Canadian Finance Blog

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST

During the month of January, my wife and I have been participating in a financial fast. After the heavy consumerism of December and the holidays, we decided it was a great time to eliminate all unnecessary spending from our budget – at least temporarily. So we started on January 1st, and besides a few hiccups here and there, we have accomplished our goal of making it through the month without buying anything we deemed unnecessary. This meant not extra clothing purchases, no extra trips to the store, reducing grocery expenses, everything that didn’t need to be done this month, we put it off.

Obstacles

Of course, we had a few obstacles in our path. First and foremost, it is hard to break the habit of spending. I think because we are so inundated with sales and shopping over Christmas time, it is easy to get into the habit of just purchasing things to solve small problems. For example, if we had a bunch of shopping for gifts to do, then if we got hungry during the adventure, or if we were running out of time, then we would simply buy dinner out. It was justified as a necessary holiday expense, when really, it was just a lack of planning and preparation. I definitely noticed at first that I would get very frustrated when I would be lazy and tired at the end (or beginning) of a day and want to purchase food to save me some time and energy, but because we are not allowed to spend that money, I don’t. I find the time and the energy to do what needs to be done, and that saves us money.

A second obstacle during our financial fast was rather unavoidable – my sister had a baby. So of course that meant we had to make the drive out to see them ($), pay for parking at the hospital ($), and so on. While these costs could very easily have been avoided, we decided that it was definitely worth it to break our fast for the sake of our brand new nephew! It just goes to show – your finances are slave to your life, and things will happen whether or not you plan on it. This made us even more thankful for our emergency fund, which is slowly growing over time, so that we don’t have to worry if are are externally limited by our finances, not just internally because we want to be.

Lessons

We have a lot of food in our freezer. One of our goals with this fast has been to work our way through our freezer so that we can empty it. I swear we have been eating as much out of the freezer as we can – but it sure doesn’t look any less full. Based upon how fast we are going through it, we could probably live another 3 months doing this fast (at least in terms of our grocery budget), and not finish what we have already frozen. My wife was worried that we would blow through what we have stored in our pantry over this month, and that we would have to just restock everything come February. Again, I think we have a lot more food in our house than we realize. So the two lessons I learned here are that most of us could probably survive a lot longer on pantry and freezer food than we think we can, and that we were probably overbuying food for quite some time in order to get to this point. In response, we will continue to have our grocery budget cut in half for next month even as we return to our more regular spending habits. It will help keep us in check and help us work our way through our freezer food.

Spending is a habit that can be learned and unlearned. I definitely think doing a financial fast in January is a great decision because it comes right after we all have gotten into the habit of spending. The only way to break a habit is by not doing that thing for long enough to form a good habit over top of it. In this case, the habit of spending was replaced with the habit of saving. The habit of purchasing solutions to problems was replaced with finding money-free ways of dealing with the situation.

On my previous post on our financial fast, some comments were concerned about what happens after the fast. Will we be more likely to buy even more because our “buying impulse” has built up? Or will this be a habit that we have formed that will continue even when we raise our restrictions? To be honest, I don’t know yet. I hope that the lessons that we have learned will help us to continue to avoid unnecessary spending, but there are a few things that we already have earmarked to purchase in February. Regardless, I’m not concerned that at the end of two months I will have spent more than if I did not ever do the fast at all. I think that it was a worthwhile investment of time and energy – if for no other reason than to simply challenge ourselves to go outside our comfort zone.

Financial Fast: Week Four originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on January 26, 2011.

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