‘I must have saved at least £100!’ Three writers try the no-spend challenge

Joel Snape

“Be serious.” That was my six-year-old’s immediate reaction when I told him I’d signed us up for a month-long no-spend challenge , and that as a result I wouldn’t be forking out a penny for four Saturdays in a row. I’m not sure I blame him. On a typical weekday, I don’t spend a lot: I work from a home that’s miles from the nearest nice cafe, so my biggest regular indulgence is a pack of Custard Creams from the local shop. On Saturdays, though, we go wild : my adorable fledgling negotiator does his swimming lesson first thing, and after that he considers it a sort of sacred mission to cajole as many snacks, knick-knacks and side-outings out of me as possible on the way home.

Week one

This Saturday will be different. I’ve come prepared: with a packed lunch to stave off his cravings, a flask of coffee to deal with mine and an itinerary of activities that won’t cost anything. The problem? While Bath city centre is a glorious place for outdoor larks in fine weather, this is one of the several hundred days a year when it chucks it down. We retreat to the library – mercifully, it lays out a selection of ageing board games on Saturdays – and he beats me handily at Guess Who. I wonder, as I’m pondering the lack of spaces in modern public life where you’re not expected to spend any money, if I’m being slightly unfair.

Week two

The biggest problem with no-spend days, I’ve quickly realised, is that they change where you’re most tempted to fritter away your money. In Bath, there are any number of local businesses I’m delighted to support: the board game cafe where they teach you the rules, the bookshop where they give personalised recommendations, the pick ’n’ mix market stall where everyone seems genuinely delighted to see my chocolate-loving child. Even the cake shop where the staff are quite rude seems preferable to giving Jeffrey Preston Bezos a cut of every pound I spend. And yet that’s the temptation: now that I’m not dropping 50 quid a week on fripperies, my Amazon wishlist looks more tempting than ever.

I spend Saturday afternoon pruning my streaming subscriptions, and come away £22-a-month better off

And yet, because I am at heart a contrarian, I resist. Actually, it goes further: I spend Saturday afternoon pruning my streaming subscriptions, and come away £22-a-month better off. Side note: I genuinely think it should be illegal to make your “Cancel” option harder to find than the “Sign up” tab.

Week three

A brainwave! As the weather improves, it seems so cruel to deprive the boy of ice-cream that I’ve decided it’s time to start giving him pocket money. It’s a plan with no drawbacks: he’ll learn about budgeting and fiscal responsibility, he can save up for things if he wants and I don’t need to hustle him past all the giant plastic ice-cream cones the shops have started putting out, seemingly just to upset us both.

I, meanwhile, am quite enjoying not being able to spend any money. For a while, I’ve been a fan of the “Don’t-not-can’t” approach to habit formation: if you say, for instance, that you don’t drink on a Monday, rather than that you can’t or shouldn’t , other people give up trying to convince you and the whole thing sticks better. No-spend Saturdays are like that, but internally directed: without the possibility of popping out to a cafe or browsing the PlayStation Store, I can focus on more important things, like unclogging our drain or putting together flatpack furniture. Meanwhile, the boy delightedly pings me with elastic bands, having grabbed a ball of them from Poundland for 1/35th of the cost of the remote-control Mario Kart he got for his birthday. There’s probably a lesson there.

Week four

Triumph – of a sort. Having made it through a month of Saturdays without spending any money, I must have saved at least £100, even once I factor in a recent Friday night’s board-game-buying binge. The trick to no-spend challenges, I’m starting to suspect, is that they work best as a reset: like having a month off booze or deleting your Twitter account for a couple of weeks. It’s a way of getting habit-creep in check: reminding yourself that you don’t need to drop a fiver on cinnamon rolls to have a nice time.

At the same time, it’s also been a reminder of how much of modern life is engineered to siphon money away from us in unnoticed ways – the direct debit, the buy-it-now button, the friction-free virtual wallet. I’ve already resolved to carry on checking my spending – but for the next month or so, I’ll be tightening the purse strings online, rather than in real life. What’s the point in saving money, after all, if you can’t have a nice ice-cream in the park sometimes?

