Spending is a Non-Issue

I came across a post about a "No Spend" challenge on the blog Budgets Are Sexy. This guy has some entertaining writing, and we have a few things in common besides both having a personal finance blog. He's about my age (I'm a few years older), he just got married on Saturday (I'll be married in 2 months), and he lives in the DC area too. However, I do not (thankfully) share his spending problem. Apparently, from reading this post and a few others that are linked from it, "No Spend" challenges are something people try hard to do.

Don't mistake this for self-righteousness, but that wouldn't be much a challenge for me at all. Somehow I'm just not much of a spender. I do on occasion spend what Budgets Are Sexy calls "discretionary income" on "random crap." (Seriously, I just took a whole car load of "random crap" to Goodwill after it didn't sell at the yard sale on Saturday.) But over all, I don't think that's a real problem for me.

I looked at my spending by category in Microsoft Money for the past 30 days, and it appears that I don't have much of spending issue in terms of random crap. In fact, I spent just under $5200 in the past 30 days, and 41% of that was related to the wedding (which at this point is actually money from my parents) or preparing for married life (i.e. helping break a lease). I did spend about $10 on a new pot and some soil for a big plant someone on Freecycle gave me. The rest was pretty much the cost of every day living (i.e. rent, food, gas, Metro fare, utilities, insurance, taxes, etc.).

Wow - that sounds pretty boring! No cool shoes or indulgent trips to Starbucks...just a plastic flower pot and some dirt. It's not that extreme every month, but it's also not like I feel deprived in anyway. However, I'm very thankful that I don't have a spending problem because we're going to need that money for more important things in the future, like a house.

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