Unschool Radical

Well, I mentioned in earlier posts that we are in the midst of a financial revolution in our home and trying cut back- WAY back and change the way we think about money and get rid of some debts.
One of the things I m doing is looking at our food budget. We spend about 250-ish a week on food and groceries. We don’t eat out in restaurants. (We eat in a restaurant about twice a year, but kids and I eat lunch at Costco’s often enough…).
we do spend a lot of money on fresh fruit and vegetables. My husband and kids all eat HUGE quantities of fruit. I am not sure how I am going to pare drop the food budget when so much of our food money is spent on fruit- I would say almost half of food budget- about 75-100.00 a week. I am not kidding. We can go though 1-2 crates of clementines A DAY easily.
On way i may help with budget is trying a group cooking get together- where you get together with friend ( or two) and make dinners for the month and freeze. The book we are using is The Big Cook.

Any thoughts on this? Ideas or book recommendations?

Tags: Money and Debt by Administrator
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We are feeling the pain of buying too much too fast. We have lived pretty much denying ourselves nothing. Well that’s not true- we are very much in the habit of penny wise and foolish. I am very good at economizing with food budget and getting great deals, where we fall apart is the big tickets stuff.

we have a normal middle class house, we have an inground pool, trailer, hot tub, tons of toys, wii, ps3, 2 cars and a motorcycle and bunch of other “stuff We all have video Ipods and digital cameras and more computers and laptops than people in the house. We live beyond our means.

We have decided to take the horse by the reigns and pull ourselves together and get rid of this lifetime habit of buying now and paying later and saying yes to each other when we should say no.
We have a a lot of debt. We also have a lot of stress. And there have been some sleepless nights at times. I can make money doing some free lance consulting work and have let that slide over the winter months.

So, now it is time to pay the piper and face reality. i am going to try and chronicle my ups an downs as honestly as I can. This week we started this in-house revolution by getting rid of stuff and selling off some of our more expensive things to pay off some loans. My husband has made the biggest sacrifice by putting up some of his beloved belongings- his motorcycle and some other collectibles that he ha spent 20 years collecting. His heart is breaking and mine is breaking watching him do it but it is the right thing to do.
I have kicked things up notch money wise.
The stress is just unreal and we have to get out of this mountain of debt before it eats us up.

Tags: Money and Debt by Administrator
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