I promise you, once you get started at it, saving money is addictive. It's just like running, it really sucks at first, and then you start getting a "saver's high" ;-) Anyways....We never got cable TV when we moved (back in July), so we don't watch TV. Everyone needs a little veg time every once in a while though. We used to have a netflix subscription, so I looked into that, but it makes me feel like I have to watch a certain number of movies each week so I get my money's worth, and who needs to be feeling a NEED to watch movies (isn't it supposed to be entertainment?) when there are other things to do. In the past, I've found some decent kid's DVDs at the library (FREE people!!) that we've rented for long car trips, but they didn't really have much for grown ups. We went to the library today and I don't know if they just got a bunch of movies or I just caught them on a good day, or what, but there was a TON there! We borrowed Night at the Museum, Pursuit of Happyness, The Sting and a kid's animated movie (something about baseball directed by Christopher Reeve). I saw lots of other fairly recent movies I want to check out at some point in the future.
The great thing though is the reason we went to the library was to pick up a book I had on hold. I noticed on a friend's blog that they were reading it and it seemed like something right up my alley, so I checked it out. It's America's Cheapest Family. Now, I've read A LOT of articles, books, etc... about living within your means, saving money, smart investing, all that good stuff. This is literally the first thing I've read in YEARS that has some really good ideas I haven't thought of. I'm only on chapter 3, but most of what they're talking about, we already do, but they take it that one extra step. It's the perfect book for me! Basically, they explain how they are able to do things like pay off a mortgage in 9 years, feed a family of 7 for $350/month (seems a bit steep to me, actually, but it's a lot less than most sources talk about), pay cash for their cars, etc...What I really hate about most articles I read is they talk all about how families are able to save all this money and the families aren't thrifty at all, they just make 100K/year. This family says their average income over 12 years was 45K/year, but much of the time it was much less than that. They were just trying to get by, raise their kids and homeschool on one income. They're my kind of people!
4 comments:
So...are you going to share any of these new ideas?
Hmmm... I wonder which blog it was where you saw that book :) They do have some really great tips in there, and it was challenging to read them, especially since they really lived on a small income with a larger family. I hope you find some good tips! We found a quite few I really liked.
The library in your neck of the woods has the best movie selection ever! We rarely pay to rent movies anymore--there are so many classics available there. You can search the library website by DVD and there are like 1500 of them--I go through that occasionally and have them put on hold so I know I can get them. Excellent system they have!
Glad you posted this. I'd love to read that book!
I love seeing what books you're reading Rachel...always something interesting ;-) And yes, some ideas will be forth-coming. Actually, one of their things is a monthly menu and only grocery shopping once a month. I was actually planning to actually write out a monthly menu/grocery list soon anyway since I have so many people claim we can't possibly spend what we say we do on groceries.
One cool thing about this book is each chapter ends with things to do. There is a "timid mouse" "wise owl" and "amazing ant" category based on your level of comfort with the presented idea. Since we are already following a lot of these concepts, we fall into the amazing ant category for most chapters, but it's been great reading for us. So many things talk about mortgage/student loans as "good debt" and gloss over them, this book addresses paying them off, and since we don't carry any credit card debt or car loans, that's exactly the type of stuff we need (they do go over paying down credit cards, etc... too)
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