Learning to Spend Less: From $376.25 to $0

From our first month of marriage, my husband and I started tracking every expense. The first month as newlyweds was eye-opening. We weren’t living an extravagant lifestyle; we didn’t even have air conditioning or a television! Yet when we sat down and looked at our spending, we were shocked. Especially when we looked at how much we'd spent on eating out alone.

This was the category on our budget that we have had to wrestle the most with. And not because we’re foodies who love to eat out at fancy restaurants or are too lazy to cook. It was more out of habit: After church on Sunday, we’d swing by Qdoba or Subway and grab something to bring home for lunch. We’d spend a Saturday evening at the coffee shop and sip cappuccinos. We were used to socializing over meals with friends, and so that’s what we did together as we settled into our new life together as Mr. and Mrs.

As we looked at the numbers after that first month, we could hardly believed that those little eating-out trips racked up to $376.25! The most expensive meal that entire month was when we took a friend to Mellow Mushroom and spent just over $30 for pizza, and pretty much every other receipt totaled $10 or less. (I have kept itemized Excel spreadsheets of my spending for years, so I have the records to prove it.)

Lest you think that all we did was eat out, I’m sorry to say that wasn’t the case: Our grocery budget the same month totaled $386.29.

That kind of sticker shock, combined with the uncertainty of how long we’d have paychecks coming in, was enough to convince us that we needed to get our spending—even as little as it seemed to us at the time—under control.

I thought of all this today when I walked past our budget, tacked on a corkboard in our kitchen that is always out in plain view to see whenever we walk by. I glanced at our eating out category for the month so far: $0.

Oh, how far we have come!

We haven't starved to death, and we haven't felt denied. We simply have made different decisions. Yesterday, my husband told me how a bunch of his coworkers went to IHOP for some food. What did he do? He carried in his packed lunch and ate it (pb&j sandwich, carrot sticks, dip and all) in the midst of their eggs-and-bacon meals. He didn't have to do that, but he decided that it was worth it, to save the money that he could have spent there for a meal somewhere else that he would enjoy much more than what you can find on the IHOP menu.

It’s been a slow transition of us learning to scale back and find our footing with our financial resources. And sometimes that’s how it is; you can’t change things overnight. You have to create new habits and new ways of thinking. But, slowly (isn’t that the way things always work?) they take hold and you look back and wonder how it was ever any different.

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