Have you heard of intentional spending before? It’s something I first wrote about back in 2016 but it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately so I thought I’d share some more thoughts on what intentional spending means to me and how I make it work for our family so we can do more of the things we love to do.
Basically, intentional spending (to us anyway) is about consciously thinking about what we spend our disposable income on and allowing ourselves to spend our money on the things that will make us feel fulfilled and happy – either individually or as a family. We cut back on our spending in other areas to allow us the money to do this.
Intentional spending is something that we’ve always practised as a family – even before we knew it was actually a thing. Making memories and having fun as a family has always been a priority to me since I lost my Mum and my Brother when the kids were just babies.
I genuinely believe that life’s too short in my opinion not to do the things you love but our budget hasn’t always been able to support this ethos so we’ve had to make adjustments to what we do spend our money on so we have money available to do the things we want to do.
The biggest example of this in our lives so far was when we moved house just after my Mum passed away. We had our eye on a lovely house that was at the top end of our budget but we loved as it had more space than we’d ever need as a family of four. We changed our mind at the last minute though and went for the house we still live in now because, even though it was smaller than the first one, it was around 20% cheaper which as you can imagine made a huge impact on the amount we’d have to pay back each month.
We’ve never once regretted that decision and yes, we always want more space but the house we have isn’t tiny by any stretch of the imagination and we can extend out, convert the garage or add a conservatory if we want (which we do) so we definitely did the right thing for us. That’s not to say it’s the right thing for everyone though, I know the consensus would be to go for the best house you can afford as an investment but we chose to do something that would save money in one area so we could afford to do the things we wanted when the kids were growing up.
Another example, although not as large scale as choosing a house, is the fresh flowers that I love to buy. I generally will only buy them when I see a reduced bargain when I’m doing my weekly shop but even then, I include the amount I spend on them in my weekly shopping budget so buying them means cutting back on something else within my budget.
I don’t stand in the shop and cross something off my shopping list just because I’ve added a cheap bunch of flowers to my trolley but I do try and save money on something while I’m shopping to make up for it. I might try a cheaper brand of something I usually buy or I might buy one less pack of biscuits or not buy something at all (goodbye chocolate chip cookies).
We have two cars in our house and one is a lovely car that we bought when it was a year old and paid in full for it at the time as we’d saved for it. The other is a 10-year-old car that we bought last year for the grand total of £600 which I currently drive and even though I’d like a nice new car, we haven’t got money saved to pay for one in full and at the moment, I have other priorities. I have some travel plans for this year and if we were to start saving for a car or buy one on credit then it would take up valuable money from our budget that I could be using for funding our travel this year.
I know that you might not agree with some of the decisions we’ve made but we’ve really thought about them and decided to do the things that we think are right for our family. You might have different priorities and that’s totally OK – I won’t judge if you won’t. 😉
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