No Spend Months: A Conclusion & What I Learned

**Reminder: The Askinosie chocolate giveaway ends Monday, January 12th.**

A few people have asked about how our no spend months ended. I wrote about why we ended the challenge a couple of weeks early and have posted a link to the entire series in my sidebar under “features” where you can read about our whole experience.

I want to encourage everyone out there to go on a spending fast of some sort. Whether it is for 2 months, 6 weeks or 1 week – it is a great learning experience. I expected to learn from this experience, but did not expect it to change me in the way that it did. During the duration of our spending fast I was challenged in ways I never imagined. I started thinking about where all of our consumables come from and where they end up. If you research origins and final resting places of the things we consume, you will never think about buying certain things again. You may even be appalled and concerned as I have become.

My hope in beginning this challenge was that it would not only change the way I think about purchasing, but also change the way I live my life. I believe that it has.

I would like to share with you some of the things I have learned, not only to bring closure to this series, but perhaps to encourage you to reconsider how you spend your money.

The hard lessons

We have been programmed to consume. If you look back into history you will find that there was a point in time when a shift occurred, changing our pursuits from one of needs to one of wants. We now have a concept called a standard of living which has been fed to us by those who want to sell us goods and therefore want to make money. We do not need most of what we have, but we are convinced through advertisements that it if we have it we will have a higher “standard of living.” The concept of a standard of living is found nowhere in the Bible.

The thirst for more can never be quenched. If we continue to indulge our wants we will only feed a never ending desire for more. Having wants is not necessarily wrong, but what we do about those desires does, in fact, matter.

We have emotional connections to purchasing. It is easy to grow emotionally connected to those things that we have, but also to the process of procuring our “stuff.” I realize from this experience that I really enjoy shopping, specifically grocery shopping. That can actually be a good thing, unless it causes me to be a bad steward of our income. From our no spend project I have taken a new look at how I feed our family and what is truly needful.

Every penny we spend is a vote of support for those we buy from. When we purchase food we can support child labor or a family farm just trying to feed families the right way. When we buy clothing we can support underpaid workers and harsh conditions or we can support a stay at home mom just like us. We live in a country where it is far too easy to be complacent. We buy things we want and never connect it back to it’s origin. We have a responsiblity to consider where all of our consumables come from. We may pay less, but someone else is making up the difference by being taken advantage of through harsh working conditions, being covered with pesticides in a field, or worse. We are now a society of kings, trampling on the poor and giving more to the rich, being blind to it all the while. We just sleep easier because we don’t have to look the poor in the eye, or see their unfed child. Our purchases do matter.

The easier, more tangible lessons

I want to eat locally. I don’t just want to eat locally here and there as I have been. I want us to eat only locally.  I have a better appreciation for seasonal foods now. Having eaten mostly winter squash, cabbage and other root vegetables for six weeks I grew to love them. It felt right to be eating those in a time of not buying any food. Having said that…

I greatly underestimated how much food was needed to feed our family from only our pantry, freezer and refrigerator for two months. This was a major factor in ending our challenge early. Ideally I would have had a lot more fermented and frozen vegetables and stored and frozen fruits on hand. I could tell we were needing more raw foods, especially fruits and vegetables. We ran out of fresh apples and pears early on and besides raw cabbage, which I can’t eat too much of, we had virtually no raw produce. Wanting to eat locally this coming season, I now have a better idea of how much food we will need to store up for the leaner months.

You will have a more organized & peaceful home if you actually live in it. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but because we were trying to minimize our driving we spent a lot more time at home. Specifically, I spent a lot more time at home. I found it much more motivating to keep up the home and create a peaceful environment when I knew I wasn’t going to be leaving it all that often.

The Results

• We did save a good chunk of money, which will be used to continue paying down our student loans.
• We are continuing to decrease our spending, asking ourselves questions and fully evaluating our needs before purchases.
• I am in the process of tracking all of our grocery spending so that I can have a better idea of how much we truly need to spend every month.
• I have lowered our grocery bill.
• We are motivated now more than ever to pinch pennies because the end of our student loan debt is in sight.
• We will probably do this again at least once this year.
• We have become more thoughtful consumers, and hopefully will consume less.

Thank you all for following along in this series, for your insights, your thoughts and your questions.

Finally, lest anyone thinks I am clever enough to come up with this on my own, I have to credit Rachel and Mary for the inspiration. If anyone out there decides to embark on a no-spend project, please let me know. I would love to follow along.