My Experiment: Day Three

I should come up with a witty name for my 30-day experiment but I'm not feeling too clever at the moment. Can you help? I'm taking any and all suggestions!

Anyway, back to my update. Brandon and I usually take out our allowance money and miscellaneous spending money at the beginning of the month. That way we only use cash and when we run out we're supposed to stop spending. Of course that never happens but our intentions are good. So when I decided to start this experiment we had already taken out half our monthly allowance ($80) and all the miscellaneous money ($300). We spent a little the day before we started the experiment so on August 1st we stashed the remaining money in a cute jar labeled "Baby Fund". There was $344 total. My goal is keep as much of that $344 as possible this month and get all the credit cards paid off, using my unemployment checks.

So today is Day Three of The Unnamed Experiment. I've bought a couple things so far. Day One I purchase a box of envelopes ($1.50 but I used grocery money because we purchased other food items with it). Day Two I bought a filter for my Pur faucet filter. I'm not sure if this was a "need" or not because technically we had another month to go before our current one needs replacing. But I had a $4 off coupon that expired this month so we bought it anyway. Turns out we bought the WRONG filter so we couldn't use the coupon! I was a bit pissed. But in order to use the coupon we would have had to buy the more expensive filter and then it would have cancelled out the whole point of the coupon. So we paid full price for the cheaper filter ($15 for one damn filter!)

On Day Two we also got Brandon a black sweater. This is clearly a "want" and not a "need" but we didn't pay for it so it doesn't count! See, a few months ago Brandon and I used our credit card points to get some gift cards. One of those was a $50 gift card to Kohl's. The day before The Unnamed Experiment started he went to Kohl's and bought himself a new pair of running shoes and some socks. By spending $52 on that he got $10 in Kohl's cash which was only redeemable August 2-10. We didn't need anything from Kohl's but I wasn't about to let that money go to waste so we scoured the store for an item that cost $10. Brandon found a black sweater that was originally $50 and was marked down to $10. So he got it for free. We didn't even pay tax on it!

Today I haven't bought anything so far and I don't intend to. I've been checking out free things to do in the area and haven't found much so far, other than boring things like visiting the governor's mansion and crap like that. I prefer free events. I did find one event that's happening next weekend. It's the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival (yes, where Mystic Pizza was filmed. Brandon actually ate at that restaurant and wasn't too impressed). So we'll probably end up going to that next weekend. The website didn't say there was an admission so I'm assuming its free. I hope I'm right. I also found this website called the Blue Star Museums Initiative. It has a list of hundreds of museums across the US that are offering free admission to military members and their families until Labor Day. How awesome! Brandon is also going to stop by the base movie theatre to see if they offer free movie showings. When we lived in Washington the base theatre used to show one or two free movies a month but I don't know if they do it here or not.

So that's been the past few days for me. Hopefully by my next update I'll have a cool name picked out for the experiment that I can share with everyone!