More than a decade ago my wife and I decided to try a cash diet: essentially ditching our credit cards, Apple Pay, Venmo, anything digital and paying for everything in cash.
Since the pandemic, a cash diet—also called cash stuffing— isn’t easy whether it’s for a few days, a few weeks or for a complete billing cycle like we did. The results were worth it:
- We all became a bit more mindful about our spending.
- We spent less than we did in previous months. We couldn’t lower the inflated prices at the grocery store, but the final bills were much smaller.
- Our online purchases fell to zero, except for recurring subscriptions. More on those later.
Cash diet 101:How to cash stuff, think about your spending and maybe save some money
I began this journey, illustrated in a few panels here by Veronica Bravo, with more trepidation than the last, considering our much more digital world and two college-age sons toting credit cards. You can read a more detailed account here.
In reality, I wasn’t terribly surprised to find subscriptions filling up our credit card statements at the end of our cash diet, but the totals were eye opening. You can read here about all of our subscriptions, and what we’ve done about a few of them so far.
Tips for tracking and stashing your savings
Some tips to track your cash diet (one I wish I’d considered before embarking):
- Put all your credit card expenditures from a recent month in a spreadsheet. Organize them in groups and total them. That establishes how many envelopes you’ll need and a benchmark for how much money you’ll want in each.
- Track where all your cash goes each day. I kept all of our receipts (I thought), but in the end, some receipts didn’t make it back to the cash envelopes. So I’d suggest a second tab on the spreadsheet where you account for each day’s cash.
- It’s not “savings” if you spend the money in the next month. That $1,000 went into our savings account along with the $2,000 I originally withdrew.
