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KaylaL08
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S/O Money: WDYT of This?
KaylaL08
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https://moneysavingmom.com/category/series/saving-100-down-for-a-home?orderby=date&order=ASC
This is from the Money Saving Mom blog. It is a pretty long read so a quick recap: While her husband was going to law school they lived on about $800 a month. They made it a goal to get through law school with no debt. They scrimped and saved and pinched pennies, like ate beans and rice for supper and rented movies from the library for fun. They also had children during this time. Through all the saving they were able to save up 100% cash for a nice home in about 7 years.
Would you live so frugally for so long to do something like this? Do you think a paid for house is worth 7 years of minimal living?
BFP 11/29/11 MC 12/29/11
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Re: S/O Money: WDYT of This?
Good for them. I wouldn't do it just to have no house payment. I've never planned on living in one house forever, so no reason to pay it off IMO.
I'll have to read the whole thing later. I feel like maybe I've read it before? Or at least something similar.
I admire their determination and I think it's great that they set a goal and worked towards what they wanted even though it wasn't the easiest road.
With that said, I don't think I would be able to live quite that frugally for quite so long even though the pay off would be great. I can live on a reduced budget to save money, for sure, but drastically cutting things like our food bill, spending NO EXTRA for years and years is pretty rough. I think if I were them I probably would have allowed a little more wiggle room saved up a HUGE down payment instead of aiming to pay 100% out of pocket and then enjoyed paying off the mortgage I did have very quickly.
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Exactly. Those would be awful 7 years.
Haha this is so me.
Good for them though.
I wouldn't do this. For several reasons- having a mortgage that you can afford is not bad debt. Plus if ALL your savings is wrapped up in real estate- how in the world can you easily access that if you really need it?
Our first house was paid off- but that is because DH bought it 15 years before we met and being single he didn't have a lot of expenses- so he paid it off quickly and still had money for savings.
We could totally pay off our new house- we actually put a very large down payment- 50%. But we will not- we like to have the savings in easily accessible accounts.
Well I follow her blog and I really think they now have liquid assets as well. If you didn't have a mortgage you could build your liquidity pretty quickly. She shares her business goals every month and they have already saved up enough cash to pay for a rental property, along with funding education accounts for their 3 kids and giving generously to various charities. I am almost positive they have a large amount of liquidity now. But I see your point.
I would assume if they could buy a house outright that they won't have trouble also building a savings. It still is having a lot of your monetary assets tied up, for sure so I see what you're getting at. But without having a mortgage and knowing how to live on so little I would imagine they'll bank plenty into savings.
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No, I wouldn't if I didn't absolutely have to. To me it's not worth it, especially considering the likely salary increase at the end of the period. Although, a law degree is not a guaranteed income, especially right now. Also, a mortgage is not bad debt, so I don't see the point in living practically in poverty in order to avoid one. I know plenty of people who could well afford to pay cash for homes who do not because they will ultimately end up better off investing that cash while paying a low interest mortgage and getting a tax deduction on the mortgage interest.
We could have scrimped and saved during DH's med school and residency, but we didn't. We lived comfortably. Now we live better. We'd have more cash and less debt if we had saved more, I guess, but at what real cost? We still have plenty of cash and savings, and can easily pay our debts (which consist of mortgage, student loans and 1 car payment...we have never and would never borrow on a credit card). Plus it's easier for us to save now than it was then. DH makes several times what he made as an intern. All the sacrifice would have yielded a drop in the bucket.
If my circumstances were different and we didn't have a reliable, lucrative career to count on things would be different, but I'd never go to such extremes.
Whoa. After starting to read the actual article, I think their priorities are way out of line with most of modern society. That's not to say they are wrong, just... out there.
The grandparents who moved their children into a run down trailer with no heat...yeah, I would not consider them great financial role models.
Euw...I guess I should have read the article.
This. Just trade beer for vodka.
Who wants to live miserably for 7 years. Beans and rice?? Come on.
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I want Vigo black beans and rice now. Thanks.
Well when you look at the big picture maybe it isn't so bad. If after though 7 years you are completely debt-free then for the rest of your life you could probably live pretty elaborately. It's the same attitude as going through college with no money. While in college you miss out on the opportunity cost of working. 4+ years of eating cheap, crappy car, etc. but the payoff is after college you have a degree so that you can live better than those that went straight into the workforce.
Or, who wants to be pregnant and miserable for 9 months so you can have a screaming newborn that doesn't sleep? Because the reward is a child. Same philosophy.
If they stay married for 50 years then only 14% was spent living so tight. The remaining 86% is spent living elaborately. I can see the appeal.
I would not give money to charities while I was living on rice and beans. And TBH, I will probably get flamed for this but I don't care, I don't think it is fair to the kids to make them live on rice and beans and have no outings just to avoid a little student loan debt. Healthy food for your kids is not an option. If you can't afford it, that's one thing, but if you're going to law school, take out a loan and buy your kid some vegetables.
They weren't giving to charities when they were living on rice and beans. The point was they lived like that for 7 years and because of that, they are now able to x,y & z. Reread the post.
Where the hell were they living that they could live on $800 a month??? I think there's something in living simply/minimalism, but not to the point where you're being a miser to be a miser.
I also think that all the talk about people living on like $5/month is the exception. Most people aren't making enough to live comfortably - American wages for the lower/middle classes have been stagnant for years and years, while the 1% hasn't been this rich since before the New Deal. Income inequality is a much bigger and important issue than how little money a family can live on.
DS2 - Oct 2010 (my VBAC baby!)
Don't get me wrong, I know it's some people's idea of happy, but it's not mine.
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#3 : due 11.02.15
If we could save up enough in 7 years then I think it might be worth it to me.
