October Challenge Update – Day 9

I’m almost a third of the way through my October Challenge, and I’ve so far been fairly successful. Here are the basic numbers:

Amount spent: $25.82
Budget so far: $29.03
Difference: -$3.21
Difference in Days: –0.995

The difference in days is assuming that each day is worth $100/31 days, which is about $3.2258 per day. I’m fairly excited that I’ve been able to keep it under budget.

Reflections so far

My goal for the first couple of weeks here has been to go through all of the food in my refrigerator and freezer before I move on the 15th. At this point it’s looking like I’ll have most of it cleared out in time. As a result, I haven’t hit my reserve of rice too hard yet. I expect to start draining that after the move.

Probably the only completely unnecessary thing that I’ve purchased so far this month was a pizza. I had fast food on a day that I was on the road. I’m OK with that. I’ve been getting a burger for lunch at a bar with coworkers on Mondays, I think tomorrow will be the last time I get to do that. The soda so far hasn’t been excessive. Well, as least it hasn’t been as excessive my typical amount. I have been fairly successful with switching to tea at home.

Protip for anyone planning on switching from soda to tea: Green tea has somewhere between ½ and ⅓ the caffeine as most sodas. If you’re as addicted as I probably am, you’ll want to back off a bit at a time or have some other caffeine supplement for a while. Otherwise you’ll have extreme sleepiness and possibly headaches. I speak from experience.

Since I have a lot of flour and such around I made something resembling Indian Naan, but with a few changes to the ingredients depending on what I had on hand. I fried it in a skillet. The results were… edible. Not great by any means, but edible. I might take another stab at it, but probably not until next week. Also, probably not without milk, that seems to have been a mistake.

All in all, I’ve made it so far at or under budget. It’s not playing out exactly how I was expecting at first, but I’m happy with the experiment so far. I think it’s still too early to do any kind of analysis. I expect the last week to be the most interesting.

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