Day 73: No Spend Day!

Yipee! Today was a triple-good-day.

First, quite unex­pect­edly, it was a no spend day.

Nor­mally I would have spent, at the very least, about $3.50 at Wendy’s buy­ing The Son a bite to eat between his cello les­son and orches­tra rehearsal. But he’s still fight­ing this cold so after the cello les­son we packed it in and just headed for home. Tonight was his first absence from rehearsals so I don’t feel too bad about him miss­ing it.

The Son, relieved to be head­ing straight home, was sorely dis­ap­pointed when he real­ized that this meant miss­ing out on this weekly Jr. Bacon Cheese­burger and Vanilla Frosty rit­ual. But I stayed tough and said “no rehearsal, no Wendy’s.” Then, in true moth­erly fash­ion, I pro­ceeded to tell him how lucky he has it. “Just think,” I said, “instead of buy­ing you Wendy’s each week, I could pack a brown bag din­ner for you to eat in the car.” That gave him pause. Then I promised to fix a box of Annie’s Penne pasta w/Alfredo sauce and every­thing was good again.

In addi­tion to the expected Wendy’s expense, I had planned to call The Daughter’s school and buy a few more gro­cery cards (I buy them from the school, the school gets 8% of the price, I use them just like cash to buy gro­ceries) but I for­got to make the call. More money not spent.

And I’d planned to run a few errands dur­ing The Son’s rehearsals: 1) to Mar­shalls to return the “swish” pants pur­chased for the nephew; 2) return the frames bought at Tar­get; and 3) pick up a bot­tle of hard­wood cleaner if the floor store was still open. None of that hap­pened, of course, because the rehearsal was skipped. More money not spent today.

The sec­ond part of the triple-good-day hap­pened when The Daugh­ter returned home from her day’s activ­i­ties bear­ing the roll of Sally Fos­ter wrap­ping paper that had been miss­ing from my order last month. It was a $7.00 roll of wrap­ping paper in a rather ele­gant non-holiday-specific pat­tern that I’d really wanted.

And the third, and pos­si­bly most excit­ing, event in my triple-good-day was the copy of my lat­est credit card state­ment. It was the low­est it’s been in a very long time. Years, I’d guess. I can’t remem­ber the last time it was under $1,000. This month it was under $700! The Hus­band was impressed and I was proud.

In case you haven’t been fol­low­ing my story from the very begin­ning or in case I only think I’ve explained this but really haven’t, I make almost every sin­gle pur­chase on a credit card. That’s sim­ply the way we work our monthly expenses. I pur­chase every­thing needed for the house and the kids on one credit card, all of our gro­ceries and din­ing expenses on a dif­fer­ent card, and all of our Costco and Costco gas pur­chases on a third card. Every month The Hus­band pays the bills in full. For the few things that can’t be charged, I write a check. I almost with­out excep­tion, I don’t han­dle cash. So this month the house­hold expenses includ­ing clothes, gifts, Net­flix, HBA, home improve­ment mate­ri­als, instru­ment rental, books, non-Costco gas, etc. — less some returns — totalled less than $700.

I can’t tell you how psy­ched I am!

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