Educating the Wheelers

The new Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Clever Dude. He sure put a lot of time and effort into it, so please check it out!

Oh, and I’m in there too, somewhere.

One of our goals this Christmas was to minimize our deadweight loss, meaning we didn’t want to waste money on gifts that people didn’t want or enjoy. If we were going to spend 20 dollars on a gift, we were aiming for 20 dollars — or more! — worth of enjoyment from the recipient. Just think of how many 20 dollar gifts you’ve given or received that have produced maybe 10 dollars worth of enjoyment. Or 5. Or 0. Or even gone negative!

One of the ways in which we did this was asking people what they wanted. I know, I know, it ruins the “fun” and and “spirit” and “romance” of the whole thing … on the other hand, you’re not flushing money down the toilet. My husband and I picked out and purchased our own Christmas presents this year (though we did each pick something out small as a surprise for each other, too.)

Next, I picked out things that would help them complete a set or collection. (Though you have to be careful with this. You can get tagged as a “Oh, she likes frogs!” and be getting unwanted frogs for the rest of your life. Don’t want to help perpetuate that.)

Or, I picked out something that I had heard the person talk about earlier in the year and made a mental note of it. (On the other hand, you have to be careful on this front, too. My mom has been complaining all year about never having a clean pair of socks, and she must have received about 30 pairs of socks for Christmas from me and a few other people. I guess I’m not the only person who heard about the Sock Situation.)

Finally, if I did pick something out on my own, I tried to make it inexpensive or cash.

Not the most romantic Christmas ever, but we spent less than we normally do, and the enjoyment level from everyone involved seemed just as high, if not higher! I’d call it a success.

I primarily write about our finances (when I do write, heh), but that’s because the kids are still young and we weren’t doing much by way of formal school. I think I can safely say that has now changed. Audrey is asking for school every day now. So what does that entail?

Primarily, it’s math, and that’s what I’ll talk about in this first post.

We use Singapore Math, and I love it. Math is extremely important in our house, and the initial reason why we decided to homeschool in the first place — to avoid the “constructivist” math that is currently taught in most public (and some private!) schools. There are two primary math curriculums (among many others, but perhaps that can be another post) that homeschoolers choose from: Singapore and Saxon. Singapore is the official curriculum of that country, and is notable because they tend to rank #1 in international student math competitions (like TIMSS). It excels in mathematical thinking and problem solving. Saxon is an extremely thorough, incremental, scripted lesson plan originally written by a homeschooling father. They’re both good, but I suspect is you’re really “into” math, Singapore is the better choice. If you’re less confident about your ability to teach math, Saxon is likely the better choice. This can be a big mayo vs. Miracle Whip-style debate, but I’m just saying where we come down on it.

The Singapore “Earlybird” Kindergarten texts were OK, but pretty heavy on learning to write the numbers and number words. In our case, we started with someone who loved math and hated writing so they pretty well spooked her. For a few months, we ended up switching to Miquon which, ironically, is a discovery-based curriculum — the very thing we wanted to avoid in public school. Of course, the reason why we used it was because it can involve almost no writing on the part of the student, and we only used it until she got over that hump. We’re back to Singapore now, using the first grade texts.

One complaint about Singapore is that it doesn’t provide enough practice — but that’s only true if you only use the initial textbook and workbook. There are also multiple supplemental books, and we use all of them: “Challenging Word Problems,” “Intensive Practice” and “Extra Practice.” Between the text, the original workbook and the three supplements, I assure you, there is plenty of practice. Heh. And Audrey loves it. She loves bouncing back and forth between the different books, deciding which one to do next. The multiple sources all attack the concept (at the moment, addition up to 10) from a variety of different ways. I was originally thinking of supplementing with a different curriculum for different methods, but I haven’t felt that need lately. (I’d probably either use Miquon again — I do think constructivist tests make a good supplement, just an extraordinarily bad primary curriculum — or maybe something like Math Mammoth. I’d love to try Math on the Level, but oy! Maybe if I win the lottery. The price isn’t exactly conducive to just “trying.”)

So how is homeschooling going? Absolutely great, really. I can already see it’s greatest academic benefit — we started math, and ran into a developmental block. So we were able to back up, use a new curriculum until she was ready, and then we got back on track. What would have happened there if she was just one of 30 kids and had to go along with the lesson plan? Perhaps you think that it would be “better” for a student to have to face the content that they’re not developmentally ready for and just get over that hump at the time that it is presented, and, well, vive le difference!

