Keep the Diff Premium Download
All articles

No spend challenge tips, and the ones you can skip

By , who built Keep the Diff

Search for no spend challenge tips and you get the same list from everybody. Set a clear goal. Pick a month without a wedding in it. Write down your essential bills first. Tell your friends so they hold you to it. Find free things to do. And, near the end, some version of go easy on yourself, because most people do not finish.

The list is decent advice. Look at it again, though, and it splits cleanly in two, and the split is worth seeing before you start.

Half of these tips are about money. The other half are about the scoreboard

Some of the standard advice genuinely helps you spend less. Knowing what your fixed bills are before you begin. Having a specific thing you are saving toward. Finding out what your town does for free.

The rest is damage control for the way the challenge is scored.

Choose a month with nothing happening in it. Tell people so you cannot quietly stop. Forgive yourself when you slip. Do not be too hard on yourself the first time. Every one of those exists because a no spend challenge is a run of perfect days, and one purchase ends it. They are advice about surviving a pass-or-fail counter, dressed up as advice about money.

Which means a good half of the received wisdom on this subject would simply evaporate if the challenge were scored differently.

Why "pick an easy month" is the tell

This tip appears in almost every list, and it is the clearest evidence of the problem.

You are being told to schedule your attempt at spending less for the period when you were least likely to spend anyway. December is out. Birthdays are out. The month with the wedding is out. What you are left with is the month where the challenge asks the least of you.

If the point were the money, the month with the wedding in it would be the interesting one, because that is where the decisions actually are. The reason to avoid it is that a binary scoreboard cannot survive it, and the tip protects the scoreboard.

The tips that survive either way

Strip out the scoreboard management and a short list is left. These are worth doing whatever format you use.

  1. Know your fixed costs before you start. Rent, utilities, insurance, transportation, groceries, medication. The point is to settle what counts as "essential" in advance, before you are standing at the register.
  2. Have something specific in mind. A named thing with a price beats an abstract intention to save, because a number you are heading toward makes each decision feel like it went somewhere.
  3. Pick the categories that are actually yours. For most people the money leaks through two or three things. Naming them beats a blanket ban you will not keep.
  4. Find out what is free near you. This is the only tip on any of these lists that adds something to your life.
  5. Write the decision down at the moment you make it. This is the one everybody skips, and it is the one that does the work. More on it below.

The tip nobody gives, which matters more than the rest

Not buying something leaves no trace. No receipt, no notification, no line in a bank feed. By the evening you have genuinely forgotten you did it.

The missing trace is the real reason these challenges feel like deprivation. Every purchase you make leaves a record, and every purchase you skip leaves nothing, so the month ends feeling like a list of things you went without and no list at all of what you gained.

Give the decision a record and the feeling inverts. Write down what you were ready to spend and what you actually spent, at the moment you decide. A note on your phone is enough. The difference is a number, and by the end of the month those numbers add up to something you can look at.

Writing it down takes about ten seconds, and it changes what the month is. You end up with a total, and a total is the only honest answer to the question people are really asking: "what did this get me?"

What to do on the day you break the challenge

You will buy something. Most people do, and the standard advice knows it, which is why every list ends with a paragraph about being kind to yourself.

Here is a more useful answer: keep going, and keep the days behind you. If you have been recording the money, keep going: the total you have built is still sitting there, and the purchase you just made simply does not add to it. Nothing resets and nothing goes backwards.

Then look at the purchase honestly. Was it a decision or a lapse? A no spend challenge that makes you buy nothing at all was never realistic. One that makes you notice what you buy is doing exactly what it should.

Spending less counts too, and most lists forget it

Nearly all of this advice is binary: you either bought or you did not. The common case sits in between. You were going to spend ninety dollars and you spent forty. You took the cheaper option, the smaller size, the repair instead of the replacement.

Under a pass-or-fail challenge that is a failed day. Under a running total it is a fifty dollar entry, which is what it actually is. For most people these partial decisions outnumber the outright refusals, so a format that cannot see them is missing the majority of what they did.

The short version

Keep the tips about knowing your bills, naming a goal, choosing your real categories and finding free things to do. Ignore the ones about picking an easy month and forgiving yourself, because they solve a problem you can simply remove. And add the one nobody lists: write the decision down, with the amount, at the moment you make it.

Keep the Diff exists to make that last step take three taps instead of ten seconds, and to add the numbers up for you. It is free to log on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Windows, Linux and Android, there is a version that runs in your browser with no install, and a sheet you can print if you would rather use paper. The reasoning behind the scoring is in a separate post.

More on this