Growing up, us country kids would often pick up a long stick and then start doing a limbo dance. One of us would start humming a tune and we’d take turns trying to navigate our bodies under the stick. After each successful pass, we would lower the stick and see how low we could go.

We all were pretty bad at it at first, but we still did it. After some time, all of us improved with how low we could go. It was fun!

I realized that when it comes to our spending, we playing a limbo game with it. Instead of a stick we use our previous spending and with each month we tried to spend less. After we were able to do it, we would lower the spending some more. We kept repeating the process to see exactly how low we could go. Now, we rarely spend money on non-necessities. And for the necessities, well, we’re spending way less on those too!

Here are some of the things that help us to play “spending limbo”:

We have no spend days. On certain days, we avoid the store. All too often, we were visiting the store every day to pick up a few things…which turned into many things. First we tried one no spend day, then we’d add another day and then another day. Now we can go a full week without spending any money (not counting paying bills).

We sometimes take it pretty slow. How low can we set our heat? During the day, while my son is in school and my husband and I are the only ones home, we have our heat set at 64 degrees. We tried doing it like that right off the bat, but we both were freezing so we turned the heat back up to 67. After a while, it went down to 66…then 65…and now it is at 64. It may even go lower by the end of winter.

We don’t purchase things on impulse. We were $37,000 in credit card debt. We were very good at impulse purchases! For the first level, if we saw something attractive in the store, we would walk around the store a while first before purchasing it. Sometimes, we would change our minds. For the next level, we had to leave the store. Now, if I see something attractive in the store, we go home and I’ll often research it on the web and if it still looks nice we’ll go back to the store in a few days.

We plan purchases. We used to make a mental list of things we needed before we went to the grocery store. The result? We were spending way too much with each trip! We’d forget what was on the list and buy tons of things that weren’t on the list! Now, I have a computerized list of things that we regularly purchased. Before each trip, I go through my sheet and take a quick inventory of what we have so we have a clear plan of what we need to buy.

We understand that sometimes we may slip. Just like with the limbo dance, you can’t always get under the stick the very first time. We don’t always reduce our spending every time. The key with playing “spending limbo” is to keep trying and to keep challenging yourself. We view it as a game, and even though some months we may not be able to lower the spending bar, we are having fun trying.

Photo Credit: 1

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Tricia is the blogger behind Blogging Away Debt. In her blog, she documents her family’s journey to pay off over $37,000 in credit card debt. Part of her debt reduction plan included a loan from Prosper.com. It originated in June of 2006 and was paid in full in October of 2007.