Thinking About an Experient

I am thinking about trying a little experiment and posting the results here. Although I am in the middle of a house restoration and my time is severely limited, I still want to try this. I going with the extra income idea from the previous post.

I am going to start a very small, low frills online business. I really just want to see if I can generate any income. I am working on some ideas that will involve a very cheap, novelty product. I will most likely try to sell something on ebay/craigslist. I am not really sure what other outlets to use, as the whole idea is to stay cheap and see if I can generate any income at all.... Anything generated will go straight to the kids college fund. More to come.

Extra Income

There may be some of you out there that don't have a spending problem. You may have been through all of the budgeting and spending tools and programs . After all of that there still may not be any money left. You may just have an income problem. There just is not enough income to go around to take care of everyone in your family. Or, you may want to make a little extra income for the special things you have planned for your family. We are researching different ways to come up with a little bit of extra money on a part time basis, preferably from home.

One of the toughest things to do is to separate the scams from the legitimate opportunities. We have found a few opportunities and hope to find a few more that we can share.

If you have any suggestions on what has worked for you, please post a comment or send us an email.

After Christmas....

The three gift strategy posted earlier went very well for us this year. None of the kids complained and everyone had a good Christmas. We recommend it to others, it helps cut down on the Christmas spending and stays with the reason for the season.

We are finally getting ready to buy that new (used) car. We are going with an 8 passenger Ford Expedition. This will haul the entire family at once and still leave a small bit of room for the extras. This will just be the daily driver for mom so the minimal amount of extra room is not a concern right now.

We are getting close to the birth of the new baby. I am going to have some time off soon to research some more for future posts. Please leave a comment if you have questions of how we do things financially or otherwise. If you don't feel comfortable leaving a comment, you can cContact us at the email on the contact page.

Little by Little

I have been reading some other financial blogs that interest me. They have me very motivated to write this post. Many of them have the theme of getting rich quickly and making your money now! I am living proof that it is a terrible way to chase your dreams of wealth. I have chased the money in my career and it lead to unhappiness.

Now I have finally figured out how it is done! I have figured out how to attain wealth and stay happy and balanced at the same time. Hence the post title, Little by Little.

Spending the last 10 plus years trying to climb up as high as I can at a major telecommunications manufacturer, gathering all of the money that I could get for us, led to unhappiness. A few years ago, the lovely Dawn and I decide we were going to take a new approach. We were going to attain wealth little by little. We were going to eliminate all debt ( including the house) and put money away little by little. Well, we have been successful so far. We have had nothing but a house payment for the several years and soon will be rid of that house payment. This wasn't easy. We made some major lifestyle changes. We moved from our large nice house to a smaller older house that needed some work. We were talked about by our friends and our family. They thought we were nuts and had gone of the deep end! If only they could see our bank account grow like we see it, they would not think we were so nuts.

Getting rid of the other debt has allowed us to get rid of the mortgage (little by little). Soon, when the mortgage is gone, we will be putting that money away (little by little). I won't put exact numbers here, but do you have any idea how quickly little by little adds up? We are living proof that it adds up very fast. We will have our house paid off after three years of living there. This even includes all of the improvements that we are doing to it. After the mortgage, we will fully fund college for all six kids, little by little....Maybe they will be able to spell better than me with all of that education!

This little by little thing has relieved so much stress in our lives. There is not as much pressure on me to keep making more and more money to support our lifestyle. Guess what, I even enjoy my job more since we have taken this approach. I was even discussing this with my boss one day. He was telling me how his kids were telling him that they did not want a job like his because of the pressure and the hours. He even wants to find a less stressful career! I cant' blame him. Right now I am happy where I am.

We have even expanded our family little by little, now Dawn is about to give birth to our sixth child!

The little by little plan takes time, but your odds for success are very high! I'll post more of the little by little stuff to come.

Christmas Time.....

Christmas time... A time of celebration of Jesus' birth. It is important not to forget what Christmas is about. That is why we do something special on Christmas. Instead of going out and buying a bunch of toys for each of our five (soon to be six) children, we buy them three gifts each. This is what the wise men brought to Jesus at his birth (gold, frankincense, and myrrh). It is a good theme, we decided to stick to it. Not only does it keep Christmas spending in control, but it helps the kids learn the real "reason for the season".


We still buy them trinkets for the stockings in addition to the three gifts, but we are sticking to three main gift packages for each child. Please leave some comments on how you make it financially through the Christmas season.....


Sorry for the longtime between posts....

Money Saving Tips Without being "Cheap"....

I have been trying to document some of the money savings tips that we do in our house. It is hard since we are just so conditioned to it, we don't really think about what we do. I'll try to list a few below:

1) Buy used cars

This one to us is pretty obvious to us right now since we are shopping for one. We have bought new cars in the past, but we will never do it again. At least not until we are too old to care about our money. We can afford to buy a new car today without debt, we choose not to. This would be counterproductive to our savings strategy. We buy used cars and then donate them when we are done with them. We have donated one to a friend in need and we will most likely soon be donating another one. We are currently searching for another used car and will be purchasing one soon.

2) Plan meals

Another way we save money is to plan meals out for a month. This allows us to shop more efficiently for food. Trust me, when we don't plan we spend! This one is a huge one. We need to be more consistent with our planning. We are still working to perfect this one and discipline ourselves to follow it. Limiting our trips to the store saves us money! Let's face it, in a large family like ours, food is a large portion of our monthly outgo.....

3) Implement a spending control plan


Way back when we went through an experiment to see how much money we were spending every month and also to see what we were spending it on. We did ours by saving receipts from everything that we purchased for the day. We threw those into a envelope and then at the end of the month we totaled them up. So much for food, so much for gas,..... so much waste! It was amazing to see what we were wasting our money on. This was a real eye opener and I highly recommend that everyone try this for one month. It only works if you are true to yourself and really follow it!


I am running out of time for this post. If anyone else has any general large family money savings tips, please post them in the comment section. I will try to post some more of these soon.

Stressed for Time???

Is there not enough time in your day? Does the day fly by and you don't seem to get anything done. You may want to check out Manager's of Their Homes. This is a nice little product that we tried and it really works well for us at certain times of the year. Some of it is more oriented toward homeschooling, which we do not do, but it still works very well with all of the kids we have running around. I realize this post is a bit off topic, but for those of you that feel you don't have the time to give to your family finances, this could be for you.

This is really just a simple color coded scheduling system. You assign each person a color code and create a master schedule for the family. We use this heavily in the summer months and occasionally during the school year. The kids like it because they can check the schedule to see what comes up next in the day. It helps to reduce arguments and fits at bed time because they know it is coming at 9:00pm. Please check it out and see what you think.