What We Didn't Spend

This past week Bryan and I went out of town while Grammy came to our house to watch the kids.  I went to a conference for my work, and Bryan got to come along.  The mucho lovely part was that my work paid for not only the conference but the hotel, (Hilton in downtown Portland, yee haw!) gas, and food.  AND I was able to get the reimbursement check ahead of time--so I didn't even have to put any expenses on my credit card.  On past business trips, I would put expenses on the card thinking "I'll pay it right back as soon as I get the reimbursement check"....but....by the time that check actually arrived, something always happened and we "needed" that check for the general finances.  And thus the credit card bill remained....

The nice thing about car trips is the chance to talk for several hours, so we strategized what we would need to spend money on and what we would be diligent about not spending.  We knew we would in fact need to eat, but we could curb the amount we usually spend on eating out.  We also are making an effort to not only minimize Christmas presents, but to spread out the shopping over three months, and therefore avoid the massive chunk of change in December.  Therefore we would go to specific stores, not just randomly browsing and risk succumbing to "impulse buying."

Here's our list (you'll soon find out I love lists!) of what we didn't spend:

• Fancy restaurant:  normally we would "justify" a spendy dinner by rationalizing that 1--we had some time to ourselves without kids! 2--we're in the big city, we have to go to a nice place! and 3--we've been working really hard to trim our budget, we deserve it!  Instead, Bryan went on a little exploration to check out The Food Truck Capital of the World and we got some inexpensive lunches that were new to us and very tasty!  Everywhere we went, we spent less than $20 for both of us together.  (If you haven't tried these, you should check out Noodles & Company, Five Guys, and Einstein Bros Bagels.....seriously good food that doesn't taste cheap but is.)  And we actually stayed under the amount I was given for my food allowance!
• Gas driving all over Portland:  we mapped out where we'd be and who we were meeting up with and lumped the same areas together.  Not only did this save on gas, but it saved on Bryan being perturbed with Portland drivers!  And....since we were in downtown Portland--we walked!
• OSU Beaver store:  picture a 37 year old dad acting like a 7 year old kid on his birthday and you have my husband at the Beaver store.  But.....he showed great self-restraint and it probably helped that we showed up five minutes before closing--and the store clerks let us know this in more ways than one.  (Note to self: This could be a good strategy for future stores!)  We did buy his Christmas presents from the kids--which he picked out himself of course--and he will have three months to be practicing his surprise face.
• Mall purchases:  We did browse around quite a bit but we ended up not spending at the Hello Kitty store (Maezie), the Lego Store (Graeson), and Claires (Kaela).  We ultimately decided that we could get similar items at home from a non-brand-name store, and we could also watch for sales over the next few weeks/months.  We did the same thing at the calendar booth--we found really cool calendars the kids would love, but instead we grabbed the online postcard which has the code for free shipping, and decided to wait and see if we still want them later on.  If not, we could always send the online link to one of the Grandma's and give them a no-thinking-involved gift idea.
• Cell phone upgrade:  back in the first blog entry, on our "not to spend" list is cell phone "everything" plans.  We learned that we are in fact on the cheapest plan already, and even though I am currently a free agent, it would cost us more money for me to leave the multiple-lines-family-plan and get something cheap on my own.  And nowadays, there actually aren't any plans without data.  (So I get to keep checking Facebook 45 times a day after all!)  But we did decide not to get the "free" upgrade which would include a new phone I may or may not actually enjoy, an extra $10 a month, and an extra $35 activation fee.  So in the end we saved $45 and some (probably unnecessary) bells and whistles.

I hope I'm not the only Saved By The Bell girl out there!

It was a very successful out of town trip!  Next on our agenda:  laptop shopping.  Cable ends in two more days!