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I just finished my monthly bill pay session, including scheduling my credit card payment. My intention for January was to do a no spend month for just me, not my husband. This means the credit card I use represented all of my spending, allowing me to very quickly and easily analyze my (no) spending behavior.
“My” credit card these days has been the Chase Amazon card and my husband uses two different ones, one for groceries (I’m the list maker, he’s the shopper) and one for gas and everything else. Sooo, how much ended up charged to my Amazon card?
Drumroll….
What's In This Post
Results!
Well, first let me be totally honest and tell you how much I averaged on that card over 2020. After taking out a few major purchases that were considered special spends from savings & any costs towards our rental property… I had a monthly average bill of $1,800 in 2020 on my card.
$1800 is more than the total monthly income I used to live off of in graduate school! It’s also an amount we can currently afford (to clarify, I pay every credit card bill off in full every month, no interest), so it’s not inherently bad. But most of 2020 I wasn’t commuting or buying lunch out during the workday. So, what the heck? Hence the no spend month. I really liked this as a way to push reset on my spending.
In the end, I had $310 on my card for January. Less than 20% of my typical spending! If we assume January would have been an average spending month, that’s saving nearly $1,500. Wow.
What did I still buy?
I will call saving $1,500 last month a major success. My favorite part of this no spend month was doing it for just me and not trying to judge what was essential vs not for all our family spending and force my husband into something that wasn’t his idea.
Since I’m no longer commuting (i.e. using gas hardly ever) due to the pandemic and my husband picks up the groceries… well, there isn’t a lot of truly essential spending on my card. The only exception would be our Amazon Subscribe & Save stuff that comes every few months.
Ultimately, there was a subscription order that went through at the end of January for some of these subscription essentials, so my card did carry one of these shipments. There were also a couple Amazon orders of my husband’s which automatically charge to ‘my’ card, so technically weren’t even ‘my’ spending. However, I kind of nudged him on picking up take out one night that was on ‘his’ card but was kind of my decision.
And I had put replacement brush rollers for our Eufy robot vacuum (total game changer for our house- and waaay less money than Roomba) in our Amazon cart to order later, which he bought with one of his orders. So it’s probably about a wash in terms of who’s spending went on a different card.
The only intentional Amazon spending I did was a couple dog toys because between Bonnie and our daycare dog… yikes, they were shredding every toy we had! Technically, though, I put them through as subscription orders because Bonnie’s absolute favorite bone on earth needs to be replaced every few months. Might as well save an extra 5% on top of the 5% cash back we get on the Amazon credit card. Subscription orders aren’t just for toilet paper and deodorant anymore!
So ultimately, yes, I did have a tiny bit of non-essential spending- dog toys, replacement vacuum brushes, & one night of takeout! Importantly, though, I don’t regret any of those. Perfection is the enemy of good, remember. Just the fact that I was paying close attention to what I bought was the win.
Catching automatic spending
The only other charges were autocharge items like the swim lesson monthly fee and our rental property’s monthly HVAC service membership.
Another autocharge went through for about $55 at thrivemarket.com. We sometimes buy some Whole30 special pantry items there and such. But since I was checking so closely, I noticed it immediately and online chatted a Thrive rep to cancel the order. They reversed it right away. But on an average month I would have just said “whoops, I guess we’re getting extra stuff we didn’t need- we’ll use it eventually.” This no spend month helped me be more proactive about avoiding that tricky membership spending that can autogenerate without need.
What about delayed spending?
So what about stuff I put off? Doesn’t that just make the next month’s bill higher? I’ve been thinking about that and, yes and no. If you really loved the feeling of cleansing the credit card, you probably aren’t going to go on a spending binge just for the sake of it. But are there some things that I didn’t buy that I’m still going to anyway? Sure.
I’m going order the filters for the air purifier now, and the kids are going to get a few things (those swimmer rewards I still owe our oldest!). But I think the carry over effect of loving the small credit card bill and realizing just how much more could be saved for my bigger goals will be much more powerful than a few delayed purchases.
Final takeaway
I think the most important thing about this month, for me, was getting back in a much more careful spending mindset. I teach people to carefully set and then watch their monthly spending cap like a hawk.
But with increasing income, lower debt, and then a drop in child care costs over recent years, it got easy to be more flexible. Flexible is good, don’t get me wrong. But my dream is not to be able to spend more flexibly. It’s to work for myself and move to the country. So returning to more careful spending is a very useful tool on the journey towards that goal.
I know I won’t always keep my credit card bill to $310. But I will report on my monthly average on my card after 6 months and see if I’m hitting a substantially lower average than in 2020. Reporting here will help keep me dedicated! So thanks for reading and keeping me honest 🙂