Hey everyone. I just finished a no spend month
and I wanted to share my results
and what I learned along the way with you
so that you can decide if you want to try a no spend month. And spoiler alert.
I am going to highly recommend that you try a no spend money.
I am Tiffany Thomas with wealthytiffany.com
and I achieved financial freedom and became a millionaire.
If you're looking to do one or both of those things,
hit that like button and hit the subscribe button,
and we're going to dive right in. Let me first explain
what a no spend month is. Essentially you can buy your necessities.
For example, you can buy groceries,
you can buy gasoline, you can pay your rent payment or your mortgage payment,
pay your utilities, things like that,
but not spend any extra money.
So no Amazon purchases,
or eating out, or just randomly shopping at Target.
No non-essential expenses.
And just as a side note, after I had done my no spend month,
I had seen that people made these calenders where it had each day of the month listed out
and then you could mark off when you didn't spend any money each day,
and then also had little questions at the bottom, why you were doing it?
And then also the things that you learned from doing the no spend months.
So one of those types of sheets, I think would be really helpful,
but I didn't have that when I did this. I chose to do it February for my no spend month.
Yes, I do realize that has the least amount of days in the month.
That's not actually why I chose it. I just thought that would be a convenient time to try
this out. So you can pick any month that you want to,
that is going to work for you and I did share that I was doing this
so I do have a little bit of feedback from other people that have done no spend February.
So I will share that later on in the video. For me,
the beginning of the month since I knew it was a no spend month,
apparently I kept thinking, oh, I should buy this
or this, because I knew I couldn't buy anything extra.
So there were a number of things that popped into my head,
especially because I just moved a few months ago
and there are still a few things that I want to get for
my house that I haven't bought yet.
So those things were on my mind, but I just thought,
you know what, I can wait a month. I don't need to buy those things right now.
Also, I have become a little bit obsessed with artificial trees and artificial plants.
I think it might be because I accidentally killed one of my real plants.
So now I want to have a mix of live plants and artificial plants.
I like having that extra greenery in my home and in my videos as you can see.
Anyway, I was thinking I wanted to get something else to decorate my house with.
And then I had this great idea to look on
KSL, it's kind of like Craigslist.
But KSL is more popular in Utah. People just post a lot of things that they want to get rid of
or services that they have.
So I thought, oh, I'll check the free section on KSL and see what they have.
And I ended up finding an artificial Orchid which was very beautiful, and it was free.
So, I messaged the girl and asked her, if she still had it.
She responded a little bit later and said that she did.
So I went to pick up that Orchid.
And I was really happy that I was able to get this Orchid free
and that I thought to check the free section,
but then I made a mistake, I decided to check the entire website
and just search for artificial trees.
When I had searched before, there were a few on there.
But they were around 75-80 dollars and I didn't want to spend that much.
But when I searched this last time,
there was one that came up for $15.
It was a super good deal, and it's a really big nice
looking tree. And I thought, Ah! I really,
really want that tree! And later that night
I was going dancing with a friend. And I had told him about the tree on KSL.
And he said, well, I'll buy the tree for you.
It's only $15. And I thought, no,
I can buy the tree myself. It is only $15.
And yes, it is no spend February.
But when am I going to find this good of a deal again?
I ended up texting to see if they still had the tree.
She said that they did, we went to go pick it up
and my friend actually negotiated the price of the tree down
to $10 and he still ended up paying for it,
which was super nice. And I'm not saying you should do
a no spend month and then ask your friends to buy things for you.
That's not at all what was happening. He offered to pay for the tree.
But the lesson that I learned here is, don't look
for things that are going to cost money when you are doing a no spend month.
It makes sense. Right? But we all make mistakes.
I'm not perfect. No one else's perfect.
And of course, I should have thought about that before hand,
but I thought, oh, maybe they just didn't list it
in the free section because that does happen sometimes, but that wasn't the case.
Anyway, I ended up getting a really nice tree that I didn't have to pay
for because I have really nice friends.
Here is something else I thought of during no spend February.
I really love eating shakes and yes,
even during the winter time. So when I went to the grocery store,
I wanted to get the ingredients to make shakes so that I wouldn't be tempted to go
buy a shake at a restaurant, and in doing that,
not only did I not spend money at a restaurant,
but I saved even more money
because you can probably get four shakes at a restaurant
for the price that I was paying to buy the ice cream and fruit and milk.
So, if there is a certain dessert that you like to have,
make sure that you are buying the ingredients at the store and then you can make it yourself.
And here's something else that I thought about during no spend February.
If you are planning to make a purchase, if you want to buy something,
but it's not really a necessity, instead of using the 24-hour rule,
you can use the 30-day rule.
The 24-hour rule just states that if you want to buy something,
wait 24 hours and see if you still want to buy that certain item.
But if you are doing a no spend month,
then you can wait 30 days and then still see if you want to buy that item.
There are things I'm sure I thought about purchasing
but knew that I couldn't so I didn't purchase them.
And now I don't even know what some of those things are.
Clearly they were not that important to me. So I'm glad I didn't make those purchases.
It was also really awesome to log into Personal Capital which is a free app that
I use that hooks all of my financial accounts to it
so I can see my full financial picture in one place.
If you're interested in that, I will leave my referral link below.
