Cash-Only August

The name of this blog is Cash Only Living because we went cash-only in the early days in order to get out of debt.  Since then, we got out of debt and have (fortunately!) been pretty stable financially so these days we use a credit card for all of our purchases during the month then pay it off in full at the end of the month.  This works great for us because it is more convenient to use a card instead of cash plus it is a cash-back card so we get a little money back each month too.

The other day I was listening to this lady on the Dave Ramsey show and I was inspired to do a cash-only month.  It has been years since we used only cash for all of our purchases so I decided that starting today, we will only use cash for all of our purchases this month.

I went to a couple stores this morning and it actually felt weird paying cash (even the cashier looked at me oddly when I handed her cash instead of using my credit card).  Like the lady in the video said, when you are watching every dollar you spend, going into the store is like a mission, not a relaxing walk.  I had a shopping list, I went directly to the aisles where the things I needed were located, and I didn't even check the clearance racks so I think this cash-only thing is already saving us money!

My goals for this month are to save money (I think having to hand over cash will make me less likely to throw extra stuff in the shopping basket since I will have a limited amount of cash and don't want to use the emergency cash I always carry with me), make my purchases untraceable (all of the transactions on your cards are tracked, traced, and bundled up by data brokers and sold to the highest bidder), and cut out buying things that we really don't need (while not excessive, we seem to buy a lot of extra stuff that we don't really need and now we have a lot of stuff piling up in the garage that we need to clean out and donate to the Goodwill).  Wish me luck!

On another note, here are some good travel infographics, we have been in full-on monsoons season this week (it even rained INSIDE the casinos), and I have been perusing r/frugal a lot lately looking for even more ideas on how to save money!