Family – Page 6 – Grocery Shrink

3 Ways to Pay the Kids

By Angela on October 3, 2015

Allowance vs Commissions….it doesn’t matter at our house, because either way you look at it, the money comes from the family budget. When your budget is super tight, that’s not an option.

Just so we’re talking about the same things:

Allowance is money kids get for living. They are usually paid by the week or the month and use that to practice money management. Kids with allowances are usually expected to pay for their own entertainment, school lunches and sometimes clothing too.
Commission is an allowance tied to performance. Kids earn their commissions by doing all their chores and having good behavior. It’s usually a set amount similar to an allowance, but they might not get it all if their performance isn’t up to par.

My kids get neither. We pay one child $1 a week for trash and another $3 to mow our yard. Occasionally I offer a quarter here and there to do some of the harder chores that are above and beyond their normal job description. Split that however you like between 6 kids and they don’t have enough money to learn how to manage it well. If they drop a quarter in the plate at church, it took a lot of work to earn that.

If I have a job that I would have hired an adult to do (because I had the budget for it) and one of my children could do that job, I offer it do them. I treat it like a job interview and if they act lazy or less than thrilled I don’t hire them and offer it to someone else. Those types of jobs don’t come up a lot, so our kids have remained relatively broke (though are usually enthusiastic about an opportunity.)

I want my kids to know how to handle money. To know how, they have to practice. In order to practice, they actually need money. It either has to come from me, or someone else.

3. We aren’t into begging people to pay our kids for things they wouldn’t normally pay for, so we taught them marketable skills and sent them out to the real world to bring in money apart from our family budget. So far it is working. Its harder on us while none of them are drivers, because we have to taxi them to their work. The hassle is worth it.

Next week I’m going to interview each one and let them tell you about their businesses (or future plans for one) and all the details. It’s going to be fun, because you never know what kids are going to say.

Do your kids get an allowance or commission? How do you teach them money management?

This is day 3 of our series: 31 days of Kids and Money

7 Things to Teach Our Kids About Money

By Angela on October 2, 2015

When I look at my kids, I want the world for them. I want to protect them from pain and sorrow and all of the hard. I can’t do that, I know. The pain and sorrow and hard is what works in their lives to build the character they need to be useful to God. Character is like money. It’s easier to develop character if you already have some. When bad stuff happens to people without foundational character, it makes them bitter. If I can’t protect my kids from all the bad, I want to at least equip them to get the most out of it when it happens.

With that in mind, I want them to know:

1. Money comes from Work. Work is just another word for helping people. It can be fun, but it doesn’t have to be fun. You are not above any legitimate job. My ultimate goal for you is to find work that uses the unique gifts and talents God gave you, but there may be a season in life where you just do a job because you need to eat.

2. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does buy choices. Money is a tool for you to use to provide for yourself and your family, to help other people, and to create opportunities. Money gives you more choices in life and I want you to have a lot of it. It’s better to be poor and have God than to be rich without him. But it’s even better to be both rich and Godly. The more money you have, the more people you can help.

3. Patience is the opposite of impulsive. It’s being willing to wait until you understand something before you invest in it. It’s waiting for a good price. It’s saving up cash to make a purchase instead of borrowing money. Patience will save you a ton of money.

4. Budgeting is freedom. It’s knowing how much money you have, what your necessary bills are and making a decision about what you are going to spend your money on ahead of time. Budgeting brings order to chaos, harmony to marriage, and prosperity in scarcity. The easiest way to stay on budget is to use cash envelopes so you can see at a glance at the time of purchase where you are with your plan.

5. Tithing and giving is a blessing. Everything you have already belongs to God. He just asks for 10% back as a good faith gesture, the rest you get to manage for Him. In exchange He offers you greater prosperity if you are faithful with your management. Giving is separate from tithing and it’s supposed to feel good. There will be hands coming at you from every direction asking for your money. As a manager for God you need to make sure that you give well, research and choose wisely. The most satisfying form of giving is done in secret and blesses someone directly.