You can click on that to set up a free account. Anyway,
when I logged into Personal Capital,
I could see that my credit card balances were lower than usual.
Of course there were still a few charges on there,
like my internet and things like that,
but there were no extra charges. So it was nice to see those really low credit card
balances. Another nice thing about doing a no
spend month is that if you are getting invited to something
you don't really want to attend that costs money.
Then you have the perfect excuse. You can just say,
oh sorry. I'm doing a no spend month. I won't be able to attend
and then the person isn't offended
as long as they're a good friend
because they'll understand that you have these financial goals that you're working on
and they want to help you achieve those goals.
So there's no pressure to spend extra money.
Something else I really liked about doing a no spend month since I wasn't going out to eat.
I was eating a lot healthier because I was making everything that I was eating.
So not only am I saving money, but I'm also eating healthier.
Also, you get to know yourself better when you try a no
spend a challenge. Because there were times
when I got bored and I may have pulled up the Amazon app
and looked at something that I wanted to purchase.
But instead since I wasn't spending any money,
then I wasn't pulling up that Amazon app.
I could pull out a book that I wanted to read or go for a walk outside,
something else besides spending money.
So you can really figure out when those times are that
you do spend money, that you are tempted to buy something and then replace that habit
with something better, something that doesn't require you spending
money and improves your life and you can make that an automatic habit,
for example, if you know right before bed,
you are going to get on Amazon to look at something
you want to buy, you can change that and say,
okay. I'm going to pull out my book and read a chapter of that instead.
Comment below and tell me something that you are going to implement
when you are tempted to spend money.
And my mom actually did the challenge with me,
which I thought was awesome. I told her I was doing it and she just flat out said,
oh, I want to do that with you. I didn't even ask her to do it.
And when the month was over, I asked her how it went for her.
She had said it went really well.
She just bought some groceries and she was tempted to buy a jacket,
but she couldn't find the one that she wanted.
So she didn't end up buying a jacket,
but that just goes to show, if you want something,
if you're going to buy something extra,
just don't even go to the store, right?
Or don't make the mistake of getting on KSL and not looking in the free section.
Also, one of my close friends did the no spend month with me,
and he is more of a spender. So I felt like this was more of a challenge for him,
but I asked him what lessons he had learned throughout the month
and he said he wasn't perfect with it,
but he really did learn some really good things.
He learned about his own spending habits,
and he also mentioned that he loved seeing lower credit card balances,
that definitely happened. He also said that he was eating a lot
healthier, that he was actually buying groceries.
And then eating those groceries, instead of buying groceries,
not eating them, having them go bad and then going out to eat,
so he's essentially spending at least double the money,
but since he couldn't do that, he ate those groceries,
so he only spent money on groceries.
He also said that he tends to procrastinate some things,
but he found that by procrastinating spending money is a good form of procrastination.
And then he shared that there were some things
he thought about buying but didn't of course.
And then he did forget about those things later.
So he definitely saved money.
And then one other thing that he said that I thought was
really interesting is that he said he figured
out what were real necessities to him.
So there is a certain thing that he spends money on and he didn't during no spend February,
but he found out that is a necessity for him.
So when he if he does this again,
he will include that as a necessity.
So it was nice to see that he was really figuring out what was important to him,
what he really found he needed to be spending his money on,
that would bring him happiness. That would bring him joy.
While he did complain a little bit about no spend February, overall
he said he was really glad he did it and his complaints weren't really serious.
They were more jokes, but while it wasn't easy to do and he didn't do it perfectly.
He definitely found it beneficial.
And he is definitely more aware of
what he is spending his money on and that is actually where it starts.
Once we are aware of where we're spending our money and what is really important to us.
Then we can spend money on those things that are important and then cut back on the rest.
And while I was doing this, I was curious to see how other people had done their
no spend months and what their results were and I found some impressive things.
There was actually someone that did a no spend year and I thought that was amazing.
But she had said she had saved so much money.
I think it was 60 percent, fifty or sixty percent of her income throughout the year,
which she had no idea that she could actually do that.
So if you really want to do a really good challenge,
try it for a full year and see what happens.
There were also people that commented that they were able to save up for a down payment
on a house, and they were able to pay off all of their student loans,
and someone else was able to pay
off all of their credit card debt that they had,
and even a single mom was able to build up an emergency fund for her and her child.
So there were such impressive results from doing a no spend challenge.
So I would highly recommend you trying a no spend challenge whether it is for one week,
if a month sounds overwhelming,
or if a month sounds too easy, try it for six months or even a year.
And if you do try it, definitely comment below and tell me what your results
were? What you learned? And the comments that I received from you guys,
most of you did pretty well.
And then those that said they didn't do well that they were going to try it the next month,
which is awesome. And I just want to say,
none of us are perfect. Right? I wasn't perfect.
And that's all this is. It's an experiment to try something new.
See how you do it and learn from it and then even try it again.
Honestly, we can do anything for 30 days, or 28 days if you choose the month of February.
It's not that long of a time frame. I would highly recommend you try
it because there are insights that you are going to discover.
If you found this video helpful, please hit that like button and share it with someone else
who would like to try a no spend month.
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even more content from me then check out the videos on the side of the screen.
Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video.