Jasmine for Miles

In my last post, I detailed some of my plans for making March my first No-Spend Month with my husband. We had an expensive year in 2019, primarily because we took the leap from renting an apartment to buying a house. We still paid debts off as we saved money for a down payment. Some of our debts are still around, albeit reduced, but we want to eliminate them all the same. That's where a no-spend month comes in. My previous post details the discretionary spending we're cutting out for March, so I wanted to use this post to list some of the free activities we'll be taking advantage of throughout the month. Home Improvement: No house we saw was 100% perfect for us, but the one we chose is getting close. There are no shortage of projects we'll be doing with the materials and tools we already have on-hand. Painting our guest bathroom with leftover paint colors from other rooms (going for light grey walls and funky turquoise cabinetry!) Organizing my craft room Touchin...

One major benefit to minimalism is that it helps break bad spending habits. Financial budgeting seems to coincide with or closely follow the switch to a minimalist lifestyle. A particularly interesting budgeting trend in recent years has been to challenge oneself to no-spend weeks, no-spend months, or even no-spend years. The concept is fairly simple. For the duration of the "no-spend" challenge, participants can only spend money on basic necessities like utilities, groceries, and other regular bills like credit card or loan payments. Expenditures like ordering takeout, dining out, and shopping for clothes are some examples of things you'd bar yourself from spending money on during the no-spend period. I have challenged my husband to join me in a no-spend month for March 2020. Here are the usual "fun money" categories that we won't be spending money on for a month: Beverages including loose leaf tea, soda, alcohol, bottled mineral water. My husband doe...

One of my goals with this blog is to make a more minimalist lifestyle accessible to other folks like me who work full-time and don't have unlimited stores of time or energy to declutter. Decluttering, while it does take a lot of time and effort to complete, generally has such a tremendous physical and mental payoff that it's worth doing. So how does one get started decluttering with limited time and energy? Here are tips that have proven to be the most useful to me: Disengage emotionally from clutter objects. This is hard at first but gets easier. We've probably all had at least a few garments in the closet that we were saving in case we lost/gained weight, or a stack of birthday cards from years gone by. Practice this emotional disengagement by asking the item "Why are you here when I can't use you?" It may seem harsh compared to the generally upbeat "Thank you for serving me in the past" connection that other methods of minimalism/decluttering...