Day 20 I officially started my week long deep cleaning stint... except it's now Wednesday and I only have one day down. That's the beauty of life, right? Monday I got down to business and did some much needed spring (but now almost fall....) cleaning in our bedroom. I folded and sorted through our laundry... SO. MUCH. LAUNDRY. And I also got underneath our bed and found way more than you should ever find under a couple of 20-something's bed. I recovered many pairs of long lost shoes! And the rest was more or less old receipts from pant pockets that needed to be thrown away.... Tuesday night I was ready to conquer the closet, but for some reason once I got home I was feeling way too nauseous and tired to do anything. So I did what I told myself I wouldn't do for the sake of your reading enjoyment and approval... I did nothing. I sat on the couch and watched House all night with my husband, and it was really nice. I was in bed by 10, and in a phenomenally better mood when I woke up this morning. I think the busy-ness of our lives has been well enough documented to justify a lazy day every now and then, right? I'm just sorry that's not as interesting for you to read about.  Tonight's plan would be to conquer the closet and make up for lost ground, but there is a chance that we won't be home until late tonight becauuusee... we're finally selling our car!!! We have an official meeting the CarMax tonight to trade our baby focus in. It's both sad and exhilarating at the same time. We're hoping to make a little more than we owe, and put that towards our card. It won't be a part of our $1,400 goal, but it is a part in our overall credit card payoff plan we've created. What's even better, once we don't have this car payment anymore, our insurance will also drop, saving us close to $300 per month! That is a great chunk in what could be going towards our debt reduction per month.  This month is really flying by, and I'm really sorry that I haven't been documenting it better. But I do want to thank everyone who has been keeping up with us, and my blog. Scott and I have been receiving so much encouragement from everyone. I get asked almost every day about how our no-spend month is going. And honestly, it has not been horrible at all! We're actually really excited to try this again, and I have confidence to know that we can do it again successfully with all of the great support we have behind us.  Okay, I'm talking like the month is over... We still have a week and a half to go, and we're starting to run low on resources. No more chicken after tonight, pasta is gone, and well... that's basically all we ever eat. (It's pretty impressive that we made it to the 20th before running out of that stuff right?)  So I'll get back to you in a week and a half with how we're feeling about it then.  I have pictures for my cleaning stint, but right now I only have "befores." Maybe if I get through a decent amount of cleaning that I originally planned for I'll be able to post them with some "afters." I'm just not ready for you to judge me on how our bedroom looks 90% of the time without being confident that I do clean it, too. Can you tell where we made a really bad decision? Still, things are starting to look up!

Hi everyone! I don't necessarily expect that you all we're anxiously awaiting my next post, but I do apologize for not posting for an entire week. I found out early last week that a good friend of mine from high school passed away in a very tragic car accident. So needless to say I wasn't completely motivated to blog about our lives because I was spending the week reflecting on someone else's. Eric had a beautiful service on Saturday morning, and I feel like I've had some adequate time to grieve. So now I am back on the blog, and ready to finish this month strong!

You should be proud to know, however, that last week we stuck to our word, did not spend a thing! If you noticed to your right, our savings meter has risen to the halfway mark towards our goal! ;)

Despite a week of mourning there were a few highlights throughout...

I tried a couple of crockpot meals for dinner, and both were actually pretty good!




First up was Pizza Casserole. And mine did not look like this, even though it was very good! We didn't have any pepperoni, and Scott is very particular about not consuming cooked vegetables, so it more or less came out like baked ziti. It tasted fine, but I don't think that the 1 cup of water the recipe called for was enough. The pasta was not completely covered, and by the time we got to the crockpot to eat after a few hours, we had an extra crunchy layer of pasta to eat through on top. It was still bearable though, and the cooked pasta underneath was delicious.






My more victorious crockpot recipe however was my crockpot barbeque pulled pork. It was soooo good. And so simple. I took two frozen porkchops, stuck them in the crockpot covered it in about 2 cups of Dr. Pepper, and a little bit of Liquid Smoke. I didn't measure anything but I would guess it was about 3-4 tablespoons? I cooked it on high for about 8 hours. When we walked through the door that evening our house smelt like our own barbeque smokehouse. SO. FREAKIN'. GOOD.

