Financially Independent, Retired Early(ish) at 57.

What does Pandemic Spending look like?

First shot of my 'no spend' chart.
Just an ordinary summer’s spending.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while might remember my “No Spend Days” chart. It’s a little thing I do to keep track of where my money goes. Every day that I don’t spend anything, I colour a square on the chart. It really became very effective once I added the silver box at the end of every week that has 3 or less ‘spend’ days in it. This gave me something to aim for and made my spending much more intentional.

At the end of every month I transfer the $$ amounts to my annual spend chart, so I know how I’m tracking year by year. The ‘No Spend Days’ chart is a useful little thing to have and it only takes a second or two each day to fill in.

This year has been an interesting one, what with the pandemic and the two lockdowns. I thought I’d show you how the pattern of my spending has changed since all of this covid stuff ramped up.

The top pic is of January spending. Typically for a school holiday period, I’m out and about a bit more and I tend to make more purchases for projects I have on the go. I also like to stock up the pantry a bit, to make those days in the future when I’m coming home from work feeling tired just that little bit easier.

The news of covid in China was about and my spidey senses were a little alarmed, but my spending was much the same as for any January. Hmmm… maybe it was a bit worse? Only ONE week where I earned a silver square for keeping my spending days under control.

February and March. This section shows a normal type of February (three silver squares) and then ramped up spending again. The beginning of March includes my little road trip getaway to Bowral – how glad I am that I was able to go! Fortunate Frogdancer strikes again! We won’t be able to go anywhere for a very long time now.

The rest of the weeks show the lead-up to lockdown. When I got back from my holiday I was sure that covid was going to be a problem and I didn’t want to be out and about any more that absolutely necessary, so I started adding to my stockpile. At this stage we had no idea that the premier would call a lockdown – he called it on the 16th March, which was on the last line of this section. The next day we had the crazy trip to Costco that I wrote about in this post – Having a stockpile. Sin or sensible?

Then the first lockdown began.

From now on, the chart shows what has happened during covid.

The first week of lockdown, I bought a few things that we needed to complete our preparations. Yeast for bread, (little did I know that I’d be making sourdough instead – I haven’t touched it!), potting mix and fertiliser for the garden… things like that.

Then we hunkered down.

In this section you can see that we had 9 straight weeks of silver squares. Three months of minimal spending. Every now and then we’d go to Aldi for fresh stuff, but we were basically eating out of the pantry and garden, while I was keeping myself occupied by doing some of the quilting, fencing and gardening projects that I’d planned for.

Up to date!

Look at this. Another 9 weeks of silver squares! EIGHTEEN straight weeks of being intentional with my spending! We’re now in the middle of our second lockdown, but even in the middle when I was back at work and life was easing back to a near-normal, I still watched when I spent my money.

Why? I was seeing a success streak happening and I didn’t want to break it.

Eighteen weeks is a long time. I’m curious to see how long I can keep it up for. It’s like that Jerry Seinfeld story when he told a young comedian that the secret to success was to write a joke a day and then put a big red cross on a calendar for every day he does it. After a while, you won’t want to break the line of crosses.

Me? I don’t want to break that line of silver blocks along the side of my chart. It’s stupid, it’s childish but it works.

I started my weeks on this chart with the weekend. The secret to making the weeks on this chart easy is to delay spending for as long as you can each week. If you avoid weekend spending, (easy in a lockdown!), then there are only 2 more days left in the week that you have to be careful. Too easy!

The thing that can derail you is that there could be an unexpected expense pop up and if you’ve burned through your spend days early in the week, you won’t get that square.

An example of this is when I asked Evan23 to buy some elastic for face masks and post it over to me from Adelaide. No one’s making face masks there so there’s plenty of elastic – the one thing I ran out of. He posted them on Monday.

So Monday became a Spend Day. Later, I sent David26 to Aldi to pick up a few things we needed so that I wouldn’t ‘waste’ this Spend Day. Hey – now that I have 18 weeks under my belt, I’m becoming a little competitive. I’m becoming even more strategic in my quest to see how long this silver square streak will go!

Tuesday and Wednesday have been no spend days so even if I run amok with my credit card on the last two days, I’ve earned my silver square. Eighteen weeks, baby!!!

Well, I’m off now to make a pumpkin and feta tart for dinner. The pumpkin is home-grown, we need to use up the feta and onion, (no waste in a pandemic kitchen!) and the rosemary that absolutely makes the dish sing is growing right outside my back door.

I’ve finished a day of teaching from home, I have a day off tomorrow and a glass of shiraz is in my very near future. It’s payday today and I love the thought that I can put a big chunk of it aside to help pay for my new ensuite later in the year because I’m keeping my spending way under control.

I hope that you’re all keeping safe and well in these strange times. I’m so thankful that I’m able to teach from home and that the rest of Australia isn’t seeing the crazy numbers we are in Victoria.

Wear a mask and wash your hands!!

Home-made masks for Tom28 to wear to work.

8 Comments

  1. chasingFIREdownunder

    I love your no-spend charts! This month I also tried a no spend chart, but specifically for take-out food. I started it mid-month after doing my 2020-in-review blog post and realising how much money was leaking out on that spend! And I’m so excited when I get to see that sea of green 🙂 that endorphin rush is sweeter and longer lasting than the fleeting pleasure of the takeout, and is completely guilt free!

    • FrogdancerJones

      True.
      Try and stay with it – the long-term view after you’ve been tracking for a while is really helpful when working out your annual spend (therefore what you need to aim for in retirement.)

  2. Maureen

    I love the charts! I’m going to do one for spending and one for exercising. Motivation is hard to come by in this house. Thanks!

    • FrogdancerJones

      I tried one for exercise but it didn’t work for me. I’ve been doing the No Spend one since June 2016, so something definitely works for me here!

  3. Caroline at Costa Rica FIRE

    It’s great to have binary visual like that — spend or no spend. I should do this for dessert — which is the bane of my existence, and then my whole calendar would just say DESSERT.
    I thought we’d spend less during the pandemic and we have but not as much as I estimated. This is why tracking is so important — I have tracked our spending for years so have a good handle on it, but still grossly underestimated our spend (groceries and takeout are big culprits for us).

    • FrogdancerJones

      Usually by this stage of the year we’d have spent around $350 on take-aways. This year it’s $71, which was spent before the first lockdown.
      The boys and I are just not wanting to leave the house for very much while the pandemic is on.

  4. Budget Life List

    Thank you for detailing your progress! I find other people’s finances fascinating even if some of it I don’t understand (like Spotlight, Cole, Bunnings, etc). I am glad that I have been tracking my spending. I recently calculated my net worth, including when I started working at 14 until now. It was eye opening and sad. I had the opportunity to save so much! Oh well, at least I know the possibilities now…

    • FrogdancerJones

      It’s having your eyes opened to the possibilities that’s the game-changer!

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