6. You deserve it when you can pay cash for it. We live in a prosperous nation, so it’s hard to feel how rich we really are. Messages bombarde us from the media: “You deserve a vacation” “You deserve a new car” “You deserve a fashionable outfit” There’s nothing wrong with having nice things. Borrowing money to get them, however, brings pain to your life. It’s spending money you haven’t earned yet, which makes future work feel like working for no pay, slavery. It causes stress which can lead to arguments, sleepless nights, and illness. So when you are tempted to borrow money for something you “deserve” remind yourself: “You deserve to be free.” “You deserve a peaceful sleep” “You deserve good relationships and good health” You deserve it when you can pay for it.

7. Stuff happiness isn’t lasting happiness. When you get something new, it feels really good for a moment, but that good feeling won’t last. It’s not wrong to feel good when you get something new, but don’t chase that brand of happiness. Lasting happiness comes from knowing you belong to God and that He is personally invested in you. It comes from living a life of service to Him by serving others.

This is day 2 of our series: 31 days of Kids and Money

31 Days of Kids and Money–Day 1

By Angela on October 1, 2015

Hi Friends, I’ve been watching the whole 31 days thing since the Nester started it 7 years ago, and thinking I could never write for a whole 31 days on one topic without taking off a day. This is the year I’m finally ~~crazy~~ confident enough to give it a go.

The Cost of Being House Poor

By Angela on September 29, 2015

I want to introduce you to a long time friend, Jennifer Dickson. She and her husband, Andrew, are risking everything to change the world for YOU. Their dream for you is to never owe another utility bill and to live in a paid for house so you can spend your income and your time with your family. With that introduction, I’m going to let her tell you more:

It was a typical morning last summer when I, pregnant and late to work (where I’d recently been told it would be unlikely for me to reduce my 50+ hour work weeks once baby #2 arrived), backed our 10-year-old car into our 15-year-old car. After working through lunch and spending the customary two hours of family time with our toddler that evening, my husband and I agreed that something had to change. But how could we make a drastic career shift and still pay the mortgage?

A quick survey of most any family budget will reveal that the biggest monthly expense is housing and housing-related costs. We take it for granted that mortgage debt is a part of life, and that utility costs will always rise. But it hasn’t always been this way!

In the past 50 years the American home has doubled in size, energy consumption and percentage of income. While families used to spend 17% of their income on housing, we now spend 35% – and that’s at all income levels, and despite a growing number of two-income families. It seems that as soon as we start to get ahead of housing expenses, we go shopping for a bigger model!

It’s no wonder so many of us can relate to feeling “house poor.” On an individual level this translates to less time, less disposable income and less flexibility to pursue, say, a different career, a new venture, a missionary opportunity or a travel experience. At the national scale we’re drowning under nearly $12 trillion of mortgage debt, with growing numbers of the population priced out of the housing market altogether.

This is what led my husband, an industrial designer and interior architect, and me, an architect, to found Acre Designs. We are a startup creating NetZero homes – meaning homes with NO energy bills – for the same cost as traditional construction. We are able to build in about half the time of a standard house, using super-insulated panelized walls and roofs that install in a few short days. Acre homes require a fraction of the typical mechanical and electrical systems, and we make up the remainder with a small solar PV system, allowing the homes to produce as much energy as they consume.

Grocery Shrink readers already understand the power of controlling food costs. Imagine the life that opens up when you can control housing costs as well! We think everyone should be able to expect more from their biggest investment, and Acre homes make that possible.

The average homeowner will save $250-300 each month on energy bills. If those savings are applied toward an accelerated mortgage, the savings are astronomical – well over $400,000 over the life of a typical 30-year mortgage! This is a game-changer for most families, and it’s a solution that’s currently unavailable on the market.

To make all of this possible, we’re fixing problems throughout the entire design and construction industry. Currently building in Kansas City, next year we’ll begin to integrate online tools with a network of builders, allowing us to build Acre homes throughout the country.

