The Beginning (Day 1)

The Austerity Project? Yes, Austerity - from the definition "extreme or enforced economy" from Merriam-Webster. For the month of February, my family and I are embarking on a new journey: austerity. Here's the breakdown:

The Players.

Justin, my husband--blacksmith extraordinaire, happy (and tired!) new father, and lover of fine food, art, and other 'toys.'

Kim (me) --waitress at a local brew pub, most of the time an at-home mom, frequenter of the local coffee house, and also lover of fine food, wine, jewelery,and other 'gadgets.'

Liam--our new joy! He's 10 months old, and has sent us scurrying to find places for all of our breakable items. He doesn't have much of an opinion about this project, but I'm including him anyway.

The Reasons.

My hubby and I have been married for 6 years, and for that time we have struggled to pay our bills, save "enough" money for the future, and still have enough to buy (and/or make) the things we want. We love art of all sorts - photography, sculpture, paintings, woodwork, pottery, metalwork, and many others I haven't named here. Because these more obvious art pieces usually cost so much, we have a lot of pottery, but not a lot of other artwork. I enjoy these pottery pieces, though, because they are beautiful AND functional. I get to use and enjoy them on a daily basis.

We also LOVE food. I think this is our downfall. We love expensive, gourmet food. We love down-home cooking....and everything in between. We both love to cook, and experiment in the kitchen regularly. As our knowledge of food and collection of recipes grows, the grocery budget has gotten difficult to contain. Recently, we have added to this a very real concern about where the food we eat is raised and processed. It has become increasingly obvious that "you are what you eat," and what is available in the grocery store is just not what we choose to become. So, the budget has been further stretched by our desire to buy local, organic (if possible) meat. Daunting at the check-out line sometimes, but we believe it's vital to our personal health, and the greater good.

This year, we also got caught up in the consumerism of the Holiday season. This over-exuberance about December 25th, combined with a few other purchases, has led to a strain on the checkbook. This reflects a general appreciation for cool new gadgets that we find, and a love of all things new and pretty. In short, at times we get caught up in buying things we can't afford. Therefore, in order to pay off some bills, and reclaim a sense of balance in the midst of the consumerism we are faced with daily, we decided to embark on this project.

The Rules.

We sat down and came up with this list of rules:

*Cut the Grocery Budget for the month to $62.50. This will (hopefully) cover some fresh foods, and any essentials we happen to not have. Besides this, we will be cleaning out our pantry shelves.

*A $10 emergency allowance. "Emergency" can be defined many ways, so we'll see how long that lasts. :)

*Minimal car usage. We would like to carpool, and park our car as much as possible this month. In the middle of a very snowy New England winter, we need to use the car for work, but will minimize its usage otherwise.

*We will find some fun, free things to do throughout the month

*We did decide to keep our automatically recurring Netflix account for the month, but will try to be less focused on nightly TV as having some other old-fashioned fun.

So, there you have it. I am hoping that this will be a period of creativity (I'm guessing especially in the culinary department!), and that even after our project has ended, we will continue to see the world a little more clearly.

I will blog about our progress each day, the ups and downs of not spending any money, and in general how we survive our month. As I am posting this first post a day late, I will write again later today.