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.

Unexpected Expenses!

We ran into some unexpected expenses this week. Luckily for us, we were prepared for it. Our no debt strategy paid off again! My truck, which I use to drive all over the place for work, had some problems this week. I came out from where I was working and found oil all over the place! I was thinking the worst! I had it towed to the dealer for the night. I would stop in and talk to the service manager in the morning when they opened.

Since many people call the dealership the "stealership", I needed to investigate my problem and arrive armed with knowledge. I jumped on my favorite websites that discussed trucks like mine and did some searching. I found out that the problem was not as bad as I had thought and I could go in and talk intelligently with the service manager. It all worked out. Although, it still cost us over $1000 after the rental car and tow, etc. Luckily, since we have no debt, we have plenty of money saved for situations like this. They don't hurt us nearly as bad as they would if we were loaded down with debt. The lack of stress associated with the situation makes it all worthwhile.


We are still looking for a car. We have also been looking for a Chevy Safari or Astro van. We need anything that will hold eight passengers....We will update when we know more...

More Grocery Money Savings...

We have run across this website that has some good ideas about saving money on food. While we do not agree with everything on the site, there are some good ideas here. Some of the recipes and stuff may not be real healthy, but some may be useful to you. There is a lot of information on this site. Feel free to check it out. Don't be scared by the name.....www.hillbillyhousewife.com

A New Car...

Well, we have officially outgrown the minivan. We are preparing to by a new car. Since we have a large family, we have some extra requirements. We have to have a vehicle that seats eight, with room for some other kid stuff. We are currently looking at a used Chevy Suburban with the third row seat. This will give us eight seats with extra room in the back for baseball/football gear and the other adventurous stuff that we do as a family. Luckily we have plenty of time to plan this out and get the best deal that we can.


We are currently researching to get the best deal. Does anyone have any suggestions? Please leave comments if you do. We plan to document this process and we will post some more on this as it develops.

We are also working on a couple of more post that will have some good links in it for other sites that can help with your large family needs......

Back to school time....

This is a tough one for us, so we are hoping to gather some comments from you for ideas. This is one of the big expenditure times of the year for us. We have to buy all of the school supplies on the list, then new shoes for everyone that will hopefully last all year. After reading the stringent list that the school puts out, I beg my wife to homeschool so we can get away from the school's stupidity! ( We are still in discussions about homeschooling) They tell us that we have to have a certain name brand of scissors! What, is there a bonus plan tied to this!

And then to fight the crowds in the school supply aisles. Do these people only come out once a year and practice their social skills at this event?

I promise, the next post I'll try to be more positive. Please leave your comments and let us know how you do it.

Mortgage Monster.....

Here is a post of an article that we wrote for syndication. We will be submitting it shortly. It definitely applies to the debt free attitude that we have. We tried to write it with a bit of an entertainment twist. We will see how it does. We hope it helps someone......

• The Mortgage Monster!

I have to admit. I have been telling my kids for years that monsters are not real. I am here to confess, I was wrong. This monster has attacked most of us reading this. We have fallen victims to the dangerous hungry monster. This monster is so hideous; it robs us of our children’s future, it steals our retirement! It is the Mortgage Monster!!!!!!

In all seriousness, debt in general is a destroyer of families. Most divorces occur in this world today because of money problems. Debt and irrational spending is the biggest part of these money problems. What is your largest debt? It is most likely your mortgage. If it is not, you are smart, renting, or flirting with disaster.

Did you know that even with today’s fairly low interest rates you could still pay a hundreds of thousands of extra dollars for your house by the time you pay your mortgage off? It is true. On a very conservative $130,000 mortgage at 6.5% interest for 30 years, the borrower will pay a total of $159,984.40 in interest alone. So, after you have paid the entire loan back you have spent a total of $289,984.40 the original cost of the house plus interest. Now look at the same loan, with $170,000 principal. The borrower will pay $209,210.37 in interest charges! Let’s say you live in one of the “hot markets” and you have to borrow $350,000 for that little ranch that you have had your eye on. You will pay $430,727.23 in interest charges over the life of that loan! That does not include any improvements or repairs that you may have done to the property. If you bought those improvements and repairs on credit, it would be even more disastrous!

