A week without money

This week has been a practice in non-consumerism for me, beyond my normal plasticlessness. This is entirely due to overspending during the previous week...it was a whirlwind of concerts, paid parking, happy hours, and eating out every night at the Fondue Pot and other delicious restaurants while Dave's friends were in town. I then realized I had $80 left to spend for the rest of the month, and a $35 massage scheduled this week. Its a soft budget based on saving part of my paycheck and normally I would be ok with spending a little more certain months, but for the sake of a challenge I wanted to see how close I could get to sticking to it even after being a little reckless.

So after acknowledging that I couldn't buy anything but food, I asked myself what someone with no money would eat. Most of the answer was using what I already had. So I did. And I skipped the coffees and the urge to stop and buy oranges for work when I already have apples.

A sub-part of the answer was dry lentils and beans. I'm really beginning to appreciate those little guys. They're good for your heart...plus they're really cheap, can be purchased bulk in a reuseable bag, will never go bad, are impossible to mess up, are endlessly versatile and will feed you for days. The trick is soaking them the night before you want to use them, then just boil with salt and few whole cloves of garlic and eat! Or make a chili, refry them, etc. In my opinion, black beans and rice with grilled onions and peppers and some carefully rationed meat is a respectable meal and probably cost me $1.50 per serving. Leftovers for lunch.

Another partial answer was soup. This particular soup was one that Jessi made, but I contributed a bit of wilted spinach, some lentils, some chicken stock base and some of that same carefully rationed meat. And when you make a soup using whatever is going bad in your fridge, its arguably free. Leftovers for lunch.

Finally, I was craving some bakery bread so I hit the dumpster with Sarah, and a toasted french baguette graced the side of my plate of salad with the rest of that meat.

The result? Besides the massage, I spent $11 this week...on 3 pounds of chocolate chips for cookies and some spinach. $34 left in my wallet, 2 weeks to go. If I pull this off, I'm going to Ruth's Chris on December 1st :)