Sirin Kale

I have always had a reasonably good relationship with money. But having a son in 2022 – and having to pay £1,718-a-month nursery fees, for which I receive no government support other than a 20% working-parent discount – has obliterated my personal finances. I no longer save any money at the end of the month, and I often have to dip into my savings.

I actually don’t think the solution to our broken childcare system is for me to forgo the occasional avocado toast – not that I even like avocado toast – to pay for my son’s childcare. I think childcare should be a basic right, like healthcare and education.

But in lieu of a properly funded childcare system, we only have individual actions. So, entering my no-spend challenge, I am hopeful that I might be able to make it through to the end of the month without using my savings – or, better still, put some money away for a rainy day.

I know going into the challenge what my problem will be: snack foods. God, I love them.

A box of spicy BBQ chicken bites from Greggs as I wait to board a train – heaven! Walking down the street, savouring the salty-sour smack of salt and vinegar Kettle Chips – sublime! I love Pret chocolate-covered almonds and M&S Percy Pigs and Wasabi salmon rolls. I love eating on tubes and buses and overground platforms. If I can eat it on the go, I love it so.

I suspect a big proportion of my daily expenditure comes from these everyday, completely inessential treats. I’d love to be the sort of person who brings snacks in my bag, for emergencies. But I never have been. Until now.

Week one

I plan to start my no-spend month on a day I’m working from home, to reduce temptation. The day passes without incident: my husband and I did the “big shop” the day before, so the fridge is well stocked. But as I’m walking to a gym class after work, I realise I’ve forgotten to bring my water bottle. Ordinarily I’d buy a plastic bottle of water, but I resolve to go without. Halfway through my class I run to the loo and slurp from the tap. I don’t die of dehydration. It’s fine.

Week two

My first no-spend day in the office. I forgot to prepare a packed lunch the night before, so I forage what I can out of the fridge as I’m rushing for my train in the morning: a boiled egg, slightly stale bread and cheese slices. A sort-of ploughman’s sandwich, I reason.

It’s horrible, and I seriously consider buying lunch and lying about it. It’s also not filling: by 3pm, I’m hungry again. What I really want to do is go down to the canteen and buy something sugary. Instead I scratch around the office, begging for snacks. Someone has a bag of sweets from their holiday; another person has a fancy box of chocolates in their drawer. I pilfer as much as I can and resolve to be more organised in future.

Week three

Technically today isn’t a no-spend day, as I have to make an essential purchase: my son has outgrown his sleep sacks, so I buy two secondhand on Vinted. I momentarily consider waiting until tomorrow to purchase them, but there’s no point: I need them, they’re a good price, and whether it’s today or tomorrow, I’ll buy them all the same.

But I realise later in the day that the tiny dopamine thrill of hitting “buy” on Vinted has triggered something in me. I’m in the gym, and I’m looking at everyone else’s water bottles, and I’m looking at my own water bottle, my perfectly fine yellow plastic water bottle, and I feel dissatisfied. I feel like I want a new water bottle. One like theirs. Made of stainless steel, with a built-in straw. They keep the water fridge -cold! I reason. They’re less likely to leak! (My bottle has never leaked.) They look more professional in meetings!

I leave the class, and as I walk home, I search for water bottles online in what can only be described as a fugue state. I am just about to order a £28 bottle when I suddenly recall, with a jolt, that today is my no-spend day. It is as if someone has emptied my (tepid, room-temperature) sports bottle on me. The upgrade will have to wait.

Week four

My final day of the no-spend challenge. I don’t think I’ve saved that much money over the month: I’ve simply shunted my spending from day to day, as if I’m rearranging furniture.

I’m in the office. I have a filling and delicious packed lunch. I have snacks. I have a cafetiere and a bag of ground coffee. I munch away, and I am not hungry, and I am suitably sugared, and caffeinated, and well fed. I don’t need to buy anything. I am a self-sufficient no-spender. This is easy, I think smugly. I could do this all the time.

