Fun fact: we Americans each spend an average of 293 hours in our vehicles every year. That’s 12+ solid days out of 365. I don’t care how good the music is or how fancy the upholstery is, that’s just way more time than I want to spend sitting in a car during my waking hours.
The hubs and I honestly did pretty well at minimizing our use of cars during 2016 and the first part of 2017 (our oldest has been a decent biker for years, so that helped). …
I’ll cut to the chase: We spent $5,894.51 in March for our family of four. You can scroll down to the see the breakdown of categories in our fancy Numbers chart. This total is only slightly higher than our spending in January or February, and March included our family trip to Maui (some of our most-effective-ever travel hacking, which we are very proud of). …
This trip was one of our bigger travel hacking wins of 2018. As such, we didn’t pay for much of it out of pocket. I have included our costs below, as well as what similar purchases would have cost without travel hacking. We stayed in Wailea on the west coast of Maui for one week during “high season” in March. …
I recently got some unsolicited and fairly angry advice from another adoptive mom to the effect of the following (the actual lecture I got was much longer than this – I have distilled it down to the main points for your convenience): …
Remember: We call this a “spending” report on purpose – not “our expenses” or “our costs of living” or anything else that implies that our use of our money is something that just happens to us while we sit there in helplessness. …
When my brother moved to Spain to teach English, my family – having never been to Spain – naturally decided we had to go visit. Soon some other family members decided to join, and then some good friends did too. Our plans exploded into a giant complex mess of twelve people’s ideas and expectations, which after several hundred email exchanges somehow resulted in airplane tickets and lodging reservations and then, against all odds, culminated in a trip that was an absolute blast. …
Like many things in life, there are a whole bunch of reasons you might choose to do this. There are also a whole bunch of reasons not to. These are just the factors that led us in to this adventure a little over three years ago. …
Putting Our Cards on the Table
In an effort to keep myself accountable to the idea that doctors do not have to spend a totally ridiculous amount of money to live well and love life, I’ve decided to share our spending for last month …
In a world where online fundraising is an accepted way to raise money for a small child’s dream birthday event, I’m sure plenty of people think that we are pretty stingy parents. After all, you can find examples of over-the-top children’s parties everywhere you look. …
According to one popular baby website, you can currently expect to spend about $2,000 on everything you “need” for your nursery furnishings. The most reasonable article I could find featuring photographic proof that their nursery wasn’t totally depressing came in around $400 for nursery furnishings (this was on a budget/frugality site). These nursery set-ups did not include what was spent on clothing, blankets, baby-feeding supplies, diapers, wipes, baby monitors, etc. …