Done and Dusted!

Today marks the end of my two month No Shopping Challenge. We've been super busy lately with our wee one starting school, beginning a new job, and packing up the house for yet another move. The end of the challenge has kind of snuck up on me.

It's been a challenging, enlightening, empowering, and educational two months.  My desire to buy things for the sake of shopping has well and truly gone and for that I'm thankful. I now look around the shops with a different perspective, and I'm much much better at saying no to myself.

We've saved quite a bit of cash despite having some big bills come up and it being an expensive time of year. We've learned the lesson (finally!) that just because the money is there, it doesn't mean it's there to spend. I have loved having money left before pay day and a nice little bundle sitting in a savings account.

I still like online shopping. It's still a danger zone for me for sure. My way of keeping this under control is to write a detailed list of things that I think I need (winter clothes for example) and then I am only allowed to look for those specific things. I'm looking forward to a modest bit of shopping now that the challenge is over.

I did pretty well sticking to the rules but I  did say I would be honest with you so I'm admitting to buying pizza a couple of times when I was too tired to cook. We also bought some plastic crates for moving although they were kind of essential. That was it.. no clothes, books, coffees, shoes, meals out, or anything else. I'm happy with that.

Over the next year we're going to keep up most of the challenge, especially with grocery shopping and no spend weekends. I hope we can stick to it.

How did your challenge go?
What was the first thing you bought when it was over?