January is in the bag already and I cant believe how fast this year is rolling along. Week 5 is finished and overall it really was a quiet week. Our first week with Hello Fresh is complete and I have to say we are loving it! Overall our grocery budget is a little bigger than it was before, however we are not running to the supermarket for extra bits and pieces so it actually is costing us about the same as it was beforehand. The meals so far have been fantastic, and that is awesome, I get a little nervous about quality of vegetarian meals sometimes but these have been great, not once have we felt like we are sitting in the corner with a bland salad!
This week also brings some further decisions toward replacing our poor dead lawnmower. We borrowed a petrol mower from a friend and we are in lllooovvveee. Whilst we don’t exactly live on acres of land we do have what I consider to be quite a large block, and that makes mowing with the push mower a mammoth task. The petrol one had the job done in under an hour and was so so so much easier to use! It also looks much much nicer when finished. We think we will try to source a secondhand one, we have at the moment $80 in our sinking fund for buying things we want, so I will keep adding to that and comparing second hand mowers until we find a perfect match!
So what did we spend?
I splurged $27.40 at the grocery store that was not budgeted for. It is Alex’s birthday week and although we agreed not to get presents for each other I felt really guilty on the day that I had nothing to give him. I made a trip to the shop for some of his favorite treats and we curled up on the couch as a family and watched a couple of his favorite movies. It really was a lot cheaper than many of our past birthdays, but still a fail in the case of a no spend year.
$10 of extra diesel went into my car this week as a top up. We needed to drive a little more than normal and unfortunately I was going to run out of fuel. I just put enough to get me to where I really had to go for the week and no more.
We are doing two separate tallies this week, one with our car repair bill and one without. We are becoming more of the mindset that we should not have included our cars in the no spend year figures as it was something we intentionally did, and deliberately sourced and organized finances for. We may stop including the cars next week.
- This week $37.40
- This month $37.40
- This year $8972.90
- No cars $172.90
We are do determined to make this month cheaper than January and we are on track to do that!
Go ahead and give us some encouragement by following our story this year, here or on Instagram where I post pretty much daily, or over on you tube where we share video updates of our finances along with frugal recipes we have tried this year.
Family seeks freedom 