Other highlights include the best cookies I've ever made:



Martha Stewart's Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Recipe:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
• 1 1/4 cups rolled oats (not quick-cooking)
• 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup light-brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup chopped toasted pecans
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

When I made these, I omitted the pecans, used whole wheat flour, and chopped a bar of dark chocolate to make chocolate chunks. I also doubled the recipe and scooped out the dough in 1/4 cupfuls to create giant cookies. Bake at 350º for 11 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through.

And finished off the week, and really the summer, relaxing with some friends by the pool.

In loving memory of Eric Harrison 1991-2013

Good news! Another successful weekend without spending a dime..... or any other form of currency. We had another relaxing weekend, we spent Friday at home, doing ab-so-lute-ly nothing. I don't even remember if we ate anything. We were so exhausted from our busy (but still enjoyable) week that we really did not want to care about anything but sitting on the couch until we fell asleep. Which I did. At 10:00 pm. 

WE DID IT!!!! We have made it an entire week without spending any money! And, we are still completely on track to meet our $1,400.00 goal.

I feel like resisting the temptation to spend has been relatively easy this past week, but we also have been crazy busy, and not at home. We can feel it creeping up on us too. Seriously, I curse in my mind just about every time I think about Chik-fil-a. And don't even mention tax-free weekend to me, because I might start crying. I am proud of us though. It has been hard, having to put in the effort to cook a meal every night, preferably enough to make leftover for lunch the next day, and then carry on with whatever plans we have for the night. I've thought many times this week about how much easier it would be to just hit up a drive-thru and move on. Even if it lessens our lives by a year or two... On the upside though I am getting a lot faster at prepping food, and once it's all said and done I am glad that we didn't give in, and the chore wasn't even that hard to begin with. Scott is even starting to see some weight changes simply from me cooking every night! We know that we're just getting started, and we are NOT ready to give in yet! BRING IT WEEK TWO!!!
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And in even more exciting news, I present to you, a free going away party:

Another day down! Again, not one that was too exciting! For such a busy week, nothing too interesting has happened. It doesn't necessarily make for the best blog posts, but I've already complained about that before. Good news though, I bought a $140.00 dress, technically for free! Our house-sitting money has covered the cost for the dress I needed to buy this month. So even though we allowed it in the budget for the month, we may actually come out with more than anticipated! (Or at least guarantee we can actually make it to our goal savings) I'm excited for the dress to get here, even if I will have to pay for alterations later in October.

Check out the lovely Kristen modeling our dress! This dress was the winner! So much that Kristen and I bought the same one. (We were allowed to pick our own) And it should look soooo gorgeous in it's real color, apple red. Ah, I just love being in weddings! I love any excuse to buy a fancy dress.  Other than that, nothing too exciting happened on day six other than we are still on track! Still no money spent!

I have come to a decision. I think instead of my "blogging calendar" (at least for this week) the best way that I will be able to give you guys an accurate picture of what this month looks like for us, is to just give you guys honest updates on what's happening day by day. I really do intend to update each day, but seriously, our lives are very... what's the word.... spontaneous. And I don't mean that in the cool way where we just decide to go do something grand off of a whim just for a change in routine. I mean our weeks basically fall into our laps come Monday, and it looks nothing like the week before. Coincidentally that makes us very busy people, and I think I was just so excited to get this no-spend month started I made my blogging schedule without having that fact in mind. I'm super thankful that Ruth at Living Well Spending Less mapped out a plan everyday for a month, but like I said at the very beginning, with us being a young newlywed couple without children our day-to-day this month will probably look very different, and occasionally you'll have to read boring posts like this one.

Technically for day five, the plan was to create a meal plan for the rest of the month, or at least make an inventory of our pantry using the worksheet from Ruth's blog. However, you might be able to see how that could be difficult with us not being home for the week. Either way we had a good evening. Our good friends Natalie and Travis came over for dinner, and we had crockpot chopped beef brisket sandwiches.