Step 1 is to build our NetZero prototype, the Axiom House, in Kansas City. We will use it to demonstrate and document Acre’s revolutionary construction processes, sensors to collect data on actual home energy performance, and the budget to prove we can build at an affordable pricepoint. We’re currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo to make the prototype project possible – visit our campaign, donate and share today! Each backer can choose from several great rewards, and will help us bring this revolutionary solution to market!

Learn more, and back our campaign, at www.acredesigns.com.

P.S. Angela here–These pics show some of their modern versions of homes, but they have all styles including log cabin and more traditional looking homes.

Back from Paradise

By Angela on September 17, 2015

Last week, Darren and I went to Paradise Island, Bahamas with a trip we earned working with my MomCeo team and paid for by Melaleuca. We had a gorgeous room with a lush view and $480 in room credit to buy whatever we wanted. Food at the Atlantis resort can be very expensive ($50-$100 a plate.) We knew this because Dave Ramsey brought us here 10 years ago with the Total Money Makeover Contest (has it been that long already?!!!) We arrived with a plan.

To help stretch our room credit and minimize our personal expenses, we packed protein powder and granola bars for breakfast. For lunch we ate poolside with our room credit (which was only $15 a plate) and then walked over the bridge to Nassau Island

to buy inexpensive authentic Bahamian dinners at the Fish Fry Shacks.

Famous Conch Fritters

Our Fish Fry Chef and his amazing hair net

By the end of the week we had saved so much money we had enough room credit to pay for an extra night in the hotel plus buy a couple of EXPENSIVE workout shirts with the Atlantis logo.

On Thursday we took a bus to Nassau to go snorkeling. One of our guides spotted a starfish from the top deck, dove in to grab it and handed it to us for a photo op. Snorkeling in the clear Bahama water is my favorite. One of our dive stops had a shipwreck that we could swim to and check out. The last one, they baited nurse sharks to come and swim beneath us so we could observe them closely. So cool. (Nurse sharks don’t eat people, but they might nibble on your feet if you don’t have on flippers. Feet kind of look like fish to a nurse shark..but are not tasty.)

A lit hand blown glass sculpture in the hotel.

A hand blown glass light fixture. It was gold glitter glass…pictures do not do it justice.

The famous Royal towers. We stayed in the west wing on the first floor. The fist floor rooms are handicap accessible and much larger than normal rooms. They have walk out sitting areas in green space and wet zone bathroom areas with zero entry showers. (Sorry I didn’t take a lot of pictures, just enjoyed life outside the view finder.)

One of the fountains near the entrance to the recreation area.

One of the many conservation areas for marine life.

Most of our friends left on Sunday. We saved $200 by staying an extra day and not flying on the weekend. We used our room credit for the extra night and walked into town to experience the Bahamian culture and worship with the folks in the Ebenezer Methodist Church.

When we got home Grant was glued to my side. He snuggled beside me as I caught up on work and took part in a team conference call, then fell asleep in bliss that we were all home and together again.

Meeting team member, Sue, for the first time on bootcamp on the beach. Bootcamp A. Run a 1/4th mile B. 30 pushups C. 30 sit-ups D. 30 squats REPEAT 4 times with a final finisher of 30 burpees. I’m sweaty in this photo but better off than Sue, because I modified EVERYTHING and only did 3 rounds and no burpees. Sue did EVERYTHING and is such a rock star. I have 2 years left to make a full recovery from Subclinical Adrenal Failure–so I’m being careful. I never want to end up in that bad way again.

I haven’t felt so healthy and energetic in a long time. We got plenty of rest, tons of exercise, never missed my vitamins, and all the food I ate was full of the freshest yummies veggies, fruits, and fish. This was the first time in 5 years that Darren and I had a few days together without the kids. There were times I missed them fiercely, like when we saw the sawfish with his chainsaw looking snoz, and when we were racing down one of the 8 super fun water slides on the resort–that I knew the kids would have LOVED. Thank goodness for Facetime and free wifi.

