My husband and I both work in tech. We live in a one-bedroom apartment. We had no real excuse for the numbers we were looking at.
We track all of our finances in Monarch, which I highly recommend if you want to either feel great about your money habits or be brutally confronted by them. For us last fall, it was the latter.
In September we spent $8,409. Not including rent. Well, including rent, but even backing that out, the number was shocking. We live in a one-bedroom apartment. Our rent is $1,200, plus utilities, internet, and parking it comes out to maybe $1,350. Two people. One bedroom. Over eight thousand dollars in a month.
And then we looked at August. $11,961.
That was not a typo. Almost twelve thousand dollars. My husband and I sat with that number for a minute.
The categories told the story pretty clearly.
| Category | August | September | October (no-spend) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electronics | $2,478 | $2,297 | $350 |
| Restaurants & Bars | $1,805 | $1,092 | $107 |
| Travel & Vacation | $1,565 | $1,356 | $180 |
| Rent | $1,350 | $1,356 | $1,356 |
| Groceries | $186 | $205 | $564 |
| Shopping | $765 | $614 | $121 |
| Entertainment | $652 | $394 | $155 |
| Taxis & Rideshares | $443 | $202 | - |
| Gifts | $410 | - | - |
| Medical | $384 | - | $900 |
| Credit card fees | - | $403 | - |
| Everything else | ~$1,923 | ~$490 | ~$658 |
| Total | $11,961 | $8,409 | $4,391 |
The electronics in August included a graphics card and a phone purchase. Travel was two separate trips. And none of those categories on their own felt outrageous in the moment. That is kind of the point. It is not one big decision that gets you to $11,961 in a month. It is ten medium ones that you are not really paying attention to all at the same time.
The restaurants and bars number is the one that stings a little. $1,805 in August, $1,092 in September. Two people. We were not doing anything wild, just going out regularly because it was easy and we could. One dinner at a time adds up faster than you think.
This was not a one-off bad month either. It was a pattern. When you see two months back to back like that, you cannot really write it off as an anomaly.
We decided October would be a no-spend month. The rules were simple: nothing that was a true want. And I want to be specific about what that means, because wants and needs blend together more than most people admit.
We were not operating under some hardcore "buy absolutely nothing" rule. If I needed new jeans, that is a need. If we needed to replace something in the kitchen, that is a need. If we had to bring food to an event, that is a need. Life does not pause for a no-spend month and we were not trying to be miserable about it.
What we cut was the true wants. The "I really want this random gadget" purchase. The "oh this looks cool" impulse buy. The thing you add to your cart because you are bored or because it showed up in an ad. That is what we were targeting, not the jeans or the kitchen thing.
The grocery budget was the most interesting part. We set $130 a week as the target. I will be honest, some weeks we went a little over. But even being loose with it, we ended up at $564 for the month, which works out to roughly $130/week and is almost exactly on budget. More importantly it was a completely different relationship with food than the months before. It forced something useful: actually using what we had. I found myself planning meals around what was already in the fridge instead of treating every dinner like a blank slate. It turns out we had a lot of stuff just sitting in the pantry.
Honestly? It was fun. Not in a suffering-is-good kind of way, but in a challenge kind of way. It felt like running a race. There is something satisfying about having a clear rule and sticking to it, about watching a month go by without the usual background noise of random purchases.
The eating out thing was the hardest adjustment. My husband and I both like going out. It is social, it is easy, and when you both work long days in tech, cooking feels like one more task. Cutting it down to almost nothing for a month made us more deliberate about it. When we did go out, it felt like an actual occasion rather than just a Tuesday.
The "delay to November" rule was smarter than a hard no. Instead of telling ourselves we could never buy anything, we just pushed the decision out 30 days. Some of those things we bought in November. Some of them we did not. Turns out a lot of what felt urgent in the moment was completely forgettable a month later.
October came in at $4,391 total. You can see the full breakdown in the table above, but the highlights: restaurants dropped from $1,805 to $107. Travel went from $1,565 to $180. Entertainment from $652 to $155. Electronics from $2,478 to $350. Our biggest non-housing expense ended up being a $900 medical bill, genuinely unavoidable. Everything that was a choice got smaller.
Compare that to September's $8,409 or August's $11,961. We cut our spending by roughly half from September and by more than half from August, and honestly it did not feel that dramatic while we were doing it. The month just went by. We cooked more, went out less, did not buy anything new, and it was fine.
The timing also worked out well. October is right before the holidays, which is historically when spending goes up for most people. Going into November and December with a month of intentional restraint behind us made the holiday spending feel less out of control.
I am not going to tell you that you should live like this all the time. You should not. We do not. Life is supposed to include dinners out and things you want to buy. The point was not to live like this forever. It was a reset, a chance to see what our actual baseline was and which spending was adding real value versus just happening by default.
What I will say is that if you are on a financial independence journey and you feel like your numbers are not moving the way you want them to, a single no-spend month is low stakes and high information. One month tells you a lot about where your money is actually going versus where you think it is going. Monarch, or any spending tracker, makes this pretty easy to see.
If you want to see what a difference your spending actually makes on your path to FIRE, the FIRE Calculator shows you the math. Spending $8,409 per month vs. $4,391 per month is not just a $4,000 monthly difference. It changes your FIRE number and your timeline significantly. Plug in both numbers and see what it does to the years column.
It felt good. Like finishing a race you were not sure you could finish. And I think that is part of why I keep telling people about it.