When I think about my finances, I absolutely dislike June. I think June is worse than December for my finances and budgeting. I love that my kids like to play softball and t-ball. Being gone, using more gas, and having to eat convenience food all month just kills my budget. I know ways to make this better and every year we get a bit better. At the end of the month though, I just get sick thinking about it. Adding to my stress, child support appears to be drying up again. Although I am hoping for the best for child support!

I read another blog called Learning the Frugal Life and I have been inspired by her no spend months. I am thinking we, as a family, need to try this for July and August. I will need to modify this no spend idea. In July I want to take the kids to a few places for day trips and tractor pulls. Those will cost money. So this is how I think we will cut down on expenses for the next few months:

1. All purchases will require at least a three day waiting period unless they are a necessity. Necessities will also be carefully considered to make certain that they are necessities.

2. All requests for money will be carefully taken under review for their importance. My children will also be thinking about their expenditures and habits as well as picking up odd jobs.

3. Pre-planned activities will be looked at for ways to become more frugal. We can take our own snacks and drinks to the tractor pulls which will cut down on the concession stand spending. We also need to make sure we have the things we need before we leave to the house to prevent having to buy things on any trips we make or places we go.

4. Reuse, Reduce and Recycle will be considered in all things. We are pretty good at doing this anyway, but I think we can get better!

5. Making more of our own goods and being active around the farm will keep us from spending hopefully. If we don’t break anything while working on it!

6. No more book buying for awhile. This will hurt me the most as I have a couple books that I really want to purchase. I will try to stick to free Kindle downloads for now.

7. Only shopping at garage sales for future necessities like winter gear/clothes and canning jars/equipment. This shouldn’t be hard.

Now that I have some ground rules, I will try to stick to them. I will post more about the no spend challenge from time to time so I can be accountable to all of you for this! If you would like to join me in my no spend challenge, please let me know! I would love some extra motivation for this!

I should add that I do receive food assistance so that will help me in the challenge. However, I am going to cut down my trips to the grocery store to every other week unless a super fantastic sale happens to be taking place. That should help with the gas spending.

I will also be hitting the car shopping very hard this month. I hate to think about this, but the possibility of a car loan will be in our future. That alone makes the no spend challenge even more important!

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!

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