We now have 10 months living expenses in a high-interest savings account. We’re shooting for a much higher number (18) than is normally recommended (3-6 months) because, uh, we’re paranoid?

Well, not precisely paranoid, but cautious and hedging our bets. The economy isn’t exactly booming, and being relatively new to the area, we don’t have a deep sense of what his job options would be if he lost his current job. How long would it take him to find another good job? We have no idea. I’d rather have too much money in our emergency fund than too little.

But we haven’t stopped our other investments. In fact, these days may very well be a great time to be shoveling money into the market. We’re continuing our dollar-cost averaging that we always have, but have greatly cut back our spending and sending that extra money into our savings account.

One big major plus of living in MN vs. TX is that I can have a real garden here. Wasn’t much of an option in TX where we lived on a deer superhighway. (Our neighbor was a real trooper, with his 10 foot high fences, and they would still get in there somehow.)

Last year, my first garden was a hodgepodge of a bunch of different stuff, planted a month too late. We didn’t get much of a harvest, but it was a good trial run and a lot of fun.

This year, we had 4 8′x4′ boxes and a bunch of containers.

The good:

Strawberries and potatoes went gangbusters. The green beans were pretty good, as were the tomatoes. The peppers did well, though there weren’t very many of them. I have a big bag of celery tops to dry and use in soup all winter.

The turnips were ready before I could blink, and were totally awesome sliced very thin and roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper. Turnip chips! I love them! The parsnips appear to be doing well, but I’m not going to touch them for at least another month (or perhaps I might overwinter them), so who knows yet?

I only had one cabbage, which I nearly lost to …. something. Some kind of caterpillar, maybe? One morning, I went outside and the leaves were filled with these goopy green egg stuff. I cleaned it off with wet wipes and a solid hose down and was able to save it — and eat it a few days ago! Yum.

The bad to neutral:

I must have planted over 200 carrots. The neighbor kids ate most of them before they got particularly large. Must remember to plant more next year. The cukes were misshapen and small, but tasty. The peas were very low-yielding. The cauliflower germinated late, and just yesterday, I saw the little heads were less than quarter-sized so I pulled them. (We had our first frost 2 nights ago.) The broccoli had a similar fate. The onions didn’t get huge, but it was enough, when dried, to fill to large plastic containers.

The ugly:

Some sort of wilt got almost all of my winter squash. Didn’t plant enough corn for it to go very well, and with a cold and wet May, what I did plant didn’t get a good start. There are ears on the stalks, but now that we’re almost halfway through September, it’s obvious they won’t mature in time.

The dehydrator has been going almost constantly for a few weeks. I decided not to can anything this year because two little ones running underfoot seemed like a recipe for danger-disaster. But I have lots and lots of dehydrated veggies now. And lots to think about for next spring…

After last week’s rude surprise that the city would be repaving my mom’s street on garage sale day — with notice given at 4pm the night before — things were not look good for our heroes.

But, you know, some times things work out for the best. But it sure didn’t look like there was going to be a silver lining on Thursday. We decided to not bother putting everything out since we were told no one was allowed to park on the street all day. Well, wouldn’t you know, my mom’s neighbor had a garage sale … and they didn’t pave the road until around 3 or so. We could have went ahead and had the sale and not missed the prime hours.

Hey, water under the bridge. So we decided to put everything out on Friday, and ended up doing really well — about 175 dollars or so. And consider that we didn’t have any big ticket items, it was pretty much all children’s clothes and books. Huge volumes. So we decided to extend until Saturday, and that ended up being a good idea — we ended up around 330 total for the two days. We were originally only planning on going Thu-Fri to start with, since we had heard from neighbors that Saturdays were usually a bust. So, we lost out on Thursday, but Saturday ended up being just fine.

I deposited my haul at the bank this morning and we’ll be adding that to my “mad money” account. Woohoo!

I have long resisted transitioning to homemade bread. This has primarily been due to the fact that most of my attempts to do so have been pretty big failures. I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to make a bread that tastes great while warm with butter … it’s a little harder to make a bread that can be sliced thin enough for a sandwich that isn’t too unwieldy without crumbling apart.

Finding a bread machine at a garage sale for cheap wasn’t too hard. (Also how I found my dehydrator, but that’s another post.) There are a handful of items that people seem to buy — or receive as presents — with the best of intentions, but never actually get used. Never buy these new! You can almost always find them in “used once” or even “used never” at a good price.

