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No spend January, planned in advance

Written by the person who built Keep the Diff

No spend January is the most attempted version of this challenge and the one with the worst completion rate, and both facts have the same cause: it is decided on 31 December and started the next morning.

This is written in September deliberately. Everything below takes about twenty minutes and none of it can be done on New Year's Eve.

Why January is the hardest month to pick

January looks like the obvious month and is close to the worst one. Consider what is actually in it.

Christmas bills arrive in January. Anything bought in December on a card lands on a statement in the first fortnight, so the month opens with the largest bill of the year sitting against the month you have chosen to spend nothing in. Winter gives you fewer free things to do in most of the northern hemisphere. And the annual subscriptions people signed up for last January renew, silently, in this January.

So the month you picked because it feels like a fresh start is the month with the highest fixed costs and the fewest cheap distractions. That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to do the preparation, because a challenge that collides with a Christmas statement on day nine ends on day nine.

What to do before the end of December

  1. Audit the subscriptions now. Go through the card statement and find everything annual. Note the renewal date of each. The ones that renew in January are the ones that will land mid-challenge, and canceling in December costs nothing while canceling on the day of renewal is often too late.
  2. Write down what December actually costs. Not a plan for it, a record. You need one honest number for what a heavy month looks like, because that is what the January statement will be measured against.
  3. Decide the rules in writing, in advance. What counts as essential, what happens to a birthday in January, whether a planned trip is exempt. Every argument you have with yourself in January is one you could have settled in December, and the arguments are what people quit over.
  4. Pick the length honestly. Thirty one days is a long first attempt. A no spend fortnight that finishes beats a no spend month that stops on day twelve, and nobody but you knows which you promised.
  5. Decide where the money goes. If there is no destination the total is notional, and a notional number is one you stop believing in around week three.

The scoring problem, which January makes worse

Nearly every version of this is scored as a run of perfect days. One purchase on day nine takes the counter back to zero, and eleven days of real decisions vanish from the screen.

In January that reset is close to guaranteed, because January contains the Christmas bill, the renewals you missed and at least one birthday. A scoreboard that can only survive a quiet month is the wrong instrument for the loudest one.

The alternative is to count the money instead of the days. Each time you decide against something, write down what you were ready to spend and what you actually spent, and add the difference to a running total. Buy something on day nine and there is simply no entry that day. Nothing resets, and the total never goes backwards.

It also records the thing January is full of, which is the partial decision. You were going to spend ninety and you spent forty. Under a pass or fail challenge that is a failed day. Under a total it is fifty dollars, which is what it actually is.

A realistic January

Three or four decisions a week, most of them small, a couple of them large. A month written out line by line came to $640.89 across twelve decisions, and the whole month is worked through here, including the objection that some of those purchases were never going to happen anyway.

Expect January to be lower than that, because the fixed costs are higher and there is less discretionary spending to decline in the first place. A quiet January with $300 of recorded decisions is a good January, and it is a considerably better outcome than a perfect streak that ended on the eleventh.

What to have ready on 1 January

A list of the rules, the subscription renewal dates, a destination for the money, and somewhere to write two numbers down at the moment you decide. That last one can be a note on your phone. It only has to be faster than the impulse.

Keep the Diff is built for that step. It is free on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Windows, Android and Wear OS, with no account and no bank connection. If you would rather start on paper there is a sheet to print, and the calculator will tell you what a January total gets you toward whatever you picked as the destination.

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