Hi Swistle,
I have been reading your blog (especially the name blog) for a while now and really have really enjoyed it. We are expecting our fifth (and most likely last) child this fall and I was wondering if you’d be interested in writing a bit about some of the time and/or money saving tricks you learned along the way. My kids are all very little (5 and under) and I would love to hear about how you managed food/activity/etc expenses as they got older or how you organized your meal planning or how you kept everyone’s school stuff straight.. Anything you feel like sharing! I feel like we got the lots of little kids stage figured out (finally!), but anything further down the line is very abstract still at this point and I would love to hear of any great tricks or routines or anything else you’d like to discuss. Thank you!
Anna
This is a great question for a group answer, because we all have different ways of doing things that work for us, and we all have different things we don’t care much about and can therefore pretty easily save money on. And in fact, that’s my biggest tip: find the things you don’t care much about, and start by cutting expenses there. It seems like that would be too obvious a tip to even mention, but I’ve found it’s the kind of thing I have to learn again and again.
When Paul and I got married, we used that concept to decide on what kind of wedding to have: we DID care about x, y, and z, so we spent money on those; but we didn’t care about a, b, c, d, e, f, or g, so we spent nothing (or very little) on those. When we were expecting our first baby, we didn’t care much about nursery decor or an heirloom crib so we didn’t spend much on those, but we (okay, “I”) DID care about the fabric of the car seat and Boppy, so I spent to get the car seat and Boppy I wanted, and I got free handmedown nursery decor from an acquaintance who was getting rid of hers. It’s not about which preferences are more objectively worthy (car seat fabric is no more objectively necessary or important than curtain fabric), it’s that you’ll feel the sacrifice more if you give up something you want, and feel it less if you give up something you don’t really care about. (Again, it feels obvious, but at least for me it has NOT been obvious.)
So when I list things we saved money on, some of you might start feeling a little prickly if I mention things that are very important to you; you might feel as if I’m saying you’re wrong to spend money there and that you ought to cut back. But one person’s Easy Budget Cut is another person’s Absolutely Crucial Not To Cut, and vice versa.
Two very big savings areas for us were (1) meals out and (2) vacations. We didn’t do either one. (I DID occasionally eat fast food, especially if I didn’t have many children with me. When I say “meals out” I am talking about family meals in restaurants.) This was an easy cut for us, because when they were littler I had approximately zero interest in either going out to eat with five children or traveling with five children. We are now very occasionally (like, when there is a promotion or a new house to celebrate) taking the children to restaurants, so that they will know how to do restaurants. But I find it very unpleasant to see what it costs for a family of seven to eat even a relatively inexpensive meal out.
When the kids were little, I made baby food. I found the task satisfying, and it saved a lot of money. But if I hadn’t found it satisfying, I would have purchased baby food at the grocery store and found something else that was satisfying and money-saving for me.
I tried all the store-brand versions of everything. If I couldn’t tell the difference, I continued to buy the store brand. If I could tell the difference, I bought the brand name.
I used to cut everyone’s hair, including Paul’s, sometimes including my own. I’ve done less of this over the years as the kids have gotten older and Paul’s hair has begun to need a more tactful, expert approach.
Handmedowns will save you one million dollars, but doing handmedowns requires a non-zero amount of work in order to save that money: boxing things up, storing them, finding them later. It might not be worth it for someone living in very limited space.
I bought a lot of kid clothes on clearance, mostly at Target or The Children’s Place at 75-90% off. This worked because I like the treasure-hunting feeling, I went to Target very regularly as a get-out-of-the-house activity, I wasn’t too particular about the clothes, and I had good Targets near me that often had good clearance racks so I found lots of stuff I liked at good prices. But this too requires a storage system, even more complicated than handmedowns because you buy various sizes in advance rather than packing away a whole set of clothes at once. It also involves a certain level of risk: maybe you buy a whole bunch of skirts in 4T and 5T for a 2T toddler who loves skirts, but by the time she’s in 4T she won’t wear skirts anymore; maybe you buy a whole bunch of summer clothes in 4T and then your child has a growth spurt and none of those summer clothes fit by summertime. Anyway, this whole thing worked well for me but might not be a good fit for parents who both work full-time, or who hate shopping, or who feel depressed by shopping from clearance racks, or who have limited storage space, or who have fewer kids.
Usually the first year I need a new big-kid thing (like when we suddenly needed binders in middle school, and I hadn’t realized we would), I have to pay full- or sale-price, but after that I know what I’m likely to need and I can buy clearance and set it aside for the next year. Some things never go on clearance: binders were a bad example because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clearance on those. But calculators and handheld pencil sharpeners and glue sticks and pencil cases and book covers and so forth, they go on clearance and I have a big School Supply bin in a storage area. This is also good for replenishing things that wear out or get lost mid-year. I don’t usually have everything I need when we’re looking at the school supply lists in the fall, but I usually have most of it.
And this is for the little-kid stage you mention you’ve got the hang of, but I’m going to put it here for anyone still in that stage: How the Hell Do You Do It? Here’s the Hell How.
For keeping school stuff straight, we have tried various systems. In our old house, we had a series of hooks in the entryway, where children were supposed to hang their backpacks, coats, etc. Yes, they instead put those things onto the floor, but at least the piles were UNDER their own hooks, usually. In the new house, we don’t have an area like that, so I’ve put over-door hooks on their bedroom doors; they can hang their backpacks and coats on those hooks.
