No-Spend February Begins

In this day and age, most people know someone who has done a "no-spend" month. While I usually feel like we do this every month anyway, we decided that for one month (notice, we picked the shortest month), we will literally buy nothing except food and necessities. I have labeled the following items as necessities:

-toilet paper
-wipes
-medicine (if needed)
-kleenex
-toiletries like shampoo or deodorant (because while we only buy these things probably every three months, this month is the month Jared will run out of both of these items and I didn't feel like it would be nice to tell him he had to smell for a month)

For food, we can only buy food at the grocery store, so this does not include buying food at Qdoba for example. While that is obviously food, the point is to not spend money unnecessarily. One meal at Qdoba is three meals I could have made at home.

We are doing this not only to see how much random things we spend money on but also because we know we will need to spend more money in March for a few things, and will use the extra money saved to compensate for this rather than have to change our budget or use credit cards.

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And so we started three days ago, confident that this wouldn't be too hard due to our normal frugality and aversion to consumerism.  And then our microwave died.

This is very inconvenient. As part of our plan to not spend excess money this month, my hope was to spend less money on groceries by making a few larger meals and eating leftovers more often. It's very inconvenient to eat leftovers when you don't have a microwave. This also sucks because every morning I have to reheat my tea or coffee no less than 4 times before I am able to actually finish one cup (anyone else with kids will understand this). While I might be able to get over having to take 30 minutes to reheat all of my meals this month, it will be very difficult for me to drink cold coffee. And of course, I can't just not have tea or coffee in the morning (again, I have children...who don't sleep).

But it made us think: is a microwave a necessity? Can we honestly say that we need one to live and should therefore buy a replacement? We decided no, it is not a necessity. While this obviously will add another "hardship" to our no-spend month, we realized that it will also give us another reason to remember how blessed we truly are. It's such a first-world problem to contemplate how hard our lives are going to be without a microwave. On a night when it's -7 (with windchill), as I sit at my 27-inch Mac, sipping a pipping hot cup of tea, I think we can go without a microwave when so many people go without so much more.

I better go drink my tea before it gets cold.