Another Blog Post About Minimalism

Based on our reading referenced in my last blog post, John and I started taking steps towards saving more money and simplifying our lives. One step was to limit our eating out. We packed more lunches and cooked at home more often. For John, his packed lunches involved keeping bread, peanut butter and jelly at his office. He can get free apples at work to add to his lunch. He does still go out to lunch about once a week with his teammates.

For me, I realized that I enjoy cooking at home when I make time for it. My packed lunches include leftovers, salads and sandwiches. Overall, I go for variety. We had a few family meals out in January, and we enjoyed them more. Now they are a treat. We enjoyed one dinner at our favorite local pizza place, Cicero's and eating at Burma Superstar in Oakland for the first time while visiting John's brother.

We also stopped all spending on our credit cards, especially the reoccurring payments. Even though we do not carry a balance on them, it is too easy for charges to creep up on credit cards. You forget about all of those little charges until you go to pay the bill. When February 1st rolled around, we did not have balances on our credit cards. We had two less bills to pay and that simplified our lives.

We took some positive steps in January and will continue to work on our spending this month. We live in an expensive part of the country and that will be part of our journey towards minimalism. Since this is my second post about minimalism, this is starting to become a blog series. I will label all of these posts under Minimalism. Thanks for reading, and please share your money saving tips in the comments.