Frugal February Final Outcome

Sooooo, I'm just a little bit (okay, a lotta bit) late in writing this post.  I'd been planning on making one last post about how the month went for us last week, but we had family in town and a birthday this past week.  Obviously, it just didn't happen.  But I'm here now and wanted to give a brief rundown of how we did.

Overall, our spending was definitely lower than any of the previous months, which was the goal.  Thinking back over the month, I recognize that we hit up the pie truck pretty much every weekend.  The other unexpected expense was signing up for a half marathon since I missed out on my planned one due to getting sick.  That set us back about $200, unfortunately.

Overall spending

I wanted to see where our biggest savings and spendings went over the month, so I also broke it down by the places where we spend the most.

Groceries: We really tried to eat from our supply of food in our pantry and freezer, so our grocery bill is lower than previous months.  Especially November and December (Hello Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts!).  It doesn't seem to be a huge chunk of savings, but I figured that the groceries wouldn't be that impactful since we were eating out less so eating more meals at home.

Grocery

Target: Here's where things start get interesting.  Now, I did make a big trip to Target in January to stock up, but look at the difference in spending!  Again, I think a huge bulk of November and December is related to holiday spending, but the difference even from January is about half!

Target

Amazon: And here's the thing that surprised me the most when I started looking into the details from the month.  We did not have one single Amazon purchase.  Nothing!  Again, I think November and December are huge due to the holidays.  Not really sure what happened in January though.

Amazon

So, there you have it.  We certainly decreased our spending over the month, but this was probably not the most extreme we've been.  A side effect of Frugal February is that I'm finding it difficult to tell myself that it's okay to buy a few things that we were holding off on over the last month.  But, I'd say that's a very beneficial side effect.  It's like we hit the reset button on our spending.  

I'd love to hear how the month ended up for you.  Where did you see the most impact?  The least?  How has this challenged you to change your spending habits?  Let me know in the comments!

Kelly