No Spend Week! - Counting My Pennies

As I was updating my budget this weekend, I noticed that once again, this has been quite a spendy month. So I have decided to do my best to not spend any money for the week.

Of course, that’s a bit of a misnomer. I do actually plan to spend money this week. I have a happy hours to hit up, after all. But those will be cash expenses. The way I budget, I set a fixed amount of cash that I can spend every month. A very small fixed amount of cash. Once it’s out of the ATM, in the eyes of my budget, it’s already spent. I don’t know about you, but my cash has a tendency to grow legs and run away. I just don’t know where it goes. Well, I do. It goes for things like afternoon snacks and drinks after work. My cash is my “fun” budget, so wherever it goes, that’s fine, that’s what that part of the budget is for.

But other than that pre-spent cash, which I am only allowed to spend at happy hour, I’m going to try to not spend any money this week. I think I can do it. I hope.

Megan Smith

Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.

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