the great plastic lockdown

Since buying a house three months ago, mr g and I have been attempting to save our butts off (after our “essentials” we needed to decorate a house into a home). So now mr. g and I are trying to do everything possible to save as much as we can before we can have little munchkins.

We have been on a cash based system for a couple years now and that has helped us better track our money and save but we still always manage to rely on cards and use them even though we know that we shouldn’t. The few times a month that we use our cards keep us from saving all that we budget and while we do manage to save some, it is never quite as much as we want to. This month, we decided to try something drastic to make sure that we can save all that we can from our budget.

Introducing to you…The Great Plastic Lockdown!

As of tonight, our credit cards and debit cards are locked up for the whole month of October…in a fake dictionary safe I might add. Classy, I know! Hey, what else is a cheap, white elephant gift good for anyways?! Over the weekend we got down to the nitty, gritty with our budget and today we took out only enough cash to last the minimum of what we thought we would need for the month. And whenever we need to buy something we are only going to use that cash and nothing more. If we run out of cash, then too bad. Guess we’re getting creative for the rest of the month.

So in went both our debit cards, both credit cards, and an extra credit card that I didn’t even remember mr g had. Locked away and the key hidden until November 1.

This kind of forced safety savings is a good way to keep us focused on buying only what we need and will be good to do every few months. I don’t think we would be able to do this every month but it should be a good way to get us back on track for a while.

Through the next month I’ll be sharing how we save and how we manage our budget. If you have any questions along the way, let me know in the comments. I love to talk about how we save and what our actual budget looks like. Stay tuned to learn about what our budget consists of coming later this week.