Can you save $1 a day?

Mr. Steady recently came home with a challenge...don't spend any $1 bills for one month. He had heard Neal Boortz **talking about this and thought it was a great idea.

As we lay in bed that night talking about this challenge I posed the question of what we would do with the extra money. We are in a season of our lives where every penny is needed. Mr. Steady, as usual, had a great idea. We take every extra dollar bill and apply it towards a nasty, ugly, stupid loan we have hanging over our heads.

Do you know how many dollar bills you spend in a week? Boortz describes it this way: If you have $5 in your pocket and you want a coffee and a newspaper, you don't buy it because you need that $5 for lunch. But if you have $7 or $8 in your pocket you don't think twice because you have the extra $2-$3. What if you saved that $2-$3 and only spend $5, $10, and $20? or if you're blessed the occasional $50 or $100?

We have been credit and debit card free for the past two years. We use cash to pay for groceries, gas, nearly everything that isn't a bill to be mailed. So this would work for us. And we stopped using our pocket coins about three years ago so we've essentially just upped the ante. We saved almost $100 in three years just by not spending pocket coins.

I had to buy a few needful things this week as did Mr. Steady and in the course of 1 week we were able to save $29 in $1 bills only. Think of how much faster that ugly loan will be gone if we continue to do this. Once the loan is gone we can apply the extra to some medical bills we have and then maybe when we're old and gray we can actually put the extra in a savings account and watch it grow. Or use it to bless someone else, the way we've been blessed by other's generosity.

What about you...can you stop spending dollar bills for one month? What will you do with it?

**Please note that I am in no way endorsing Neal Boortz, I honestly can not stand to listen to him and I am perpetually offended by him and his website. I only linked to his website in case someone doesn't know who he is.