I kind of hate to admit it, but the "Buy Nothing in April" challenge has been....easy. That's what thirty years of practice will do for you.
Here's the run-down:
$37.80 for groceries
$26.74 for non-food items:
batteries for my bike-light: $4.25
paper lawn bags: $5.50
download of tax program: $16.99
Total: $64.54
All were necessities. And, obviously, we continue to use our basic utilities as usual.
Where I think we were really pleased was in the area of transportation. Three different days last week, the car didn't leave the garage. Of course, this requires some cooperation from the weather, but we are going to see how long that 1/2 tank of gas we started the challenge with will last.
Okay, enough with the boring bean-counting. Let's go have a fun day!
P.S.-I'm not sure what all the hate towards Target is about. I like Target! It's not their fault if you spend too much when you go in there!
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$37.8 for groceries?! Wow. I am so impressed. How is that possible? We spend 2x just in our local farmer's market.
As for Target, I have a love and hate relationship with it. It certainly tests personal will not to be sucked into buying more than one intends. I guess I am weak when it comes to that and I ALWAYS walk out of the store with a bunch of things I think I need but I don't really need. My husband doesn't seem to have that problem. He goes in to buy a screw driver and he comes out with one, nothing more. So I have adopted a Stay Out of Store (SOS) approach, suggested by a person on burbonmom's blog.
LOL! I use the SOS method a lot, too!
As to the groceries, remember there are only two of us, and we had some stuff in the house to begin with. It may go up a bit in coming weeks. But here's an example: I made a pot roast in the crock pot Satuday, and had some green beans on the side. There was so much good juice left in the crock pot (which had some dried onion soup mix in there too), that I just stuck the crock in the fridge. Then Monday I threw the little bit of left over green beans into the juice, plus chopped up a couple of iffy looking carrots and put in a cup of barley and chopped a clove of garlic, and voila! beef with barley soup. That's how I fed the troops for years. By the way, there was some left over from that, and Mike took it in his lunch today.
Our farmer's markets aren't open for another month or so. You are really lucky!
I don't like Target's ad campaign. The TV Spots are very hallucinogenic with . . . hmmmm. . . Beatles songs to back them up. Its like they're saying shopping becomes this big "trip" or escape from reality.
Grant, that's an interesting perspective. I hadn't looked at them that way at all. We always comment on how eye-catching and original they are, but we were assuming that that is what someone would be shooting for when they create an advertisement.
I've been living in "Buy Nothing January, February, March and (part of) April." I splurged and bought a $20 Bench Plane tonight to keep one of my doors from sticking. It was the cheapest one. (See this post for details.)
So far in April, I've spent under $5 for groceries, since I'm getting food pantry food. If the farmers are trying to market anything around here right now, it'd be recently-thawed oak leaves from last fall. I raked up enough of those just around 1/3 of the church building today to fill the back of a pickup truck.
Aaand, just for fun, I priced replacement windows for my worst offenders tonight and put that thought off for a long while, so I won't be spending that money either. :)
My escapism (if you can call it that) is through my walks - such as this one. It's free, if you don't count the price of the shoes you wear out doing it!
I think Target is just very representational of problems with our current economic model. It's more, more, more for less, less, less and plastic, plastic, plastic and much of it unnecessary in the general scope of things.
Much of it is also outsourced and not locally produced. I pretty much liken them to Wal Mart- - -check out www.thestoryofstuff.com.
ANTWAY........... I blew my challenge last night as I got a birthday present for somebody and two water bottles. I finally found all metal bottles that were kid sized- - - and figured it was a greater good to buy them. It enables us to continue to eliminate buying water bottles out and they are non-plastic.
Other then that....pretty good. I'm frugal Mama right now anyhow so it isn't a huge loss to me.
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