Hello dear readers!

In my ongoing effort to reduce my spending, I have invented yet another way to trick myself into spending less so that I can change my mindset around spending. At some point I should chronicle all of these efforts (from completely cutting out clothes buying, to weekly cash, to the sin tax) and share to what degree they were successful for me. But maybe the bigger lesson there is to learn how to develop your own tricks to impact your buying where it hurts the most…more on that later. In some ways I’m embarrassed that I haven’t done better (again noting that I’ve been aware of the idea of frugality since 24, meaning I could basically be at FI right now had I been a little more diligent). On the other hand, I think I’ll start publishing how close I am to FI as a % to start because even though I’ve spent a lot more than I should, I’m also like 15% of the way to FI which is okay! Not great but not terrible!

Once again, my most recent effort to reduce has been turning most of my shopping into bulk buying trips in order to reduce the number of times I go to the store. During my maternity leave, I got into the bad habit of going “shopping” for “necessities” as a “way to get out of the house.” This meant that during the week I was going out to a store 3-4x. And for every trip to the store, I had to buy something that was not on my list because it was “on sale” or I realized that we “really needed a whatchamabobber.” As YMYL correctly points out, all those things are a real waste of money. So I started to force myself to limit specific trips to once a month so that I:

• See what my spending in a category looks like at once (like when I do my monthly budget — hurts more to see $200 go out the window once than $25 x 8 trips)
• Don’t have as many opportunities to buy things out of convenience (e.g. I’m here so I should buy that sale item)
• Make and re-make my shopping list before going somewhere and REALLY cut it down to the essentials
• Force myself to deal with the amount of crap I’m actually towing into the house on a monthly basis (as of late this has been a real driver for keeping spending down, because for every shopping trip there is a car unload and a stuff putting up at home that are a lot less fun than the shopping cart load up in the store)
• Free up time to develop hobbies other than shopping! Like recently I’ve been taking my baby for a walk in the beautiful fall weather…what a drag

Where will I be doing this bulk purchasing? At bulk stores of course. And below are the ones that I think are going to have the most impact on our spending:

• Costco: Obvi. Here I will be attempting to make bulk purchasing around some of the meal planning I’ve been doing (grains, eggs, chicken, milk) as well as soda water. I’ve been a little disappointed in their bulk pricing to be honest. A lot of time it could be beat by my local Kroger (and using their apps it was easy to compare this ahead of time). But the great news is that planning really reduced my spend here (like at Costco specifically, cause without a plan I can go BANANAS in a Costco). And I’m thinking about just making this trip quarterly because I don’t have much to replace on a monthly basis here.
• Total Wine: This one is a bit of a game changer. My husband LOVES beer. And his favorite beer here is a full $5 cheaper for a 24-pack. Plus this forces us to really think about how much alcohol we’re wanting to drink in a month, rather than just going out and buying some when the mood strikes.
• Amazon: I’m reducing purchasing here to once a month. Yes, you heard it here first, Amazon spending can be reduced! Jeez they really got us with that free shipping didn’t they? I also have a few things that are already on monthly or semi-monthly shipping (e.g. dog food, vitamins) but this will be a once a month order for anything else I think I can only get on Amazon. It already saved me money because I realized that we don’t need to order the bulk size of diaper trash bags when we use mostly reusable diapers anyway.
• Goodwill: This is something I’m adding in because I want myself to think more about purchasing things that end up on my Amazon list from Goodwill – but inevitably every time I go there I find other “needs” so once a month is plenty. Plus that gives me time to build up stuff from the house to donate each month!
• Farmer Fresh Meat & Produce: Not a bulk place, but a local meat market that I will go to once a month both because it’s far away and because I also want to manage my spending on meat.

And outside of these 5 bulk buying trips, I will go to the grocery store once a week only to mostly get produce and the stuff that is cheaper than at Costco. This officially started in October (but buying started in September) so we’ll track spending in those categories in the table below going forward and see how it all pans out! We’ll go ahead and start with July spending so we can see the actual trend.

So far, trending in the wrong direction, but TO BE FAIR – we regular bought all through September until I decided to do this bulk thing then stocked UP for October at the end of the month so clearly it’s going to look out of whack.

As a note, it’s always a good idea to track new initiatives like this because there can be downstream impacts that you don’t realize (e.g. now I’m spending more money because I’m doing a big trip and 4 little trips a month and validating all their spend being higher because they should be larger…but then I just spend more overall and this was a waste.)

UPDATE: Feb ’23 is the lowest month yet!! And like a full $1000 less of just bullshit spending on stuff I can’t even remember. I feel in my bones that I have lost the urge to buy things I can’t use immediately – even if presented with it – so I’m excited to see this continue to trend down. Plus I’m taking an alcohol hiatus and we’ve jointly agreed that the expensive dinner we did in Feb was not worth it so monthly date night OUT has been cut.