Previously on the blog, I mentioned that we were doing the 34-Day Reset from the You Need a Budget Community. We started on January 3rd and were supposed to go through February 6th….but we got impatient, and tallied our savings on Jan 31. How much did we save?

*drumroll*

$1,575

How did we calculate our savings?

We first created a 34-Day Challenge Budget Line in our YNAB (If you aren’t YNABing, you should. Here’s my referral link to try it out). Into that went any additional income – credit card rewards, Instacart, etc. At the end of the month, we put anything in our variable expense categories into that line item, excluding our personal spending. The categories that we harvested money from included:

Insurance (since we recalculated our balances)
Cell Phone (since I switched to Visible)
Groceries/Housewares
Transportation
Dining Out
Haircuts
Recurring Donations
Entertainment
Clothes

Key Lessons

1) We don’t have to buy or do everything immediately. We had scheduled a plumber to come fix a drain pipe that may or may not be covered by homeowners insurance. We meant to shop around for tile layers and check with insurance, but we had gone ahead and scheduled the plumber. As the date loomed, we still hadn’t done our due diligence. So we canceled. We have three bathrooms in this house. It’s not an emergency, and we didn’t need the stress. I also made a list of several smaller purchases that I was interested in, but still haven’t pulled the trigger.

2) It’s not so bad eating at home. Last year, we averaged eating our four times a week! In a pandemic. During the challenge, we ate out exactly four times, including once when our friends kindly bought delivery for us. Once take-out was off the table, we adjusted our habits, and planned different activities instead of eating out for entertainment.

3) Meal planning was a godsend. I finally did the free trial of Plan to Eat. People in the ChooseFI groups had been raving about it for years, and I never quite understood why. It seemed like a lot to pay for a recipe storage app – $39/year. Instead, I tried PrepDish, PlateJoy, and HelloFresh – all much more expensive options, thinking that the value was in the recipes. It turns out, the value is in the convenience of having all of MY recipes searchable, so I could plan around what was already in the kitchen. The app also combines all of your ingredients into a single shopping list, which you can review and plan your trip to the store. I’ll do a more detailed review later. It makes everything so simple, Mr. FIVE has made dinner TWICE. Totally worth the annual fee. (Want to try it out? Here’s my referral link.)

4) Meal Prepping took the convenience to the next level. Mr. FIVE pointed out that we had a TON of dishes every night with all the cooking that we were doing. Meal Prep has been a block in my life for a long time, but with Plan To Eat, we just started by organizing all the ingredients for each recipe on a Sunday afternoon. Then we looked at each recipe and asked these questions.

What needed to come out of the freezer and thaw before cooking?
What vegetables (onion, carrots, celery, zucchini) could be washed and chopped?
What spices could be blended?
How much brown rice would we need for the week (one big batch in the instantpot instead of 4 little batches)?

5) Question every recurring expense. I didn’t knock out all the stretch goals on my 34 in 34 list – I didn’t even get to 34 things on my list. However, I did question a LOT of recurring charges. Here’s the impact:

Recurring Charge	Monthly Savings	Annual Savings
Insurance for our Rental Property	$40.00	$480.00
Cancel Paid Canva	$12.95	$155.40
Cancel Board Game Arena	$4.00	$48.00
Switch to Visible from Verizon	$25.34	$304.08
Adjusted Auto Insurance	$20.00	$240.00
Cancel Consumer Reports Subscription	$10.00	$120.00
Total	$112.29	$1,347.48

We were spending nearly a full working day to pay for things that we weren’t using or could get reasonable alternatives for.

The Bottom Line

The exercise of pausing for a month and reconsidering our expenses was incredibly valuable. As we’ve moved forward, the biggest change has been in our eating out. We now ask “Is it worth it? Is this going to be a quality experience?” instead of asking “Am I too tired to cook?” We’ve added freezer meals to our rotation to prevent the immediate ordering of a pizza. It feels like we’ve got much more clarity.

Mr. FIVE suggested that we keep the incentive to save in place. For everything left over in our categories, we split it 50% to a savings goal, and 25% to each of our free spending accounts. For me, that means that half of what I’m getting will be invested via M1 Finance. That will motivate him to spend less, and if he’s spending less, I’ll spend less. Let’s see what we can do with that savings rate in 2021!