Anywhoo. After much flailing around, I finally found the perfect bread for my family. I started with a Taste of Home recipe and modified it for whole grains and changed it from sunflower seeds to walnuts. Give it a try in your bread machine, let me know if you like it! I can report that, the day after making it, I can slice it quite thinly and successfully for sandwiches. And the kids love it.

Wheeler Bread

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons warmish water
1/4 cup honey
2 tablespoons butter, softened
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup quick-cooking oats
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups white flour
4 tsp vital wheat gluten
2 tablespoon nonfat dry milk powder
2-1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/2 cup chopped up walnuts

And I usually sprinkle some more extra wheat germ and some ground flax seed on top, on the sides away from the yeast (though I’m not sure if that matters), to boot. No more than about 1-2 tb of either, though.

I pick the 1.5lb wheat setting and let it fly. I realize it could be a little easier if I bought bread flour and didn’t muss with the vital wheat gluten, but I never seem to have bread flour, and this works for me.

My mom and I have been working hard on getting a garage sale together for several weeks now. She wants to clean out her house, and now that we’re on a pretty intense saving budget right now, it was a chance for me to earn some mad money for myself. So you could say I was motivated.

The ad ran in today’s paper, we had the signs, I was arranging things on tables, et cetera, all day today in my mom’s garage … until 10 minutes to 4, when a nice man in an official green vest came to the door to inform us that they were repaving mom’s street tomorrow, and no cars could park or drive on it from 7am until 7pm.

Oh. Thanks for the tip.

I guess we won’t be having a garage sale tomorrow.

The first couple of times that Andrew and I talked about hunkering down and saving more money were the easy times. But now that we’re even more serious — nearly the fabled “gazelle intensity” — it was a little more difficult to cut.

It’s sort of like when you read the article that tells you can lose 10 lbs in a year by stopping drinking soda, and you think, “But I already stopped drinking soda!” (And didn’t lose 10lbs!)

To continue the weight loss analogy, you could say we’d plateaued. So we took a closer look at where we could cut back. Now that Andrew works from home, we moved the car seats from the CRV into the Echo, almost doubling my around town gas mileage. We had already taken an axe to the grocery budget and almost completely stopped eating out, but I started looking at removing more convenience foods. I now bake our own bread, make our cereal, and I’m testing out various hamburger roll recipes. We signed up for Saver’s Switch with our electric company and got a 15% discount there. We are seriously considering getting rid of cable.

Another big thing is finding ways to not go to the store at all. For instance, if I’m just out of milk, I’ll pick it up at the gas station quikee mart (where it’s often a loss leader) or have my mom pick some up for us when she does her shopping. Thus I get to spend 3 bucks instead of the inevitable 75 or 100 dollars.

That goes double for Walmart or Target and the like. A trip for a 10 dollar pack of diapers never seems to be less than 100. Any time I can avoid walking into a store, I’ve dodged a bullet.

With both of us having a hand in finances now, just knowing that you’ll have to justify your expense to the other person raises the bar on what’s a want vs. a need.

I should probably mention why we made the switch from me handling all the finances to Andrew primarily doing it.

The underlying answer is that motherhood of little ones takes your little mind and scatters it to the four winds.

We have our primary checking account which is still with our bank in Texas, but they don’t have any branches in Minnesota. So we opened an account locally where we could deposit physical checks. We don’t have too many of those, so we made that my “grocery money” account. I hardly ever checked it online, there was rarely more than a few hundred dollars in there, though I’d open the envelope and peek at the balance — generally not bothering to pull the thing out and look at the whole thing. (This becomes important later.)

Now, occasionally I would get the little fleeting thought that it was lower than it should be, which was immediately replaced by the guilt and shame of figuring I must have spent too much money. Because that’s just the kind of girl I am — something’s awry, and I’m already berating myself for everything I must have done wrong.

Anywhoo, fast forward a few months and this time I know something’s wrong because I haven’t *used* that card for some time and there should be more money in there. Turns out we had a slow leak — an effective strategy, really. As my dad always says: the successful parasite knows not to kill the host. If they had been taking more money out, I would not have just felt shame and guilt and moved on. I would have looked into it sooner!

So that’s what brought us to Quicken and obsessively tracking every penny.

Hey, it’s embarrassing enough to have to admit it here. But you can be sure it will never happen again.