I leave the office to a lovely, sunny day: the first properly warm day we’ve had after a rotten spring. I’ve got nine minutes until my train home. An ice-cream would be nice, wouldn’t it? I buy a Solero. I am halfway through it when I remember.

Honestly, I don’t regret it. A life without an impromptu ice-cream on a summer’s afternoon – it’s just not worth it. But the fancy water bottles I don’t need? They can wait.

Chitra Ramaswamy

A no-spend challenge is going to be a cinch for me. Why? Because I’m a self-employed freelance writer with young children, which means no travel costs, no social life, no need to even get dressed, frankly. Plus I get off on frugality. One of my favourite middle-aged activities is to go round TK Maxx accumulating vastly reduced items – a dog bed, a Le Creuset mini-casserole dish, a candle scented with linen and self-denial – and then, as I approach the tills, put the items back one by one until I walk out the door with … nothing! That’ll stick it to the man!

Week one

I begin by walking my son to school. On the way back I realise I need to buy batteries for my dictaphone to do an interview. (I’m the last journalist in the land to still use a dictaphone, which I think is very on no-spend brand of me because it’s about 10 years old and every time it works my eyes actually moisten with gratitude.) I ask myself “Do I really need this?” which is the no-spend equivalent of Marie Kondo’s inane “Does it spark joy?” prompt. Perhaps not.

I spend the next two hours prising open every gadget in the house in the hope of finding two triple As. I get them, do the Zoom interview, eat a fridge-raid lunch of out-of-date hummus and floppy celery to celebrate. Then I pick up my daughter from school and when she begs me for snacks direct her to the free school lunch provided on Fridays, which she despises. She threatens me with a plastic cheese stick and refuses to talk to me for an hour. This spending ban is placing a wedge between me and the next generation. Still, I persist. Until I pick her up from ballet (pre-paid) two hours later and cave when her six-year-old demands reach their zenith just as we are walking past the local Morrisons. I can’t believe I fell on my sword for a 35p stick of Fudge!

Week two

Today gets off to a good start. I work at the kitchen table, walk the dog in the park and do a free Yoga with Adriene YouTube video called Slow Your Roll. In the evening I slice two chicken breasts in half lengthwise to make four and zhoosh up the end of a loaf for breadcrumbs. Chicken Milanese is served! Yes, I could do what an Instagram no-spend account advises and “start journalling”, “start a YouTube channel” or “learn crochet” but the fact is, I’m not some deeply irritating 21-year-old influencer. I’m a frazzled 45-year-old perimenopausal mother of two who has just spent zero pounds on keeping two adults, two children and a 13-year-old rescue staffie alive for an entire day. I think this may be the secret to happiness. What a feeling.

Week three

Life, like earnings when you’re self-employed, is unpredictable. Today I’m in hospital, being flooded with antibiotics for acute diverticulitis, which I had never even heard of until I got a tummy ache to end all tummy aches, and was ordered by my GP to go straight to surgical assessment at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary. Silver linings: I didn’t need surgery and it didn’t happen on a scheduled no-spend day, so I could pay £25 for a taxi to rush me to hospital and not worry about jeopardising the challenge. It turns out hospitals are ideal places to be if you’re trying not to spend anything. That’s because we have this extraordinary institution called the National Health Service. In which the cafes are awful. And I’m on a liquid diet for five days.

Week four

It turns out recovery at home is also highly conducive to acing the no-spend challenge. Sort of. OK, yesterday I went on a poor-me online shopping spree and spent £150 on summer pastel linen Uniqlo nonsense. But that was then: today I resolve to do better. Until I pick up my son. He is autistic and has to go to Morrisons – the scene of the 35p Fudge stick fall from grace, no less – every day after school. It’s a routine and as any parent of an autistic child knows, routines must not, under any circumstances, be broken. And so I part with 20p for a mini-bag of Haribo and what every parent really wants: a bit of peace. Totally worth it.

Doing this challenge has been amazing. It’s made me realise that spending next to nothing on day-to-day extras is something I genuinely enjoy, already do, and will continue to do more intentionally. And although children may be the greatest threat to my bank account, they are also my daily reminder to live a smaller, slower, kinder and cheaper life.