Anyhoo, so that’s why the blog has been quiet, and won’t be any longer. I have a few things I can’t wait to share in September and in October I’m taking part in the 31 day challenge. The theme here will be 31 days of Kids and Money. You’ll want to
subscribe in the side bar now, so you don’t miss a post.

Coming in October!

Why We Wait

By Angela on September 2, 2015

How long are you willing to wait to save a few bucks? I’ve been asking myself that lately. I was ready to paint the boys’ bedroom in July, before school started. Except my home repair envelope was empty. I hosted a garage sale in August and earned enough money to buy paint if it’s on sale.

That sale is supposed to happen this Labor Day Weekend. By waiting I’ll save around $40. Waiting also means I could either move the boys out of their room until I leisurely finish it; This would displace them while they are trying to get good sleep and be organized for going to school, OR I could push myself and paint their room and put it back together over the 3 day weekend.

The pushing sounded like a good plan a month ago, before I knew how much other fun we’d have opportunities for this weekend. It’s going to be a blast of family experiences with some little pockets of time for painting smooshed in. I’ll need to be efficient.

I’m still feeling optimistic though. I took the popcorn ceiling removal, skim coating and ceiling painting off the schedule this time. I decided I could do that part later. Maybe NEXT summer so they aren’t disrupted during the school year.

I’m optimistic because I’m thinking about all the ways I can bribe my teenagers to help with the painting. My first plan is try the Tom Sawyer method and to make it so much fun that they can’t stay away. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to try candy…and then money. If all that fails I’ll remind them of the hours of labor it took to bring them into the world. That should do it.

Living debt free can be hard. Sometimes we wait for things or do without. We make hard decisions about what we can and can’t do. Sometimes we face criticism of friends and family. It’s hardest when we see other people enjoying the immediate gratification of debt, while we wait. Since we aren’t there for their private moments when the consequences of debt are felt, it’s hard to remember they still exist.

It’s impossible to rightly judge another person’s choices unless we are there, loving their family as much as they do and knowing every detail of their income and expenses. We can’t really know what we would do in their shoes without being in them.

Recently I had to make a tough financial decision that made some friends close to me question my faith. The decision was painful, but the criticism was more painful. They thought I should move ahead and commit to something that I couldn’t pay and trust that the money would come. Since the money wasn’t there, we chose to live within our means.

As hard as waiting and doing without can be, living with debt is WORSE. It’s a panic that is there all the time. An awful feeling that becomes so familiar you don’t realize it’s there until it’s gone. We choose freedom.

That’s why we wait.

It’s “Getting Food on the Table” Month

By Angela on August 4, 2015

Happy August! It’s my birthday month and my husband’s too. Plus our daughter, his mother, his sister, my grandfather, my aunt, our niece, and a cousin too. Everyone shall eat cake!

It’s also the month that school starts. 3 of our kids start in 9 days. Honestly, I’m not done with summer yet but que sera.

In light of all the crazy that is happening in homes across the nation Read more…

Homemade Breakfast Sausage Mix

By Angela on June 22, 2015

I love sausage! Especially when it’s part of biscuits and gravy. That dish was my grandpa’s specialty and his love of it, made me love it too. Read more…

Day 1: Summer Here We Come

By Angela on May 25, 2015

Storm Clouds

Today is our first Monday of summer vacation. I’m a barrel of mixed feelings about school being out. I love having the kids home and the sound of stirring in the lego bin as they search for that perfect piece. We are making different education choices for next year and I am mourning the change. I’m not ready to talk about it publicly yet. Soon, I hope. For now, I want my friends to know we weren’t offended or upset in any way.

1217406_28114914

I’m still trying to figure out the whole summer vacation thing. In the past, I’ve written a summer bucket list and then had terrible Mommy guilt when I didn’t do much of it. Last year I made a list of things I wanted to do around Kansas City, one a week. We did 2 things, then adrenal fatigue had me mostly bed bound the rest of the summer.

1442196_33585767

I want to be a fun mom. I look at the pictures on facebook of families doing things together, like eating in a restaurant, going to the trampoline park, or in an extreme case, taking a girls’ trip to England….and I feel a little small inside. It’s dumb to compare, I know. But I do it anyway–it comes naturally.

