Instead of making New Year’s Resolutions that they might not keep, the Dunning family in Davis, California, has decided to spend no money for the entire month of February. Well, the parents, Shelley and Bob Dunning, made this decision, and their four children are going along with it.

One reason driving their choice to cut down on consumption was the amount of money they spent over the Christmas holidays, which made Shelley Dunning, at least, feel that they should cut back.

No More Discretionary Spending

From ABC’s Sacramento affiliate, KXTV:

Shelley Dunning said the family plans to eat a lot of rice and frozen meat, so they went to Costco on Jan. 31 to stock up on other foods like butter, pasta, nuts, and peanut butter and jam. The only miscellaneous thing the family plans to spend money on is fresh milk for the kids.

Bob Dunning clarifies that the family is just vowing against discretionary spending, like a coffee or movie tickets here and there.

“It adds up real fast and I wasn’t sure if we could do it or not,” he said.

Resetting The Clock On Everything

How about gas for the car? The Dunnings plan to walk – not so easy for some of us, but both Shelley and Bob Dunning work from home.

Shelley is hoping that the experiment will reset their clock on everything, and that the family will be able to look back and see how much fun they had together.

The Compact

On a much bigger scale is The Compact. In December 2005, a group of friends in San Francisco, CA, made an agreement to go one year without buying anything new except food and health and safety items (though they could purchase secondhand products.) Their goal was to help preserve the environment by reducing the number of new products brought into it, as well as to simplify their lives.

The idea is still going strong; in fact, people around the world have taken up the idea.

Good luck to the Dunnings!

Think you could do it?