Is this the perfect diet to add to your New Year's resolution? It saves cash, not calories

I never tire of the little upbeat bleep when I hover my credit card over a store's reader.

Somewhere in the back of my brain, that sound amps up the dopamine hit I'm already getting from the pile of groceries or a new shirt that I've just magically purchased.

Or, maybe it just fascinates me because I'm old.

It doesn't seem that long ago that I'd fuel up my car, walk inside the station and wait in line to hand my card over to the attendant. After a few long minutes, my card number would be crunched on to multiple pieces of paper that I needed to sign.

What a pain.

Waiting on the credit card process. Digging through your car's ashtray for a few extra quarters. With today's speedy payments, how often do we feel or think about the money we're digitally spending, or what some have called the pain of paying?

The sense that we'd lost touch with our finances brought our family to the cash diet. That and a $50 purchase at CVS.

We've combined portions of the five-part series about my family's cash diet that published this past summer. These highlights offer insights into how to start a cash diet and what else you might learn from the experience. You can find additional details in the original stories linked throughout.

How to start a cash diet – also called cash stuffing

There's nothing particularly difficult about the cash diet – other than sticking to it and only using cash for your purchases, making online shopping pretty much impossible. I would offer these three guidelines from our family's two previous cash diets:

◾ Set a time limit. A month, a week, even a weekend can be eye-opening. We quickly felt how much we used electronic payments. My preference is a month because you experience a full billing cycle, which offers a variety of benefits.

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◾ Make an educated guess at how much you'll spend. People often divvy up their money into envelopes based on what they'll spend at stores or restaurants. On the other hand, you could just set a pile of cash on your kitchen counter and see what happens. Whatever method you choose, you're not limited to how much cash you pull out of the bank – except for your bank balance.

◾ Have a safety net. This is just an exercise. Stick to it the best you can, but we are hewing ever-closer to a cashless society. So in addition to carrying a debit card, consider having a credit card ready for emergencies.

Cash diet 101:How to cash stuff, think about your spending and maybe save some money

How the Sergents muddled through their cash diet

Our most recent cash diet started this past spring. It might actually be easier in some ways to start your year on a cash diet, considering you might be foregoing alcohol, eating less and still be in a shopping coma. Our 28 days on the cash diet ended up cutting our month's spending by at least $1,000.

Did we succeed? Yes.

Were we perfect? No, not even close.

In our cash diet diary, you'll find that I once expanded the term "emergency" to mean "too lazy to find an ATM" at the low point of month. My wife and I had an enjoyable lunch outdoors on a beautiful day, and maybe I enjoyed it just a little bit more because I'd gone rogue.

A few tips from our latest experience

◾ Track where all your cash goes each day to get a better sense of your spending. I kept all of our receipts (I thought), but in the end, some receipts didn't make it back to the cash envelopes. So I'd suggest a second tab on the spreadsheet where you account for each day's cash disbursements.

◾ It's not "savings" if you spend the money in the next month. The money we saved – about $1,000 – went into our savings account along with the $2,000 I originally withdrew. Most of the $1,000 stayed in there when the windshield repair bill came in. Too much to explain here, but you can read our whole diary.

◾ The cash diet diet. After a couple of weeks, going to the grocery store became even more of a chore. If it wasn't the worry of arriving at the checkout line with too little cash, it was the embarrassment of facing another cashier with a mishmash of bills. As a result, we made much better use of the foods in our pantry that otherwise might still be sitting there.

Cash diet diet:3 recipes helped us save money and avoid the grocery store

Cash diet can help you sift through your subscriptions

A monthlong cash diet allows to you unearth all the subscriptions hiding on your credit card. That's one of the biggest benefits of the exercise. Sure, you know you have an Amazon Prime subscription on one card, a music service on another. But what about the bunch of little items scattered about? They can add up like they did for us in the chart below.

The Sergent family's laundry list of subscriptions

What we changed about our subscriptions after our cash diet

◾ Amazon Prime. Free shipping isn't really the draw now, and I don't need a pair of nail clippers in the next hour. So it came down to Amazon's vast library of music and TV shows vs. Spotify's music library and podcasts. We did come back for one month of "Thursday Night Football."

◾ ESPN+ Sort of. One son upgraded the Hulu subscription to add ESPN+ and Disney+. Other son already had an annual subscription to ESPN+, which he no longer does.

◾ Location sharing app. The price more than doubled from when we first subscribed, and we rarely use it now.

◾ A cable TV-internet bundle. We now have several channels from one provider and speedy internet from another. That cut those monthly expenses by more than $70.

There are a few more tips and charts in the original stories, but if this is where your education ends and your diet begins, good luck. And hopefully you can keep a few more dollars in your pocket (and bank account) in the new year.