These are more actions that I will take rather than goals I will achieve. If following the actions results in me losing weight and saving money I will be happy with those results. I’m not concerned about shooting for a certain number for the month.
This month I will be strict with my intermittent fasting. I’ll do all my eating within an 8 hour window. I’ve had a bad habit the last few months of eating snacks or meals after I’ve finished working for the day. This results in me eating just an hour or two before I go to sleep. That isn’t good for my digestive system and it doesn’t help me lose weight since I’ve generally already had enough to eat for the day when I have my nighttime meal. This month I won’t eat after work. I need to learn to not always give in to my cravings and that it is ok to be a little hungry. Cutting out that meal will save me calories and hopefully lead to me losing weight. It should help me sleep
I’m also going to eat fast food no more than 3 times a week. That might sound like it is still a lot. Last month I had fast food 26 out of 31 days. Cutting back to 3 times a week will be a significant reduction. I’m also going to plan and prepare my food to take to work the night before. If I wait until morning I know I’ll get lazy and just buy fast food rather than taking food from home. This should also help me lose weight.
I’m going to try an experiment this month and do most of my spending with cash. I use my credit cards for almost everything so this will be a pretty big change. I want to see if using cash reduces my spending compared to using credit cards. I’ll still use my credit cards for my recurring online bills. I’ll also use a credit card for gas since that will get me 5% back and I don’t think I’ll buy more gas just because I’m using a credit card. Any other credit card usage must be planned ahead of time and there must be a reason for using the card.
Lastly, I am going to track and share on the blog every single thing I buy this month. I already track my spending down to the penny, but I don’t break down all of my expenditures. For example, if I buy groceries I would just list the expense as groceries in my monthly budget. This month I’m going to detail every single thing I buy. I think that sharing everything I buy will lead to me buying less. This would be due to me not buying something just because I don’t want the hassle of having to blog about it later and also I may not buy something because I’d rather not share it on the blog. For example, I bought a lot of junk food last month- chips, soda, snack cakes, cookies, etc. – and I’d be a little embarrassed to share exactly how much junk food I bought.
Today I spent $450 on rent. I also spent $11.25 to pay my rent with my credit card. I did that to meet a spending requirement to get a 60,000 mile bonus on my Virgin Atlantic card. That will be recorded as a travel expense. My $19.89 Regal Unlimited movie subscription was accounted for today. This allows me to watch as many movies as I want at my local Regal theater. I can’t cancel it until Summer. Lastly, I spent $2.21 to upsize a free small popcorn coupon I had to a large popcorn. This is the drawback to the movie subscription. I watch enough movies for the subscription to be a good value. Unfortunately, I have a hard time resisting the popcorn which is bad for my weight and my wallet. This year I intent to only buy popcorn when I have a free coupon. After today I hope to have a few days with no expenditures at all.
I prefer to use cash for everyday expenses.
I’m going to give it a try for the month. I doubt I’ll permanently switch to using cash.