Spending Less & Bonding More

Starting this new year we want to get away from so much excess in our lives.  December seems to easily become a month of spending and splurging and justifying it all until you're blue in the face.  We did no less and were left taking a huge chunk of money out of our Emergency Fund, not so fun and exciting as those trips to Starbucks on a whim seemed at the time;).  It made me sick to think that we could have used that chunk of money we spent frivolously on nothing for a family trip to Disney (I know it takes a lot to go to Disney... I'm telling you we really know how to spend $).  Now it is done and over, and really its probably the best thing we could have done because it gave us some major motivation to really be intentional about managing our money better this year!

The first couple of weekends in January we thought, every time we leave the house we spend money so I guess we just have to stay at home...  this quickly turned into feeling like a long house arrest sentence with 2 energetic toddlers and 2 stir crazy parents!  The truth is pretty much every time we left the house on the weekends it would be for a trip to target, the mall, some other kind of errands and/or out to eat.  None of these activities were ideal dream outings for two toddlers and the money we spent doing them added up very quickly.  Our mission was born....  it was time to be intentional about how we spend our family time and our money in the process, luckily I think that working toward both goals could go hand-in-hand.

I am looking so forward to sharing our journey of filling our weekends with activities that are engaging for the whole family, ways of making some fun memories for the girls and ultimately spending less while bonding more.

Here is a working list of our weekend activities each weekend to spend less & bond more:
1.  Picnic at the park

(There will be a short post about each outing you can click through to read the whole post.)