Introducing Josephine Faith!

Hello friends! It’s been quite a while. Please allow us to introduce our newest member! Josephine joined our family in early September and we are over the moon! She’s a calm, quiet, snuggly bundle of goodness. Hannah and Xander are very happy proud big siblings.

Our debt pay off has not been great. Basically we join you right  where we  left off. One thing after another and a surprise (but welcomed) pregnancy have left us just treading water. (Plus some extra medical debt now)Now that she’s here and we are all healthy and happy it’s time to get gazelle!!! We will be sharing lots of our money saving ways here, not just to to help you out friend, but to keep us accountable,

Let’s do this together!

We promise to never sell you a course or a book or anything. If you’re reading this you are probably where we are and buying a course to help save money just doesn’t make sense. So this blog and our YouTube channel will remain free ways for you to learn from us.  Please comment so we can learn from you and others can to. 

Stay tuned!

❤️

Updates

Hello friends!!

I feel like lately life has gotten away from us. We have been so busy! Every weekend and week day night have been jam packed since Hannah started back at school. Now that the holidays are upon us it seems to be even busier! For the first time in a long time I am actually looking forward to the boring cold days of winter so we can catch our breath. Don't get me wrong, I love being with friends and family and doing all these activities but it's feeling a little jam packed like my schedule may burst at the seams.

Anyways, I would like to just throw up a little update for you guys. We paid off our van!! That frees up 250 dollars extra a month for our snowball and we are beyond excited!! We really feel like we can make it though this journey .While we can't quite see this finish line yet, we know it's there. We received our letter today saying the loan was paid and out title. It is such a good feeling to know WE own that van now and not the bank.

As far as my job, for now, no news is good news. It is still in limbo so we are working like crazy to get enough debt paid off so if I do lose it, it won't be a huge blow to us.

Other than that, our tree is up and we have plenty of holiday festivities planned .Of course, we will try to share as much of them as we can with you.

Happy Holidays friends! We hope you are all blessed with a fantastic holiday season.

Talk to you soon!

Resetting Our Grocery Budget!

Hello friends! When we first started our YouTube channel it was all about how we were living on a grocery budget of 30 dollars a week. I decided that for the January we are going to do that again for one month.

I want to show you that it is possible to survive and thrive on a super low grocery budget.


I am going to show you every meal we make and every grocery trip we take.
 I am giving us until January so we have as little as possible stock piled in our pantry and freezer. Because not everyone will have that stockpile and while it is nice, it isn't essential.


Whether you are living on a small income or you just want to reduce your expenses, this blog series will be for you. We will chonicle some of it on the youtube channel but most of it will be here on the blog. I hope you come and read all about it and I really hope it helps!

5 Tips For A Successful Yard Sale

We had a garage sale over Labor Day Weekend. It was our most successful garage sale ever, we sold most everything we put out! I want to tell you about what I learned and what I think worked to make our garage sale a success.

1.Price To Sell

Don't think of how much you paid for it when you got it, and price it that way. 

Price it to sell!

Remember that you are selling it used, and people came looking for a good deal.

That being said, make sure to make SOME money don't price everything for a quarter or you 

will be wasting your most precious resource, time.  Also, take into account that most people will want to pay less than you marked so keep it at a fair price but something you could negotiate down too.

2. Be Willing to Negotiate

 People almost always haggle at garage sales. If what they are negotiating a price for is something that you know no one else has picked up, looked at or seemed interested in then negotiate a price you and the person buying it feel is fair. Remember that getting something for it is better than nothing at all. Also, when you see people who are getting a lot of things make them an extra deal to get them to buy even more. We did a lot of buy 2 get 1 or 3 for a certain price. This worked wonders.

3. Have Lots of Signs

This one was key to our yard sale success. Advertising is important and you will never get as good of advertising as you will with well places signs. Invest in some bright poster board (dollar store sells them for .50 each)  and some sign stakes. Make sure if you are a little ways away from major streets to have extra signs pointing people to your house. 

4. Advertise!! 

There are many ways to advertise your sale. I prefer to use the free ones. 

Craigslist is a great way to advertise for free. Make sure  you list a lot of things you are selling so your ad will show up when people are searching for more than just yard sale. List baby clothes, specific toys, products and furniture. It will drive more traffic to your ad. Make sure to take a lot of pictures of your items, pictures always help to get more people to your sale.

Facebook buy/sell/trade pages are a fantastic way to advertise for free too. Try to find one for your specific neighborhood and neighborhoods close by. Don't forget to add lots of great pictures of the things you are selling.

5. Half Price At The End Of The Sale

At the last couple of hours of your sale of even the last day. Make everything half off! Make a new ad on Facebook and Craigslist and make an extra small sign to put on your neighborhood signs saying that everything is half price. You will get A LOT of traffic at that point and remember what I said earlier, it's far better to get something for it than nothing at all. 