Things like snowpants and boots and hats, I store in bins by type of thing, since who knows who’ll be wearing what size next year: all the snowpants in one bin, all the boots in another bin. Each year as I’m digging through the bins, I try to notice and get rid of anything I know won’t fit anyone anymore. Hats and gloves live in drawers, and kids can rummage to find some that fit.
Activity expenses are a slightly touchy subject, I think. Or at least, I feel more nervous saying that we saved money and time by not doing many of them. I feel as if parents are expected to pay any amount to encourage their kids’ interests in anything their kids want to do, but when the kids were younger we didn’t really have the disposable income/time for that philosophy, and there was a stage when that would have required sacrifices of money/time/effort that were not worth it. (I am thinking particularly of the years when, if Rob wanted to do an after-school activity, I would have had to bring FOUR younger children with me.) If a child had shown a FIERCE interest in something, we would have found the money/time/logistics—but for the ever-rotating list of “Can I take karate/gymnastics/archery/soccer?” for kids who didn’t show likely talent in those areas or sustain such interests for long, we tended to say no. Or we would find a way for them to inexpensively/briefly sample the activity, through a recreation-department summer program or YouTube tutorials or books from the library or something. Sometimes this cut was really hard, like when a kid wanted to do something that sounded really reasonable or classic-childhood, like going to a sleepaway summer camp, and then we’d look it up and it would be $1800 for a week, and there was just no way that could work with our budget. Crucial surgery for $1800? We could find a way. A vacation for one single member of the family? No. When our finances loosened up a bit (and when the kids were getting older and easier to bring along), we started saying yes to interests that were sustained (i.e., the kid kept wanting to do it for more than the one afternoon when they learned their friend was doing it), and/or that were more reasonably-priced, and/or ones that seemed to us more important/valuable/useful (I am absolutely not going to make the mistake of giving examples on that).
Another harder cut: preschool for the twins. Preschool feels so RIGHT. Education! So important! And it felt unfair, because we sent Rob to preschool. But Rob had various issues that caused his pediatrician, a pediatric neurologist, and a speech therapist to all strongly urge preschool for him, whereas the twins had no such issues. And Rob was a firstborn with one younger sibling when he went to preschool, while the twins lived in a household with five kids—plenty of socialization with other children, including a same-age child. And Rob was one kid going at a time and that was still hard to afford; $750/month (and this was a decade ago) for two kids at once was not a percentage of our income we could justify spending on something optional.
By the way, some you might be looking at the summer-camp price and preschool price I mentioned and thinking “WHAT???? Here it’s only $200/$150/free!!!” or whatever. This is another thing that can vastly impact decisions. You might live in an area where camp/preschool/lessons are very cheap, and so that would not be such a good place for your family to cut costs. Or if you’re religious, you might have access to very cheap camp or preschool through a church-subsidized program. And so again, those might NOT be a good place for your family to cut costs.
We opted out of ALL school fundraisers of the sort where they want $11 for a roll of wrapping paper. Just, no. I will happily give the school money directly, and have done so, and have also bought things off teacher wish lists; but typically only a small percentage of those fundraising funds go to the school, and the rest is profit for the fundraising company, so no. For me that’s a really good place to save. But it often means disappointed children, because the fundraising company sends motivation speakers to ramp the children up about all the prizes they can win. It helped once I’d explained it a few times so that when the new fundraiser came out the kids already knew we would not be participating.
For a number of years my meal-planning consisted of getting worked up about it every night. Now we have a very simple meal plan, where there is already something planned for every night of the week. In some cases they’re alternating-week plans: like, on Sundays it’s either hamburgers or chicken. And I CAN go off-menu any time I feel like it. But every night has a default plan and I don’t have to think about it if I don’t want to. I’ve just recently delegated Monday a night for trying new things, because I finally feel as if I can cope with that. But I hate to cook, so this is another area where someone else might have a very different feeling about how to handle it. Like, I can easily see someone else saying that they way they coped was by making sure they didn’t get into a rut and always had new fun recipes to try.
I don’t tend to use a lot of coupons, though I know lots of people who say they save lots of money that way. I am more inclined to shop sales/clearances. When peanut butter goes on sale from $3/jar to $2/jar, I buy enough of it that a manager has to be called over to approve the sale. Paul teases me about it, but this is the sort of thing that adds up over time and is almost effortless for me, as well as fun. If I hated doing this, or didn’t feel as if I could keep track of it (as I feel about couponing), or didn’t have the storage space, this would not be a useful idea for saving money.
“Having the kids do their own stuff” helps considerably with time management, and becomes increasingly possible as they get older. I am not a patient teacher and I HATE training kids to do things, but when the kids are older there is nothing quite like the amazing feeling of getting just your own self into the car while everyone else hops in and buckles their own seatbelts. Or saying, “Okay, go take a shower,” and the kid just goes and does it. Or “Okay, Dad and I are going out for dinner, so everyone make your own dinners tonight.” Or “Okay, everyone off to bed now,” and there is nothing for you to do. It is the best, and it is in your future.
Okay, I have gone on a long time, and it’s time to let other people talk. Where are the places your family doesn’t mind cutting expenses? What are some of the systems/routines/tricks that make your family’s life easier?
