Could You Not Spend a DIME for 30 Days?

Timeout!

I'll be back to regular recipe programming in a couple of days {think....turkey sloppy joes...killer!}.  But until then we are going to talk about money.  Please don't sign off now that you heard we are talking about money, stay with me on this one, you might learn a thing or two.

Here is the back story.

A few months back, my friend Kelli from The Sustainable Couple was chatting about this book, The Spending Strike.  A few days later I asked my library to order it {they'll do that you know}.  When it came in I read it in a day.  It's not deep, it's pretty short, it really is just a book about a mom {from Iowa!} who was a bit fed up with their spending habits so she called a strike.

For the month of January they would not spend ANY money.  Nothing.  Zilch.  Zip.  A day before the strike started they made a large grocery run, took cash out for two tanks of gas and paid all their bills for the month.

Some days were easy peasy.  Like the days when Iowa winters hit them hard and were snowed in and couldn't get out of the house if they tried.  But other days proved much harder.  Like the day when her parents called spur-of-the-moment and offered to babysit the kids so they could have a dinner/date night out.  Since they weren't keen on telling her parents about the strike they spent all day trying to figure out how they could go out and find a way to pay for dinner.  One HUGE bag of pop cans later {found in their garage}, they had enough cash to buy dinner out.

Shortly after reading this book, Kelli announced on her blog, along with my friend Michelle at Simplify, Live, Love that they were both going to tackle a Spending Strike for the month of January.

And then they asked if I wanted to join.

{Enter thumping heartbeat HERE.}

I thought about it  I really did.  I asked the husband {with a thumping heartbeat}.  He looked at me and said, "don't we pretty much do that anyway?"

He was right, we pretty much do a strike every month.  So I told Kelli and Michelle that we would not be participating....BUT....I would be happy to share OUR story.  Next week on both of their blogs I will be telling our story.  I'm not going to give away the details here, but I dive into the past 4 years of our life.  It's gets a little personal, I am a little nervous in sharing it, but I wanted my readers to know that money shouldn't be scary.

We are no longer scared of money, because now we control it.  We choose a program to follow that was right for US and in the past 13 months have paid off over $12,000 in debt. We now live on a cash system and hope to someday be completely debt free.

Yes, I said completely debt free.  It can be done.  Don't laugh!

So.  Here are my questions to you.

Could you not spend a dime for 30 days?

Could you do at least 2 weeks?

Could you plan your meals and eat out of the freezer to use up all those "items" taking up space?

Could you find free, exciting, fun things for the family to do?

Could you not drive your partner nuts?

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.  Could you do it?  Want to read the book first?  Do you want control of your money?

Leave me a comment and lets get this discussion rolling.

And don't forget to tune in next week for MY STORY.