I am proud to say I managed to complete the whole year only buying consumables and toiletries. That year I quit my high pressure management job and a lot changed for me. I wrote about the experience as it was happening and I’ve split this into 2 parts.
Since 2012 my ‘self’ and my mindset changed a lot and I was ready to dive in once again. So 2015 brought on One Empty Wallet round 2. That time around I was interested to see how my spending would change since the first time around, and if I could still exist without the crutch of consuming now I was living a much improved, more minimal lifestyle…
Kate Brennan's No Spend Challenge had six strict rules - two rules for what she could do, four what what she couldn't.
Spending on basic food, rent and bills, plus any commitments she'd made before the start of the challenge, such as a hen do and a holiday, were okay.
Spending on transport, eating out, alcohol, clothes or beauty products; squeezing luxuries into the grocery shop; scrounging from her friends and boyfriend; and, finally, being miserably anti-social, were all banned.
The heartbreaking reason she took the challenge on
Kate took on the challenge after looking at her financial position with an eye to the future.
Like many people her age, she had hoped to own her own place by the age of 30, but is stuck renting, and has little on the savings front, after completing unpaid internships to get started in her career.
Having been a personal financial journalist in London for the past 10 years, “my friends, family and colleagues assumed I was brilliant with money — but that wasn’t strictly true,” Michelle McGagh explains in her latest Telegraph essay. After noticing she’d lately spent thousands of dollars on completely “unnecessary” things (coffee, meals out, clothes), she decided to commit to not spending for an entire year — starting on Black Friday 2015.
