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LIFE ON A BUDGET

AuthorHouse

Contents

1. "VACATION -Yes or No?".........................................................12. We all have to eat.............................................................93. Couch potato - time to relax...................................................174. Fly like an eagle ... "Where are we vacationing?"..............................235. Bah Hum Bug ... holiday shopping...............................................296. Just say "Charge it" ... I don't think so......................................337. I don't want to cook tonight...................................................398. Is it time to move?............................................................439. Talk is cheap, but is the phone?...............................................4710. Rent vs. Buy..................................................................4911. Chop chop ... bye bye mortgage?...............................................5512. Teaching your kids about money and how it really works........................5913. Is it time to fly the nest?...................................................6314. Is there a way to teach your kids to save for the future?.....................6915. Let's play dress up...........................................................7316. Taxes ... Do you know what you really should know?............................7717. Scamming your life away ... Watch out for the bad guy!........................8518. Is your credit important to you?..............................................8719. Turning the nest into a castle................................................8920. So, you want to tie the knot!.................................................9121. Miscellaneous things to keep in mind..........................................93

Chapter One

Vacation is defined as "a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation". Everyone likes "time off" from life to relax, play or travel. There are many people that I know personally who do not take time off because they can't afford to and if they do take "time off", they stay home because they don't have the money to travel. Do you have a dream that takes you traveling somewhere that you truly believe you will never see before you die?

Guess what! I have had that dream so many times in my life and my desire for going was so strong that it bummed me out because I thought I would never get there. My longest dream was my desire to visit Germany. Since taking German through middle and high school and having an ancestry mostly of German, I wanted to see what it was all about. In my early forties, my husband, Michael and I backpacked Europe (including Germany since he was born there) for eight days on a budget that was hard to believe.

We had talked about our European vacation for a long time and had a lot of trials figuring out that it was something we really could not afford. At the time, we had three children still living at home and their daily financial needs seemed to supersede the ability for us to go anywhere that extravagant. It was more like which state park shall we camp at during the coming summer.

It took a lot of "motivation" once we recognized that our "desire" was too strong to let go. We devised a grand plan that we knew was fool proof as long as we followed through. It took us a little over a year to save the money that did not affect our budget heavily. We cut back enough that it did not drastically disrupt our lives or even enough that our children really noticed. The following is the plan we implemented and followed through on. We did not deviate from it even once. The startup cost was inexpensive while the investment was worth every nickel saved.

The first thing we did was to go shopping. Remember, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. We started at a discount store and bought a ten- gallon fish aquarium. (No, we did not raise or breed fish ... lol) Next, we headed to the hardware store and bought a small tube of bathtub caulk and a piece of Plexiglas (defined as "polymethyl methacrylate - a transparent plastic used as a substitute for glass") cut to fit the top opening of the aquarium. We took our supplies home and got to work putting our idea into action. The first thing we did was to drill a hole in the center of the Plexiglas that was big enough for a nickel to pass through. We opened the caulk and spread it around the top opening of the aquarium. It was then time to set the Plexiglas in place so the caulk would hold it secure. Perfect. We just needed to let it dry so no one could get the Plexiglas off. We were so proud of ourselves because we finished the first step. This was the easiest step of all. We set the aquarium in the kitchen on the counter so that we would see it many times a day. By seeing it often, it gave us the "motivation" we needed to get started and stay focused on our goal.

Our next step was close to the hardest of our goal. Every two weeks on payday, my husband and I went to the bank and bought forty dollars in nickels. We each took twenty dollars from our paycheck to put towards our savings. We then brought our nickels home and opened them and slid them through our "nickel" hole in the aquarium. If you are thinking, "Why nickels?", then think about it for a second. Are you willing to rip off the top of the aquarium to go nickel diving? Are you going to take a handful or two of nickels to the store for milk or to get gas? What about the kids? Ours would have been embarrassed running around with a lot of nickels. If you said "No", then we are on the same page. If you said "yes", I hope you will read this book from cover to cover so you will also learn about self-control.

The first couple of months proved to be disappointing because the nickels didn't look like much sitting in the bottom taunting us. This is when we began adding change that we acquired (after it was turned into nickels). There were several times that we questioned our motives and each of us was strong for the other. Any handyman chores that my husband received compensation for and anything I earned from taking surveys and taste tests was turned into nickels and put into our magical aquarium.

After this, our pyramid of nickels really began to grow and soon we were even unable to slide it from place to place on the counter. At eleven months the aquarium was almost full! We both agreed that it was time to really start planning our trip. Having spent close to a year of saving and agonizing over whether we made the right decision on a trip out of the country, we decided to plan our trip very cautiously with finances in mind. We applied for our passports first to give us the reassurance that this was real. I spent many anguished hours on the Internet researching airline fares. Did we want to fly into Amsterdam, Madrid, Dusseldorf, Brussels or Paris? I checked every possible airline site for every possible city in and near Germany. During all of this searching it occurred to me that we would need to get around once we arrived. I found that rental cars were too expensive and driving in a foreign country did not appeal to either of us. I did my homework and discovered that Europe relies on mass transit for transportation. It was time to research the Eurail pass (Eurail.com). There was a new dilemma to face, which meant we needed to decide how many countries we wanted to visit. There was Benelux, which included Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium. Then you...