Why do we do it? Why do we let our wallets fall into the jaws of the Mortgage Monster? Many believe it is the only way to buy a house. Housing costs can be out of reach, but don’t you think that is the way that the lenders want it? Of course they do, they want to protect their business, and they want to continue to make a ton of money. I could go on and on about the many reasons why we fall prey, but there is plenty of information about this subject.

I am not saying that mortgages are completely evil. In fact, to some they are a necessary evil. I myself used to have a huge mortgage, and then I wised up. We came up with a plan. We decided to sell our house with the large mortgage and by an older “fixer upper” in an older neighborhood. This house was considered to be way below our means. People made fun of us for moving into this house in this older neighborhood and giving up our beautiful large house in the new neighborhood. People would say: “Why would you want to give up that house? It was so beautiful.” It was also about $100,000 more in cost. Do you know what that translates to? It translates to about $220,000 in interest payments over the life of the loan. We realized our house does not make us the people that we are…

This time we are going to do it right! Our mortgage on our new house is much lower; we put a large sum of money down from the sale of the big house. We ended up borrowing $114,000 on our house. You are probably saying: “What? Wait a minute! I thought you hated the Mortgage Monster?” Well I certainly do! One thing we learned, was if you need a mortgage, learn everything you can about how the process works. There are a lot of dishonest people out there that will try to take advantage of you. We can see that from reading the papers today. Many people were talked into loans that can't repay.

My lovely wife and I came up with a fantastic plan to pay off our mortgage. We found out the best way to kill the Mortgage Monster was to feed it so fast that it could barely grow. Seems a bit backwards doesn’t it? It doesn’t seem backwards if you follow the principles of compound interest. You see, the Mortgage Monster needs time to digest your money to make it big and fat. If we can keep it from getting big, fat, and happy, we can make ourselves happy!

We sharpened our pencils and found every extra penny in our budget . We took every available surplus that we had and put it into our mortgage payoff fund. We will have paid off that $114,000 mortgage in about three years. We are still doing it, methodically. We have about $5,000 dollars to go. We will have it completely paid off within 14 months of the time of this writing. We will also have saved about $115,000 in interest charges! Then we will be completely debt free! We will no longer have to work so hard to feed the evil Mortgage Monster.

This has not been an easy task. Although not easy, it is very do-able. We had to take a hard look at our lifestyle and make some difficult choices, but it is well worth it knowing that we are the best managers of our resources that we can be. Do you know what the best part about it is? We will save about $115,000 in interest payments! We will be able to take the money that we were paying towards mortgage payments and invest them in our children’s education and our family's future. They will have a future! Hopefully it will be a future without mortgage payments to the Mortgage Monster.

Rick Bolt

Husband of one

Father of six

Mortgage Monster Conqueror

rick.bolt@gmail.com

http://allbolt.blogspot.com

http://largefamilyfinances.blogspot.com

I admit the article is a bit "dorky". It is a little fun though....

So how do you get the little bit extra?

So after the last post you may be saying; How do I get the little bit extra? Well, we are glad you asked! It is really pretty easy to get some extras when you know what you are spending your money on.

The first thing to do is anytime you spend any amount of money at all, get a receipt! It doesn't matter if you spent $1.12 on a cola at the gas station, get a receipt for it. At the end of the day, put the receipts in a large envelope. You then can periodically (ie, weekly) go through the receipts and try to categorize your spending. Categorize by food, gas, housing, etc. You will then see where your money goes.

