the first time in our adult lives. Having 2 incomes felt like a big gasp of breathing room after years and years of tight grad school/crap job/student loan hell budgets. Starbucks? Don't mind if I do! Buy my lunch every day this week? Why not!  Don't you think Auggie could use $42 worth of treats this month? Why yes, yes I do! Whoo-hoo!! We're grown ups now! We can buy things! Word to the wise: Good Grown Ups are responsible, and they have impulse control.

Fast Forward to the end of June, and I'm getting twitchy that my latte days are far far behind me now.

With bank statements in hand, I turned to the nifty free budget planning tool over at Google Docs and plugged in my income and all our fixed expenses. Feeling pretty good about those numbers, I started playing with the other stuff. The groceries. The Eating Out. The Random *EXTRA 30% OFF* JCrew purchases. You know. The stuff you have to really wrangle to the ground if you're going to stick to a budget.

My first set of "dream budget" figures ended up with us being $141 in the hole every month. Boooo. After some jockeying and trimming, I came up with a budget that would leave us with about $30 extra every month. Which I promise you we will need, since are BOTH Spendy McSpendertons at our house. The learning curve could be tearful.

The New Budget for FY 2011-2012 does include some discretionary money for both of us, so I can get my latte fix every once in a while, and not have to pass up the perfect clearance-rack skirt if it is really awesome. But the reality is that I have way WAY too much stuff as it is.

Which brings us to the MISSION.
To not buy anything that I do not actually need for my daily life for the entire month of July.

You heard me.

NOTHING.

No magazines, shoes, organic paraben-free mascara, funky earrings, or $2200 oil paintings of cows. (Yes, I am pining for a cow painting I saw at a cafe on Wednesday. I even asked Les if I could buy it when I sell my car).

Think I can do it? If so, cheer me on. July is looking like a looooong month from my chair. I'm hoping July can really kick-start a commitment to living simply. Or at least help me be grateful for all the great stuff I already have.