I hope my kids tell their therapist that I really loved them. That they know I tried.

SONY DSC

I need summer to be as restful as possible. School is hard. Teaching; spelling lists, math facts, reading charts, reports and posters, fund raisers, and things to sign x 5 nearly puts me under. Then we also have ballet class, soccer teams, basketball teams, violin lessons and piano lessons. Plus Zion’s League and YAChoir for the High School one; Zioneers for the Middle School ones; Young Adults for the parents; Priesthood classes, Gatekeeper training; and family visits for the Daddy who also helps lead the Trailblazers group….and takes the boys to Boy Scouts too. There’s Handmaidens and Lamplighters for the girls. The only night we can be home as a family is Wednesday night, and the church would prefer we come to prayer service instead. We don’t usually go. I have stay at home guilt on those nights, but if anyone walked a day in my shoes, they wouldn’t judge.

We’ve talked about limiting activities more. We haven’t come up with a perfect solution. The kids each have special needs that make a certain activity important for their development. The ones that aren’t crucial for congnitive and physical development are the church activities–and that feels kind of wrong to quit. So we stay with the crazy and ask ourselves often if we’re doing the right thing.

1446129_36471881-2

This summer I have no bucket list. The 4 oldest kids will each go to a summer camp. I will take the children to a family camp (we call it Reunion) while my husband stays back to earn money and hold down the fort. We are going tent camping in the Rocky Mountains at some point. And there’s a week of Bible School for the little ones. There will be a lot of time just at home though. If I can keep the screens off until 3pm, I will consider it a win, plus minimal fighting, and maybe cleaning once a ~~month~~ week.

1443880_76577189-2

Maybe we’ll air up the bike tires and send restless kids out into the neighborhood. And a summer membership to a local pool. That was a good thing last year. I have a few house projects I’d like to squeeze in, but I’m hoping to find lots of peaceful moments. Lots of peaceful moments.

1443142_16441598

My mediation:

Drop Thy still dews of quietness.

May all our strivings cease.

Take from our souls the strain and stress,

And let our ordered lives confess the beauty of Thy peace.

John Greenleaf Whittier

It’s One Pot Wonder Week!

By Angela on May 11, 2015

Oooooooh, I’m so excited! One Pot Wonders are deliciously easy meals that
require minimal clean up. They often work well for outdoor cooking over an open fire with a skillet. (A flame is ok, no need to wait for coals.) And a lot of them can go in a freezer bag for make ahead prep, and dump and go cooking.

This is my preferred cooking method when I’m in a hurry, low on groceries, or tired of washing dishes. (And by preferred method, I mean using one pot on our indoor stove, not an open flame.) It’s perfect when the fridge is mostly bare, because you can combine bits of leftover things and turn it into one BIG dish. If that sentence just grossed you out, try to hang on a little longer. There are a few “rules” to make sure you get something delicious at the end. Here’s what you need:

1. Flavor theme: Southwest, Italian, Oriental, BBQ….. For best results, stick to one flavor profile.

2. Protein: Ground beef, Shredded chicken, Ground Turkey, Smoked Sausage, Breakfast Sausage; Italian Sausage; Eggs; Shrimp; Salmon…

3. Vegetables: Southwest: bell peppers; onions; corn; tomatoes. Italian: everything. Oriental: Everything, but especially baby corn; sugar snap peas; bamboo shoots; water chestnuts. BBQ: corn, carrots, onions, mushrooms; sweet potatoes; potatoes.

4. Starch: Pasta; Corn; Potatoes; Sweet Potatoes; Beans; Rice.

5. Sauce or herbs; Cheese

I’ll be featuring recipes of tried and true one pot wonders the rest of this week. I’m sure you can think of some you’ve had before: Frittata; stir fry; fried rice; skillet lasagna; (hamburger helper….)

What’s your favorite one pot wonder? Leave a comment and help us with ideas.