Here’s what happened.
Inflation sucks eggs. The price of everything shot up and compounding this was the fact that my husband was gone two weeks out of three for work. This meant that grocery shopping was either done when he was home or via Instacart because I can’t take big things home by myself and grocery shopping with a three-year-old mostly results in him getting a Danish and everything melting.
So, I was spending a lot on delivery. (groceries plus delivery costs adds up fast).
Now, add to this:
- Amazon
- Micro transactions for games (embarrassing, but I’m coming clean here)
- Buying books on Kindle (that buy now is terrible)
- My husband having to eat out at work all the time, which meant using delivery usually which meant… credit card.
- Video game downloading
- Subscriptions
Sheesh.
None of these things alone amounted to a ton of money going out, but put it all together and we were sinking into a hole fast. And we were already in a large hole, so it was just getting worse.
So, I cut the strings. On July 14, I started a No Credit Card Challenge (ie, I wouldn’t touch the credit card for 30 days. And husband, in solidarity, didn’t either except for one birthday present for my sister). The only things going on the credit card for those 30 days was a donation of cat food to the SPCA that I do every month, my World Vision monthly donation, and my husband’s subscription to Crunchy Roll. Ok, it wasn’t a total ban).
The No Credit Challenge is done now and here’s what I’ve learned:
Everything Takes Credit Cards
I had to delay getting tickets for Comic Strippers and for the Hospice House lottery, which I faithfully support every year, because they only accept credit cards. This sucks because I wanted to support early and I wanted my pick of seats. But fine, patience is a virtue.
Other things though became a nuisance. I can’t just order things off Amazon without a credit card. Instead, I have to go to a place that sells Amazon gift cards (toddler in tow, praying he’ll behave), buy the card, load the card, use the card, and there will always be bits of money left over that is not enough for what I need to get. Ditto for the games: I had to buy Google play cards with the result that I have eighty-seven cents left on my account. You can’t do anything with eighty-seven cents.
Now, ultimately this is a good thing. I don’t need to buy things off Amazon and frankly, I think I’m going to uninstall one of my games for being unplayable without microtransactions which is pretty scummy. I’m mostly sticking around out of habit now which is a stupid (and expensive) reason to do something. And being forced to get a gift card before going on Amazon means I think pretty hard about whether I actually want that thing I’m getting. (In the last case, it was a set of books I was donating to an adult program out east, a book that just released from my favorite author, and some pull ups for the three-year-old). This is a good habit to be in, but it is hard.
It’s a good thing I didn’t want to travel though. You need a credit card for airlines, hotels, renting vehicles, and a host of other things. So, I’d be out of luck.
Lesson learned: if you’re not going to use a credit card, you either have to find another way to pay for it or just don’t do it. Which is pretty classist when you think about it. On the other hand, I probably saved an easy hundred bucks not buying things on a whim, so, worth it.
Restaurants are EXPENSIVE
Inflation has struck every corner and that means eating out is something a lot of people just don’t do much anymore. But my husband works out of hotels half the time and those hotels don’t have the means to let him prepare food in the room, so he eats out, a lot. His per diem is relatively generous, but it isn’t able to keep up much anymore and furthermore, delivery takes credit card. So for the last two weeks of his shift, he was either going to restaurants and paying in debit or eating left over cold food in his hotel (or microwaved food).
Now, I track the money coming in and out and the amount getting spent just so he could eat was horrifying. A single dinner out could easily hit $60.00. No wonder he was using credit because we nearly ran out of money before he ran out of shift. Pretty absurd, but here we are.
And we didn’t order take out once for the last thirty days and paid cash or debit for coffee out. (That wasn’t new – I never use credit for a coffee date, but the no delivery or take out kinda sucked, especially when it got hot).
Lesson learned: Inflation is crippling restaurants where the pandemic left off. I’m not sure what can be done about this though: food, gas, and wages cost money and that money has to come from somewhere. Also, I can cook food in plus thirty degree heat, but it sucks and usually means hot dogs.
Grocery Planning is Critical Now
Without easy access to grocery delivery (and horrified by how much more it cost compared to buying them ourselves), we steeled ourselves to do even more planning than usual. I already planned things like meals for the week, but now we had to go three weeks: the week Patrick was back plus the two weeks he was gone. If you don’t know, three week meal planning is kind of hard because you don’t know what you’ll find in grocery stores, what will be on sale, and there are always things you forgot.
Obviously, I do some shopping in between: milk, bread, produce, and snacks being the main ones. But dinners are bought well in advance. So how do we do this?
- So many freezer bags. We have a deep freezer we bought years ago (yay Costco) and I faithfully use it. We buy enough meat to go for at least a few weeks at a time and then I bag it up. When I’m shopping, I carefully count up how many ‘meals’ worth of meat I’ve purchased and stick with that plan.
- We’ve been cutting back on the amount of steak and ground beef used per meal and the fact that we are down one adult for two weeks at a time means that I can make one dinner stretch to two for at least some things.
- Leftovers are now lunches. We throw out a lot less food now and eat more varied lunches. (Well, my sister and I do. My boys eat whatever they feel like at the time).
- Chase the case lot sales and points. We shop at Costco now and then alternate between Superstore (points) and Save-On (Also points), choosing the one that has the most stuff on sale or that we are in the mood to handle. Costco is a must though – bulk meat is a dire necessity now.
- I bake a lot and freeze it. Muffins freeze well and they make good breakfasts, which also stretches out our bread supplies. Otherwise, the three-year-old lives on toast.
- Meal planning. It’s spread over three weeks, so there’s a lot of duplicating. We eat a lot of hot dogs in the summer (bulk packs at Superstore last us three meals plus some extras for the toddler to eat) and then whatever else was affordable. And I buy 30% off meat at Superstore.
It results in an hour of shopping and another half hour of putting things away, but then we have food to last the three weeks which just a few trips for the essentials that wouldn’t last long anyway, like milk.
Lesson learned: Meal planning takes a lot of time, energy, and creativity. On the other hand, it is comforting to know that we have dinners at least for a while.
So, Is it Worth It?
The last month was hard. We went eleven cents over grocery budget (1800) which is just insulting, and my hobbies all froze. Having to drag the toddler around to run errands was a special kind of torture and not getting to eat take out as the temperature climbed really sucked.
On the other hand, not having much of anything show up on the credit card bill other than some payments was really nice to see. It’s slowly coming down and with Pat’s raise starting at the end of the month, hopefully we can put more on the debt and get back on with the savings. So all in all, it was worth it, but it did take a lot of discipline. I stayed on track by posting daily on Facebook to keep myself accountable.
However, it showed that we really aren’t living within our means and I’m not sure it’s quite possible to right now. Once grocery prices come down again, hopefully our bills will come down too, especially with the new habits picked up from this challenge. But we still have to eat, pay bills, and make sure Pat can work safely, and sometimes that requires the credit cards. Still, we showed that we can live without using it (if that means eating hot dogs and not buying much for fun stuff) and that was worth doing.
Afterword
Stopping using the credit card was mostly just me throwing my hands up in the air, tired of it constantly going up no matter how much I paid on it. I didn’t do anything special: I uninstalled apps that used the credit card too easily and then fought with myself regularly to not use it. It meant that a lot of stuff I would have thought was necessary turned out not to be. So, it was worth it for that piece of self reflection as well. But I still had one day where I could use it so that I could get those tickets.