Another important thing that you will see from this is where your money is wasted. You could discover that you are sending $35 a week on lunch when you are at work. You can then add that up to a yearly cost. For example, $35 per week, 50 work weeks per year (35x50) equals $1750. That is almost $2000 per year spending on just lunch.

Here is your chance to make a big change. We like to call these lifestyle changes. You can take your lunch to work and put that $1750 in your savings account or even the kid's college fund. (After all, if you are like us, we will need to save to send six kids to college.) That is just one example. You may have three or four spending items that you can cut out and save with. You can quickly build up a savings by reviewing your lifestyle choices and weigh them to what is more important.


It will take discipline to make that lifestyle change, but it will add up quickly and be worth it.

Saving--->Every Little Bit Helps!

It is true, every little bit you save helps. Many people get discouraged because they are not saving enough. Set a goal that you can reach. Once you reach that goal set it higher and watch your savings multiply. It takes time and discipline at a minimum. It is harder to save when you have a large family. The average large family has many needs. Sometimes in order to save more, we need to make some serious lifestyle decisions. We did it. Dawn and I sat down one day and decided to list the things that are important to us and stick with our decisions. One thing we commited to was to never have a car payment again. We have since stuck with it. We have not had a car payment in several years. This has freed up a huge amount of cash flow every month, which allows us to save much more money. We may not drive the latest cars that we can "afford", but we are able to save a substantial amount of money, but removing the car payments from our life. It has also helped us to feel more financially stable while raising a large family. We have made several other decisions since then, I'll share those in the posts to come.

Where to Start......

Having a large family can put a strain on your finances. One thing that we would like to do is to help to share the ways that we have overcome some of this strain. One of the ways that we have done this is by reading a book called Miserly Moms, by Jonni McCoy. We first picked this book up when Dawn was pregnant for our fist child more than ten years ago. Dawn and I knew that raising our children was more important than an extra income. Dawn really wanted to quit her job to stay home and raise the kids, we just needed to figure out a way that we could do it financially. We were young and starting out when a friend of mine from work recommended this to this book to me. We will do a short review of the book here. Please leave comments and let us know what has helped you.


For starters, this book is very helpful for large families because it discusses many ways to cut expenses. For example, it covers how we waste so much money without even realizing it. It also uncovers the "cost" of working. How going to that job every day costs you a lot more money then you may think. It also covers how to reduce grocery and clothing costs.

One of the best parts of the book is how to cut the grocery bill. I know in our house, the grocery bill one of the largest "black holes" of money. Ms. McCoy covers many ways to reduce the grocery bill, from making certain things homemade to not buying certain convenience items. She goes into great detail (with examples) on how much you can save. As an example, one of the little things we do is to make homemade maple syrup. It takes about as much time to make this as it does to boil water. A bottle of syrup cost $1.59, we can make the same amount for 11 cents. Now, you may be saying, not this not much of a savings. Well, if you are like my family ( 2 adults, soon to be six kids) we go through a few bottles of syrup a week. See below:

3 bottles of syrup per week 52 weeks per year.

3 x 52= 156

That's 156 bottles of syrup per year...

Store cost per year: 156 bottles x $1.59 = $248/year

Homemade cost per year: 156 bottles x $.11 = $17/year


That is a savings of about $231 per year. That could pay a winter heating bill! That is only one example, I will give more in the posts to come....

There is a tremendous amount of research that went into this book. Mrs. McCoy covers what are good deals at warehouse clubs and what are not. This book will pay for itself several times over, even if you just implement a few of the ideas in her book! If you are trying to go from two incomes to one, or just starting out and trying to save money, this book is an excellent resource.

You may be able to pick up this book at your local library, if not it is still available at Amazon . Just follow this link to go directly to Miserly Moms.

Large Family Financial Issues

This is the launch of the Large Family Financial Blog. This blog will cover financial issues that arise when raising a large family. There is so much joy and responsibility in having a bunch of little ones running around. This blog will help to sort out the details on how to make it financially while raising a large family. More details to come soon!