Low spend-no spend September

I have seen this on social media, Oxfam are suggesting we all purchase second hand through September, trying to get the message out new things cost the planet resources, which when you think of how much is discarded, it does make sense. We do use charity shops, we have 3 in our village, but we don't get too much mainly books from them. 

I showed this image in my post back in July, the green section is the renewables resources we take each year, the red section is what we take which can never be replaced, as you see each year it gets worse. To carry on living as we do (that's we as in the whole planet) we are using 1.75 earths, we are killing our planet. 

Very wise words.

I get the message, it's headlines on another group I follow 1million women, they are based in Australia, but they have wonderful values. I have said before our governments don't want to stop the consumer, they gain taxes from every stage of the production to the final sell, they can't afford for all of us to stop shopping. 

We are bombarded every day with media adverts, you look up and item on line, and then bam you have loads of adverts all over your social media. Emails full of deals and fantastic stuff, which most of us don't need. These days you see huge storage facilities, where you can rent as much space as you want, to store stuff you don't need, these places were not required when I was a child. How many empty garages to you see locally, some are full of stuff. 

Success is measure by loads of people, by what they have.  

We are taking a step further, we have decided to do again, 'Low spend, no spend September', so rather than follow the advice in top picture to get second hand, we have decided to not spend instead, the only purchases will be food, and we will record each spend. We could other than dairy and fresh food manage the whole month without shopping, but that will run our cupboards and freezer really low, and with the way things are heading I would rather ensure we have food in the house. We have done it once before back in 2014  I have made Septembers calendar with room on each day for our spending, sadly last time I did not record the final results. The biggest shock last time was how much money we spent in local shops, you pop in for 1 item and can easily spend £10, we are now much better, treats are now again occasional rather than every day. 

I know most of you reading this have the same values as us, this won't be a hard thing to do, we don't regularly shop for non food items, we use what we have, and keep using it. It will be good to see if we are learning from our past mistakes.