No-spend day

I read a few finances-based blogs a while back and one of them was using a particular method for organising your finances and getting out of debt. I did click through to the link but to get the information and join the discusssion forums you had a pay a subscription so I didn't bother. What she did mention often on her blog was no-spend days. Without reading what the 'official' idea behind this was it seemed to me to be a good idea. In fact it's amazing how easy it is to feel like there's something wrong if I don't take my purse out at all during the day. Even if it's just to buy something in the bakery for breakfast on my way to work (which happens more often than not).

Today was a proper no-spend day. Despite staying up much later than planned last night (I didn't finish the filing but did cut up three of the t-shirts while watching 2012 - a film which wasn't really worth staying up late for at all) I got up in time this morning to hoover up all the glass from the dish that fell off a cupboard last night, have a nice long shower to wake myself up and cook myself breakfast. I bought a goose egg at the market at the weekend and scrambled that. It was HUGE! With two slices of sunflower seed bread toasted and slathered with butter I was definitely full before leaving the house so absolutely no excuses to stop in the bakery. I also washed the pots from last night and took the recycling stuff down to the bins.

I have deliberately not gone to the bank again as I have definitely already spent as much as I had budgeted for this week but I know if there is cash in my purse I will find something to spend it on. So I have 1.83 in small change and that's it. Mid-morning I was contemplating whether or not I would use some of that to get some chocolate from the machine in work (which definintely isn't the kind of nice dark chocolate which would best satisfy any chocolate cravings) when I remembered that I hadn't finished a bar of chocolate last week. There were still two squares left in my desk drawer so I had them instead and then a short while later an apple.

It helped that it was fairly busy in work as well. I had nothing else (except for some water, I usually get through 1.5 litre bottle during the day) until lunchtime, when I walked to a nearby park and ate some of the pasta and veg that I made yesterday. For a snack in the afternoon I had brought some yoghurt (I still have half a jar of dried redcurrant and blackcurrants left from last summer so I'd put a good handful of them into it as well) and I also had a few brazil nuts and a cup of hot chocolate (healthwise no better if not worse than eating chocolate I suppose, but moneywise, much better since it's free). I walked home from work and ate another apple while doing that and am feeling very good about myself for having eaten everything I set out for myself this morning withouth leaving something out because I'd replaced it with an unplanned something else. Have some leek soup heated up and waiting for me now. I think I have definitely achieved my 5-a-day today!