Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Re-working the Average Daily Spending

Welcome to $12 a day! LOL. For real though. Laughing out loud.
I started this blog several YEARS ago challenging myself to live off of $12 a day, everything under that umbrella: food, toiletries, cleaning supplies, gifts, clothing, vacations, pet supplies... you get the idea. Everything. It was a fun experiment and I learned so much from the challenge.

I ended that year, nine years ago with an average daily spending of $13.70 a day.
$1.70 a day over budget which adds up to just over $5000. Still a huge win for me because I tracked my spending so closely, spent SOOOOOOO very much less than I would have otherwise and learned so many valuable lessons. Additionally, I had fun.

Nine years and two new family members later I feel like my spending is out of control. Money is so difficult. One of the valuable lessons I learned from this blog is that when you meticulously track your incoming and outgoing finances you're automatically in much better financial shape.

There is no possible way I could commit to $12 a day, two more people in the family, inflation over the past nine years and all that jazz; I think $18 a day would be a better goal (not gonna hide the fact, I'd be thrilled with a $20 a day average for the year).

All that said I'm going to at least track, ideally report, and hopefully do a pretty good job with the average daily spending for 2020. In truth, I have no idea what the average daily spending was for the past three years. So this will be a fun new challenge.

4 comments:

  1. Good luck and I will be following your trek through the year.

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  2. Then why not make your goal $20 a day? Children are expensive (even I as non-parent realise that!) and even with just one in 2014 you were spending $18.40. Or are you better aiming for the nearly impossible? I used to enjoy your "the numbers are in" posts.

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  3. I agree with frugally challenged. $20 seems like a decent starting point. Maybe you should consider a range of between $20-$25( $7300- $9125). That would keep you in the under $10,000 range.

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