"Splurge Coupons"

So, last week I received an email from our bank saying that our balance had fallen below $25, upon looking at the bank account, it turned out that we had $2.02 in our joint account!!

Luckily, we have a second account that all of Caleb's refund checks go into that we use to pay rent, and there is always extra money in that account at the end of each term, so we just transferred a couple hundred from that on into our main account to get us by until we get paid at the end of the month

Needless to say though, that is a very scary feeling, to only have two dollars, and it made me start thinking about everything we spend money on without thinking. The biggest culprit: Coffee.

We buy coffee a lot. Caleb used to work at Dutch Bros. here and he is quite addicted to coffee. It would not be uncommon for us to go 5-6 times a week to get coffee, which costs around $7-9 depending on what we both get. 5 times a week, and seven dollars a trip is $140 a month spent on coffee. Then we added in our "I'm too lazy to cook so we are getting fast food" trips, and the even worse "I'm too lazy to cook and don't want fast food so we are eating out" trips, and we spend a lot of money we really don't need to.

Solution? Splurge Coupons!!!

 

I went online and searched Google images for clip art pictures coffee, fast food, and dinner. Then I went on Microsoft Publisher and made "Business Cards" for each one.

We talked about how often we thought we should allow ourselves each of these treats (I am said 'need', but we don't actually need them ever), and we decided that we were allowed Fast Food 7 times a month, Coffee 5 times a month, and Eating Out 3 times a month. I printed out the appropriate number of cards to last us the rest of the year (seven months), and made envelopes for each month.

And Voila!! Our new system to start saving some money each month. We decided that we get to have roll over tickets, so if we don't use all of them one month, we can have them the next month rather than spending the last day of the month getting coffee twice and fast food and eating out. Individual trips out with friends don't count (i.e. girls night, guys night). And the rest we will just have to figure out as we go! (I will update if anything changes)