A Day With Xander

Yesterday I went to the museum with Xander, all day. I didn't work, I didn't blog, I didn't answer emails, I didn't vlog. I just focused on my newly 2 year old son.

It was the best day! We spent the day learning, talking and playing. I got to really focus on his voice and his little view of the world. We didn't rush through anything. I let him lead me to where he wanted to go, which was the African prairie display 9 out of 10 times.

                    

He was so excited to share with me his major love of all things Zebra. I was excited to listen to his squeals of joy and zebra facts he rattled off to me. "Zeeyas are black and white momma", "I love zeeyas" are the only facts he really can articulate, but  I appreciated them :D

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Time goes by so fast and I want to revel in every minute I have with my children. That's why I have decided that once a week I will spend unplugged, uninterrupted time with each of them. This day reminded me of just how important that is.

Do you spend unplugged, un-phoned time with your kids? What's your favorite thing to do with your kids?

Blowing Up The Log Jam

I was watching a video clip of Dave Ramsey's Radio show a couple weeks ago. (Did you know you can watch the radio broadcast live on daveramsey.com ? Or clips on youtube here ) The clip I was watching had a caller on the line asking Dave what he could do when he felt like he just couldn't get traction. He was making enough to just pay all the bills and minimum payments. Dave told him something has to give. You need to sell something or increase your income. He compared it to when loggers used to float logs down stream and they would all get so stuck, this is called a log jam. To get the logs moving again the loggers would have to use dynamite to blow up the log jam. Once the log jam was gone everything could keep flowing smoothly down river.


With my probable job loss (the company I work for is being sold) and having to save my income for now, we have our very own log jam. I keep having to pull some out of savings just to keep our payments (our gazelle intense payments) the same. So, I am having a hard time reaching our savings goal, which is 2500 dollars . The reason we chose 2,500 instead of the 1,000 dollars Dave Ramsey recommends is because we want to be prepared for a job loss and a possible big emergency at the same time. Our insurance deductibles for our house and car are both set to 2,500 to save us some money every month in the premium. If an emergency came up where we needed that deductible, we need to make sure we have it safe and sound in the bank. We need to do this as quickly as possible.


So, that is our log jam and here is how we are going to bust it! We are having a yard sale. A huge one. I have asked some friends to come and sell too. The reason I asked friends to come and sell is the more you have out there the more likely people are to stop and shop. I have been going through every nook and cranny of our house and boxing up anything that we no longer use, or barely use . If we barely use an item we can more than likely borrow that item from someone and don't really need to own it. As I have been going through our home I am realizing HOW MUCH STUFF we have. I wish I could go back and kick myself for every item I bought and never used or used once. I have 15 boxes and a couple garbage bags FULL of stuff, ready to be sold! I am pricing everything to move because we are not taking it back into our tiny home. Anything left will be donated. We are hoping to make a couple hundred bucks and blow up the log jam for good! All of the garage sale money should be going into savings. If we do make more than expected I will take a tiny bit out of the profits to do something fun with the family.

The Value of Memberships

Hey guys!! How are you?? We are plugging right along on our debt free journey, slow and steady wins the race.

I wanted to talk to you guys today about entertainment on a budget. One of our favorite ways to have fun and not spend a lot of dough is through memberships to different places. We actually have three of them and it has saved us tons of money! We always have a place to go to meet friends or take family from out of town. We have extra passes that came with each membership so we can take friends and family with us. Since we can invite them along we don't need to meet at a restaurant or any other place that would end up costing us extra, and since we can take a picnic along to each place, we save even more.

We have one for the zoo ; that we bought for Xander on his birthday. This zoo is so big! Instead of rushing around to see everything in one trip we now get to take our time and look at just a few animals a visit. We find many teachable moments at the zoo too. Xander (and even Hannah!) is learning so much and so fast.The zoo never really gets old either, because the animals are always doing different things!

We also have one to a beautiful nature center. I can't even tell you how nice it is to leave the city behind and take a walk in the woods when ever you want. Also, talk about learning opportunities! Xander is learning about trees, animals and plants and even how to catch frogs :D
There is also a serene beach. It's the prefect way to de-stress and unplug for a while. We don't bring our gadgets with us (except for my camera of course!) we just hike and enjoy the beauty of god's work.

The last one we have is for the  museum,.We buy this membership as a Christmas present to our family. We have been going to the museum for quite some time now (5 years) and it still isn't old! There is so much information in there I don't know if we will ever be able to see it and read it all!!We find this membership especially valuable in the loooong winter months in Wisconsin when it's too cold to be outside. It gives us a place to get out and walk and learn with out any extra money being spent.


We feel like with these 3 memberships we have the best of all worlds! We get to spend the whole day exploring different places and when we do the math it costs less than .50 a trip. That is hard to beat. Do you guys use memberships? What is your favorite way to spend your down time?