This week, I am reflecting on my September accomplishments and looking ahead to October.
I took on a lot of challenges this month and October will likely be similar.
For the month of September, I tried a “no-spend” challenge, a 30-day minimalist challenge, and a state park hiking challenge. I’d say they were all pretty successful.
No-Spend September
I’ve tried no spend months in the past and usually it ends up being the month I finish up my eyeliner and hair products or something breaks and needs a million parts to be fixed or replaced and I get sidetracked and all my plans are derailed in a day.
This no-spend September was a little different.
I started the month by warning the kids that when we went to the grocery store they wouldn’t be able to pick out any extras and we were purchasing only ingredients we REALLY needed.
We had several birthday parties to attend in September but I decided in advance that presents for those would be allowed.
My husband wanted nothing to do with this challenge and planned on going to the Big E (a huge fair in the northeast) and he sometimes orders take out. I did go to the Big E because it was a family event but I didn’t purchase anything there and never ordered food for myself when he ordered take out.
I didn’t have any real plans on how much I should spend on groceries during my no-spend month (since the rules of the challenge allow for purchasing essentials and fresh items), but I knew I wanted to keep things as minimal as possible to use up as much stuff in our freezer and pantry as we could.
Everything I read or watched about no-spend months suggested an arbitrary number of $50-60/week for groceries, so I figured I would shoot for that.
One week we hosted a party (25ish people) for my daughter’s birthday and I didn’t include that grocery trip into my spending.
One week a friend purchased some stock up items for me because she found a good deal.
Another week I purchased an insane amount of bacon because I found a good deal.
Including those impulse purchases, though, I only spent an average of $62/week each of the 5 weeks of September.
All in all, I consider the no-spend month a win.
My grocery spending is usually all over the place because my family eats so much (see my previous post about meal planning). We ate so much of the food in our freezer and got creative making meals with what we had; it was fun and challenging.
30-Day Minimalist Challenge
You can read more about the minimalist challenge I undertook in my recent post about morning routines.
I won’t go into great detail here, but I liked Modern Minimalism’s challenge enough that I plan to repeat the challenge in October.
Hiking Challenge
We also started a plan to hike all the state parks in Connecticut after receiving this beautiful wall hanging from our friend.
We’ve completed some of these hikes and/or visited several of the parks previously, but I was excited to visit parks we had never been to.
We marked off state parks that we had already visited earlier this year and set off to hike more in September.
We plan to continue checking off parks until it gets too cold for our kids.
One of our hikes ended an hour after sunset because we didn’t realize that it would take as long as it did, and sunset was earlier than we realized. After a different hike, we made it home just in time to see the most beautiful rainbow in our back yard.