(photo credit: Mix and Match Mama)

I wanted to get fancy and make us some homemade hamburger buns, but by the time we had gotten to the house, I was starving, and sliced bread looked just as good to me. Either way they were still delicious, and we literally have leftovers to last us the rest of the week. I enjoyed a night in watching chick-flicks and reality TV with Natalie while our husbands were out at Starbucks discussing theology. Exciting night, right? Still enjoyable nonetheless.

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So to sort of offset a relatively uneventful update, I thought I would throw in some excitement. I know that I've given you all an idea of why we're doing the 31 Days of Spending Zero, but we also have a bigger picture in mind than just using this one month to go towards our credit card. This past month Scott and I have made a decision for our next transition in our lives. We decided that once our apartment lease is up in June 2014, we are going to move downtown! We've come to the conclusion that downtown is the ideal place to be for us with where we are in life right now. We both work downtown (we even carpool together each morning) and are beginning to make great connections with people who either live downtown as well, or at the least closer than where we live right now. The con here is, downtown in exponentially more expensive than the area we are living in now. Your first thought is probably "How do expect to do that with all of this 'debt' you keep talking about, it's kind of counterproductive, isn't it?" Well, yes, it would be. So this is our big plan. Depending on how the next three weeks play out, our hope is to do these no spend months every other month, until we have our card down to 20% of it's usage. (Approx. next Feb/Mar) Our other big decision in being able to do this is selling Scott's car. Which, through some incredible blessings, we should be set to do in September, or better yet, possibly even this month. So if you're in the market for a 2012 Ford Focus, hit me up! ;)

As you can see, we have some big dreams in mind for the next couple of months. It does help make this month seem much more bearable in perspective, but I hope you can see how much encouragement it would require to actually achieve. I hope that you all will stand by us in this adventure, and cheer us on when the going gets tough. My prayer is that when the next ten months are said and done we will have a great story to tell about God's goodness, provision, and gifts of strength and self-control.

So please, stay with us! Tonight I will be getting my bridesmaid dress (technically "for free" through our money earned by house-sitting) and Thursday is the big going away party which I have put together for FREEEEEEEEEE! I'm so excited, and really, just a *tad* proud of myself.

More to come!

Okay. You guys have to forgive me... already. Blogging every day is a big responsibility! I promise that I DO have a daily blogging plan for each day this month, but things have been slightly hectic this weekend, simply because that is the nature of our lives. I hope you all could relate to that. The good news is, it is the end of day four, and we have not spent ONE PENNY!!! (Quite literally, considering we accidentally forgot to pay rent on Saturday...oops.) This week were are house sitting for some very gracious hosts, and in the midst of packing and going back and forth between our apartment and their place, we pretty much forgot what day is was. So that may result in a teeny late fee, but nonetheless we are still on track for our goal of $1,400!

I am happy to report that Scott and I are experiencing minimal withdrawal from our fast food life style. We made great strides this weekend! Friday night I was hoping for us to have our first free date night, but instead I became completely immersed in a baking frenzy. And all from scratch!



 Find the directions here.
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Pre-heat oven to 350º, spread olive oil and alfredo on spread out pizza dough, top with mozzarella and italian seasoning & garlic poweder to taste. Bake for 15 minutes or until cheese is melted and bubbly.

My other project Friday night was for our friend David's birthday party we were attending the next day, so Scott and I got crafty and put together a pretty impressive gift together for not spending any money on it!

Today is the day! We have officially begun our 31 Days of Spending Zero. We're using the spending freeze plan based on Living Well Spending Less. You'll probably notice a few differences in our 31 day activity plans, but that's only because Scott and I do not have any kids yet, so I've come up with some alternative ideas for our daily activities to keep us from spending money. I'm super excited to get our spending under control (hopefully 31 days can do that... I mean it only takes 21 days to break a habit right?) and address a lot of our habits face on, and deny them like a boss!!! I hope we can anyway. I'll be posting each day with an activity and small update of how we're doing and how miserable we are... Some of those activities include free date night ideas, a design tutorial, and a week long cleaning stint. Here's a look at our Activity Calendar for the month, chock-full of free events around our area!