But since a modest house in our area goes for about 850K it would take longer than 7 years. I wouldn't be willing to live like that for how long it would take, and certainly not for my kids' entire childhoods.
For what?
Is her husband named Dan?
Does one child sleep on a pull out mattress beneath the crib of the other child?
Are Rubbermaid bins stacked all willy-nilly around the house?
Does she believe in dental insurance?
Unable to even.
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You don't understand the appeal of Benedict Cumberbatch / think he's fug / don't know who he is? WATCH SHERLOCK. Until you do, your negative opinion of him will not be taken seriously.
??? Are you saying MSM doesn't have goals?! They have set and achieved a lot of goals throughout their life so far. I feel like paying 100% down for a house is a pretty big fat goal.
Also, LOL at "I think she thinks she is happy." WTF does that even mean?? This is an honest question, What do you think it means to be happy? Why are you saying the way they are living means they have some type of pseudo happiness? What should they be doing to be happy instead?
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https://freejinger.org/forums/viewtopic.phpf=8&t=6952&p=571160&hilit=Emily#p571160
That is the most recent part of the thread. You can scroll back if interested, but it is a load of craziness. Emily was (and Obviously still is) bat shizit crazy who was enamored with the idea of poverty, even though she grew up quite wealthy. I am not sure if you have to create a log-in to read- a while back they were having a heck of a time with fundies hacking the site and shutting it down, so you may have to sign up. I promise, it is worth it.
My Ovulation Chart
What are you people talking about??
I don't think you guys (Hav and Kate) were around when the $1000/month blogger was introduced to the boards.
Emily was a blogger who said she and her family of 4 lived on $1000/month. It was supposed to be a money saving blog. Then people quickly realized how crazy she was.
She didn't believe in health insurance.
Her kids lived in some seriously dangerous living conditions. The Rubbermaid bins I mentioned before were stacked 4-5 high in a very very small apartment. Both of her kids were super young so it was pretty likely that they would be climbing on those all the time. The crib thing was bad, too. Her younger son slept in the crib and the older son slept on a mattress that was stored underneath the crib. There was a shelf, like the kind you mount directly to the wall and store knick knacks on, just above the crib and it was filled with heavy books. There was also a bookshelf within reach of the crib that always looked like it was tottering dangerously close to falling into the crib.
Then there was the cleanliness issue. Her apartment was filthy. It looked like she never cleaned the counters and the kids mattresses were covered with stains, some of which looked like pee and poop stains.
And she fed her kids something like hot dogs and beans every night for dinner to save money. Very rarely did she feed them fresh fruits and veggies because they were "too expensive".
For her kids birthdays, they would get something like a single matchbox car she found in a clearance bin at the Goodwill for 50 cents.
It was a trainwreck and kept our interest for several months before she took her blog down and deleted all the photos.
There was some question about her getting ad revenue from her blog to the tune of thousands a month, so she was actually bringing in about 3x what she said she was and she refused to move or keep her kids well fed.
Her husband was also crazy as a loon. He had his own blog of barely readable gibberish (like you couldn't even read it because it was so littered with typos and text speak) and he was their main breadwinner.
It was one of the craziest blogs I've ever read in my lyfe.
Unable to even.
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You don't understand the appeal of Benedict Cumberbatch / think he's fug / don't know who he is? WATCH SHERLOCK. Until you do, your negative opinion of him will not be taken seriously.
Why? Why why why did i miss this??
There were some other fun tidbits, too. She would not purchase produce, period, unless it were less than $1 per pound. To give her family fresh veggies, she grew a "lettuce garden" inside (she lives up north and it was winter- I can't imagine that it produced much at all) in a few used/recycled tin cans. She also bought their meat from the dollar tree- tube meat- for $1.
She posted photos of her kids bedroom, as PP stated, all of their things nailed to the wall. It was so very dangerous. Aside from that, a couple of them were sleeping on the floor. One of the generous ladies of FreeJinger (the forum I linked above) sent her an organic kid mattress for nothing. She ended up selling it to keep the $$ because they didn't need a mattress (wtf)!
She made all of her pasta. FROM FLOUR AND WATER. We called them gloodles, because who the helll makes pasta without eggs? I offered to send her a pasta machine, but she declined- she prefered to cut the long noodles (hundreds of them) with a knife instead.
They didn't use their oven, because they used it for storage instead. Their heat was included in the cost of their rent. They didn't use the heat, though, because it wasn't "right" and she was afraid their rent would increase if they used the heat at all (like I said before, she was in the north- I want to say Maine. What a good parent!)
She made her own fresh cheese using her skirt to strain it instead of purchasing cheesecloth. She grew/made her own kefir and had a name for it.
The icing on the cake (and the beginning of the downfall of her blog with people contacting CPS) was when one of her sons went into a coma and almost died. He ended up being diagnosed with a possible poisoning, but they never figured out what it was- and he was "asleep" for a couple of weeks. She mentioned symptoms around that time that her LO was having, and others told her to get help but she refused. And he almost ended up losing his life. She was a real winner, I miss her blog.
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So I replied earlier but TB ate my response, so to sum up: I think both of you are missing the point. They lived a crappy life for 7 years so they could live elaborately for the rest of their life. This was not for the long term.
I do read her blog occasionally and she is now a successful business woman who travels with and without her husband. She writes books and various other projects. I really do not understand how this qualifies as having no expectations for her life.
Although I don't feel this way, I do understand and accept the fact that some women out there want nothing more out of life than to be a good wife/homemaker and a SAHM. There are some women who just want to support their husband in his career. You both are painting a picture of a sad, pathetic doormat. It baffles me that you can't see that some women WANT to live that way and are HAPPY about it.