Mid-Year Do-Over Declared!

I hereby declare July 1 the start of our family's new fiscal year.

Like my money clip art? I'm not totally clear on the legal rules for  using google images on your blog, so I figured I should stick to the generic clippy art!

We have, ahem, been spending like mad this year. When I go manically through our online bank statements to figure out exactly HOW we have gotten where we are, I see only a couple of big, unplanned-for purchases: new tires on my car (Ouch. But crucial when tires are precariously worn.) and a vet visit for AugDog for some annual blood work that we should have budgeted for but did not.

We haven't been out buying lots of stuff (some stuff, admittedly, but not loads). The tale of woe that you can glean from our bank statements is that we spend $10 here and there (lunch, bottle of wine, fig tree, Starbucks, blah blah) and a whole WHOLE lot of money on food. Food we cook and food we grab on the go. Like, a staggering amount.

In reality, our spending troubles boil down to two main personal glitches: failure to plan and poor impulse control.


We have all these great ideas for healthy food to cook and we go to Whole Foods, the Farmer's Market, and Trader Joe's with Good Intentions Goggles on or something. We THINK we will totally make all 6 recipes for which we just gathered ingredients. We are SURE we will go through an entire bag of organic spinach. No matter how many times we toss out a slimy bag of half-eaten greens or scoop underwhelming leftovers into the trash, we still think we can and should shop to our ideals rather than our reality.

That, and we buy a lot of wine and beer. Summer nights on the back porch have ratcheted up our alcohol consumption.

Anyway, this accidental spending spree lifestyle is not gonna work. "No Buy July" was a great exercise last year, I'm going to do it again this year and rope Les into it as well. We've gotta get it together, people. We're regrouping. We're looking at our family budget as the moral document that it is: I spend money on things that I value. If I value generosity, simplicity, and debt-free lightness, then I gotta put my money where my mouth is. Oh, and "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also". I don't want my treasure or my heart to be in my closet or my fridge.

No Buy July will be a good entry point for reworking our finances and enacting some of the other principles from 7. We're not going to bring home any non-essentials this month. No magazines, no books, no clothes, no random cosmetics or hair junk or cool pens or house-prettying stuff. AND we're going to force our brains to figure out the actual amount of food we can cook and eat per week and not buy any more than that. Period.*

If you've never tried a month-long life experiment, I encourage you to give it a shot. I know it is kind of lame, but going for one whole month without ANY pop was kind of empowering, and it encouraged me through tiny impulse control successes that I really can make better choices. All those little decisions ramp me up for Bigger and Better choices. It's a start, anyway.

* Coffee is considered an essential in our house. However, Les bought me a $15 Starbucks gift card last week which we decided is a reasonable monthly latte budget. But other than that card, I gotta make home-made coffee work.