Odds are we won't end up doing all of these activities, if you can't tell our weeks are pretty busy to begin with, but I thought it would be a good idea to have something there just in case we decide to take advantage of them. I am excited to explore our city in a way we haven't before! We'll also be looking for more volunteer opportunities around our area as well!

• Sugar
• Flour
• Eggs
• Milk
• Butter
• Oil
• Vingar

- Home Cleaning Items (laundry detergent, dish soap)

So, I know that we're still two weeks (+) out from August. But I have to say I am SOOOOO excited to start our August Spending Freeze! That's 31 days of us spending ZERO MONEY. Am I crazy for being excited for that? Probably.

Here's our game plan: Starting on August 1st, we will not be spending any money on anything other than our essential bills. That's rent, utilities, cell phones, some selective groceries, and gas. We also have a couple of events we are budgeting in such as one wedding gift, and a doctor's appointment. One other event I have coming up is a going away party for a little group of friends that are moving away at the end of the month (two of them to different countries, so cool!) So I might stow away a tiny bit of cash to fund that party, but what I'm challenging myself to do, is to put together this party (decorations and all) for ZERO dollars! I hope you guys will come around and read that post!

I know I'm a little ahead of myself in introducing this project, and I'm trying to be short as to not give too much away, but this post is mainly a letter to our close friends. We would like to include you all in what we're doing with our spending freeze. To put it lightly we have a LOT of debt. And it's debt we are not proud of. Through our first year of marriage we made a couple of foolish decisions with how we were swiping that credit card of ours and it piled up fast! And even though we wish we weren't having to make a credit card payment each month on previous poor choices, we still continue to have pretty bad spending habits now as well. Our hope in these 31 days of spending zero is that we drastically change, and break some of our impulsive ways so that we can be better stewards of our finances.

Our goal for August is to save $1400. Thank goodness for an extra paycheck next month!!! You can stop by and keep up with our savings total with this handy little meter I made to the right.


Friends, (and random readers, too) what I ask of you all is that you would please keep us accountable. This is a huge issue in our life that needs to be addressed, and we hope that you will walk alongside us in this venture. That means sometimes we will have to tell you no to things like going out to eat, or other activities that include spending money. And we won't want to. So sometimes, you should probably tell us no. That doesn't mean we're going to disappear for the month. We hope that if things like that do come up we will be able to tag along without spending money, but if that's not really an option, just please help us in being able to refrain until the month is over. That would the best way to love us during this time! I'm excited to see what happens! Only 16 days left!


I'll be posting more details as the time grows closer, so please check back when you can!

Today has been a hard day. We're already into the first of the month - yet we're two days short of pay day. The first of the month is the hardest for us because we have our biggest bills: rent, our utility bill, cell phones, and Scott's car payment all in the first two weeks. And if our paychecks don't land just right we're in deep trouble. This means we usually have to pay attention to our last paycheck of the month, and save accordingly to pay for the things due just short of pay day, which is typically our rent.

Let me map this out for you. My husband and I both work full-time jobs, and we make a pretty decent living for ourselves considering it's just the two of us. Together it's about $40,000/year and I am nothing short of grateful for it, because we have come far from much less.

