Back at the end of January I decided to embark on a discretionary spending freeze for two months.
No clothes, limited eating out, no home decor – you get the idea! Basically we would buy our essentials – food, gas – and pause on anything else. We kept this up for 2 months, so today I wanted to reflect on it!
How did it go?
Being at home with a newborn makes it REALLY hard to not online shop all day. It was also super rainy in February so we did some mall walking, and again, really hard not to buy tons of things for myself.
Being in a weird time of year – is it winter or spring? – did make it easier to pause on buying. And since I’m postpartum I didn’t want to buy anything that might not fit later BUT I did buy two things. I bought this pair of shoes from Target and I’ve worn them so much already! Love me some slides. I also bought a pair of jeans in a larger size so I can wear them now – just having leggings wasn’t cutting it anymore.
Also how amazing is this new beauty area in the Target by me?!?!!?!? Everything looks so good!
Not eating out was pretty easy because we spent so much time at home. I did hit the Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s drive-thrus during errands a few times 🙂 But grabbing lunch at work has always been a weakness for me, whereas we rarely eat out multiple times a week for dinner. So not being in an office did help with that. We did go out for dinner before my induction, but that was a special occasion and I’m ok breaking the rules for that!
What we did buy
So we did have to buy some essentials the past two months, most of which were related to baby!
I severely underestimated how much nursing gear I would need. I mean I’m wearing these items all the time so I should have figured I would need more than 1 of anything. I got more sleep bras, a workout bra, these tanks, and “real” bras.
We also got a space heater for our bedroom so we could keep that room cozy (and not spend money heating the entire house at night). And we bought pacifiers (these are her favorites, we love these too), a portable sound machine and more swaddles (having only one was becoming a laundry issue).
We also bought a new laptop charger and battery for my husband – his computer is on the fritz and hopefully this will keep it alive a bit longer. So spending $50 now seemed like a smart move versus hundreds. Not really “discretionary” spending, but something we needed to do.
So we had an expensive few months – combined with all those fun costs for our hospital stay! – despite trying to cut out “discretionary” spending. I’m happy that we did have this pause however so we could try to keep things under control. Even if we couldn’t come to a complete stop it did make me pause before purchases and re-evaluate what we really have to get.
But honestly it’s hard to stop all random purchases with a new baby. There are so many things you don’t know you need until you *really* need them! Thank goodness for Amazon and a close Buy Buy Baby.
Plus I feel like I actually spent less downtime shopping than I usually do. Now when I have time alone I lay in bed and watch YouTube videos 🙂 A mom’s gotta rest when she can!
Let me know – have you ever tried to pause your discretionary spending? I might do this again when I can REALLY pause. Maybe sometime this summer! Let me know if you think it’s something I should do again in the comments!
