The Family Money Mentor

in Spending Strategy

The money fasting secret to conquer spending every month

Post last updated April 8, 2021

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Any money master must learn to embrace frugality to some extent. Ultimately, the best way to save major money is to stop spending it. Instead, you must consistently accomplish your monthly savings goal. Which means you must always respect your monthly spending limit. I use two techniques to make this happen- money fasting and freezing. But no, I’m not talking about starving yourself or giving up on central heat.

In embracing more frugality, taking on motivating challenges to stop your cash outflow now can be accomplished by a short term spending fast and, when necessary a full spending freeze. These short term challenges can be an enticing way to maintain control of your spending habits to ensure you will stay on track towards your financial, and ultimately life goals.

Why this money fasting post is different than the rest

Many others in the financial world discuss spending fasts as a 21-day challenge. Or doing a serious no spend month to get some fresh perspective. There’s even a popular book discussing the 21 day financial fast approach if you want to read more in depth.

These all-in challenges have their place (I’m actually doing a month-long spending fast myself as I write this!) But this article is different- I will teach you how to use fasting (and full on freezing) with your spending as ways to maintain regular, every month, success in your spending habits. All without a categorized budget! Woot!

For the focus of this post today, once you have worked with your checking account tracker, identified the amount of cash needed in your savings, and identified some goals that require savings and/or debt payoff, you will have identified a number that is left after all these fixed monthly expenditures that is your discretionary spending threshold per month. For example purposes, let’s say that amount is $1,800. (To use my calculations for finding your Magic Monthly Number, check out the workbook in the Shop!)

Much conventional financial advice would take that $1,800 and divvy it into budget categories, each with their own threshold. I have a different post with more details on why I don’t use this approach (and how to do it simpler).

But here I want you to focus on that monthly spending cap example of $1,800. This is the number you must watch like a hawk, just one total number to keep an eye on. You should at least check how far you’ve spent weekly, maybe twice weekly when you’re first getting started with my approach for budgeting your spending.

Then if, and inevitably when, you’re halfway through the month and there’s $1,200 already on the credit cards or out of the ATM in cash, it is time to challenge yourself. Because remember, you must stay below that monthly spending cap ($1800 for our example), month after month, to ultimately reach your goals and dreams.

The spending fast

The first kind of challenge is what you may choose for the ‘I have $600 left to live on these next two weeks’ situation- money fasting. You’re not out of spending money, but you’re burning money at a rate that’s too fast. This is a problem for your budget and for your cash flow planning.

Choose something or things that you generally spend quite regularly on. Food is usually a good overall category because we all eat each day (and it makes ‘fasting’ a good pun!). Pick some food spending you can definitely survive without and ‘fast’ from that for a week, maybe two weeks if necessary to get yourself through that billing cycle.

This might mean you ‘fast’ from takeout entirely (no pizza delivery night, no drive throughs, no grabbing lunch during the workday) which may make up for the approximately $300 too far into spending for this (example) month that you find yourself.

Other options may be clothing if you tend to be a clothes shopper, or gadgets and tools if you tend to constantly acquire those on your weekly Home Depot trip. Whatever regular, non-essential spending category or categories work for you, take a fast. You should see a real slow down in your spending to get you through the month while successfully staying under your cap. Mission accomplished.

The spending freeze

If some categorical money fasting doesn’t ease things up quite enough to keep yourself under your $1,800 cap for the month, and now the total discretionary spending (i.e. new balance on the credit card) is $1750 with six days left in your billing cycle… well, it’s time to FREEZE.

A spending freeze of this type means basic essential groceries (if you can’t survive on what’s in your pantry a few days… which you should try!) and gas (if you must drive to be able to work) are your only allowed spending. Certainly everyone will have other absolutely essential things (e.g. diapers, medicine)- yes you can buy those but they must be truly essential to working and surviving. BUT in general, your debit and credit cards are on a full freeze until you complete the month.

To more tightly control in a freeze situation, just pull out the amount of discretionary spending money you have left ($50 in our example) in cash and keep yourself on a cash only basis until the billing cycle/month is over. You must also check any auto-order items you may have set up (Amazon Subscribe and Save, for example) and ensure you’ve accounted for any such spending. It’s the worst to freeze yourself down for a week and then stinkin’ Amazon auto-bills $100 worth of toilet paper and laundry detergent!

So, in short, use this kind of spending freeze- no spending of any kind (unless essential for survival or work) for a very short time- to stay under your spending cap.

In conclusion…

Continually honoring your spending cap will ultimately bring you to complete control over your money, watching your work pay off each month towards your larger goals. You can think of these money fasting and freezing approaches to maintaining appropriate monthly spending more like ‘intermittent fasting’ for your diet, as compared to a one month no spend challenge which may be more akin to an extreme calorie restricted diet. The latter isn’t meant to be long term.

Therefore, before embarking on a major spending fast for three weeks or a month, put these techniques into practice for your every-month spending limit. Maybe you’ll keep a perfect burn rate and never need to fast or freeze. But sometimes we all get a little too deep. And learning to fast from some category or freeze your spending altogether to honor that month’s spending cap is the difference between living in debt or triumphing over your money and consistently hitting your financial goals.

Think you can do it? Absolutely you can.

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The money fasting secret to conquer spending every month