Frugal February - a recap

I've had a few requests to talk about our Frugal February, so I thought I'd give you guys a breakdown.

Photo source: http://icanhascheezburger.com

It was actually very simple. We cut out all unnecessary spending, which to us, means everything except bills, groceries, the car payment, and rent. Our normal bills include gas (just cooking gas. Our heat is paid for by our landlord), cable and internet, and electricity. We also have a Netflix account, as well as automatically refilling passes for Illinois tolls and public transportation. We did not cut down on any of these things. We even kept our normal cable package, which has a few extras like DVR and HD.

What we cut out was everything else. Normally, we'd go out to dinner on the weekends, maybe grab a beer at the local Marquette bar if we couldn't get the game on TV at home. Occassionally one of us would go out to lunch during the week or buy a snack from a vending machine. For this month, we didn't go out to any movies, restaurants, or bars. We stopped buying alcohol (even at the grocery store). We didn't buy anything for our apartment, and didn't even go to Target once!

The hardest thing for us to cut out was beer. This was tough, because while hubby and I don't drink at all during the week or very much on the weekend, it's still nice to relax at home with a movie or board game and a few beers on the weekends.

To keep us from feeling too deprived, we each got an allowance of $20 for the month. This money could be used towards anything (including beer), and most of our allowance ended up going towards Miller High Life (classy, I know). Some of my money went towards a one night trip up to Milwaukee to visit some of my college friends. That night we grabbed a burger at my FAVORITE place from college, which was about $9. The rest of my money and all of hubby's went towards two cases of beer that lasted throughout the month.

For fun on the weekends, we hung out with friends and just stayed in, played Mario Kart on Wii and Scrabble, and cooked a lot of meals at home.

It's amazing how much money you spend on little things that you don't even realize. I think this month really taught us that it's not too hard to save money, we just have to pay more attention to where our money goes.