We got married when I was 20, and Scott was 23. Culturally, it's a lot younger than most people are willing to get married (at least on my end), and neither of us were even close to finishing college, which we both still intend on doing. I was in my second year of college, and I had just started attending the University of North Texas for Graphic Design while we were engaged. Scott had only taken a few classes at our local community college. We knew that money was going to be hard for us if we got married. To be honest, financially, we had no business being engaged. Neither of us had stable or well-paying jobs, but we felt like God was calling us to get married, and that we would be okay. And He was right. We have been taken care of fully financially since the day we've gotten married, even through joblessness, and hospital visits (four months in no less! We got to learn what "in sickness, and in health" meant real quick! Good times...) Regardless of faith, it still required sacrifice on our end to abandon the "American Dream" in order to be married young. Right before we got married I made the decision to stop going to school to avoid debt, as I had no means of financial aid before getting married, and I was paying a fortune for something I wasn't even sure I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So now we both have full time jobs. And with our one-year anniversary coming up on the 8th, I have a gold mine of money saving tips for all of you that are in the newlywed boat.
Aldi is super cheap for the "off-brand" of most items, with no difference in taste for things like milk, eggs, bread, cheese, and spices/baking items. We even prefer their version of cresent and cinnamon rolls! They're super fluffy and delicious.

- Buy produce at a local farmer's market.
It's cheaper, you pick the portion of what you know you're more likely to eat, and the produce is always wayyy bigger than at grocery store chains.

- Buy cleaning products at the dollar store.
(I.e. dishwashing detergent, laundry soap, trash bags, etc.) Dollar store chains sometimes make their own brand of cleaning products that are super cheap, but I have even seen select dollar stores that sell name brand cleaning products for less than what grocery stores charge.

- Check the clearance item section.
If you make a fourth trip to buy the rest of your grocery needs, be sure to check their clearance section. It's usually hidden somewhere in a shady back corner, but the products there are usually still good, they may have just been damaged cans or overstock. Always check the expiration dates too, just to be safe... ;)

$656 on food is a HUGE improvement from last month which was $900!!!

Can I just gush about Pinterest here for a second? I'm sure if you found my page it was redirected from Pinterest in the first place, so I'm sure you don't mind! I am so so so thankful that some genius unleashed what is Pandora's box of crafts, steals, and D.I.Y.s to the general public. I have to say, my life has improved two-fold since I discovered Pinterest. I mean, it just makes like so much more unique doesn't it? I am constantly just awe-struck from the creativity I see from people out there. Seriously, people are GENIUS! What I love is that although you could argue that Pinterest leads to some full-fledged plagiarism, it also creates an awesome snowball effect of seeing an idea, and being inspired to make it better. It brings the community of the ENTIRE WORLD together, and I think that is just one of the coolest things ever. One tragic downfall of Pinterest though, is the habit of letting your pins die without doing them.

Wow. So I just spent like a week just getting this thing to look just how I want it to. I think this will do for now, huh? I always feel like first posts are really awkward... like first meetings, times a million. Mostly because I don't know who in the world is reading this, and even more awkward, there's more than likely no one reading this post. No, I'm not fooled. I know those blogger stats are mostly just me admiring my own amateur graphic design from any computer I can reach.

So, what to say? I guess I'll start with the purpose of this blog, and I'll be honest. It's mostly because everyone else has one. I know this blog won't be nearly as cool as the ones I follow (i.e. Maskcara, Imperfect Homemaking, & Living Well Spending Less) but hopefully you'll get a little inspiration from mine, as somebody who gets really really excited about something I saw on Pinterest and want to try IMMEDIATELY. Only, if it requires any will-power at all I'll lose it in about a week.

My newest endeavor comes from Living Well Spending Less' blog from her "31 Days of Spending Zero." This was an AWESOME little program she came up with, and she even made free printables for each part of the no-spending month. What I enjoyed the most is that she posted every day with something to do to keep yourself from spending. I haven't even tried it yet, but just by reading through it I felt like she was truly there sharing the pain of wanting to indulge in dinner and a movie every once in a while (or every night, if you're like me...) You can see her plan for 31 Days of Spending Zero here:


I'm so excited to try this out! But we have SO much going on in the month of July. Scott and I's one year wedding anniversary is on the 8th, and then we also have my mother's birthday AND Scott's birthday all within the next month. So we are going to wait until August when we have less extra expenditures to worry about. I will try my best though, to post anything I'm doing to prep for our 31 days of no spending. And don't worry, I'm also hyped up on trying to clean eat right now too, so that might be what you'll be reading most about until we start...

Okay, I can tell I'm rambling now.  Until next time!