Inside: An update on how our all-cash spending plan saved us nearly $5,000 over a three month span; how we made online purchases, how moving to a spending plan shifted us from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance and prosperity.
I really did want to write a weekly spending plan update when we started our all-cash journey back in June. But here’s what I learned. It was kinda boring! Let me explain. After moving from using our debit and credit cards for nearly every single purchase to using only cash, it felt new for about two weeks.
You can read about our first week on cash and our second week on cash here.
But after two weeks? It started to feel NORMAL. So I didn’t really feel like I had much to say until I had lived that new normal for a few months, know what I mean? Well, here we are after three months of all-cash spending and it has saved us a bundle of money.
Let’s back up.
Our Three Months on an All-Cash Spending Plan : Results
After our initial assessment with our One Number Solution expert, April Stroink (she is not sponsoring this post by the way, this is a 100% honest review), we were given $460 a week to spend on the following:
- groceries/pharmacy
- retail
- restaurants
- pets
- alcohol
- incidentals like snacks, decor etc.
We never once felt deprived or like we were left without enough money to get through the week. The first couple of weeks, we ended up with quite a large surplus of cash – in fact, I think at one point we had more than $1000 in cash in the house.
But by about month two, that had evened out and now we typically end each week with about $40-$60 extra. We’ve been socking those extra dollars away in a separate envelope that we will use for holiday spending and family splurges.
In the non-cash portion of our plan, everything was made monthly or completely automated. We still use our credit card for online shopping (which is then off set by not withdrawing as much from cash that week. So if I spend $80 on new art for the office, we’d only withdraw $380 that week to account for the retail online purchase).
By the end of the three months, we had a credit card bill that was so small, I couldn’t ever remember it being that small. It still includes our monthly subscriptions to things like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify etc. and then some large household purchases (like the flooring for our basement renovation) and a few medical expenses – I got new prescription lenses and Dan went to the dentist.
I guess the biggest surprise was when we went for our ‘check-up’ meeting with April and she presented us with a certificate showing – PROVING – that moving to a spending plan that gave us the $460 a week and automated everything else, we’d saved more than $1600 a month that, in our old life, was basically unaccounted for.
We’d been burning through $400 a WEEK on things like eating out, unconscious consumer spending, too many restaurants (though we still eat out two to three times a week and we do it on cash now) and vanity purchasing.
I can’t tell you how flipping good it feels to be on a plan that we know is working for us and building our wealth by spending the money we have in conscious ways.
Beyond the cash plan, April also reassessed our insurance needs, so we are both now more than covered when it comes to disability insurance, critical illness and life insurance and we were able to account for our basement renovation fully within our plan. We built in a healthy family travel fund so we can have an awesome getaway every year and we don’t have to feel deprived or guilty for any of it.
It’s like nothing has changed, but everything has changed. Through this whole experience, I’ve learned that money truly is just energy. If we give it positive power, it does positive things. If we choose to change our story from ‘I don’t have enough, to I have more than enough’, the world will rise to meet your expectation and your bank account will thank you.
