Unless you own a gas company or an oil well, you’re probably not a big fan of the gas prices lately. I paid $5.67 per gallon yesterday and that was at the cheapest station in town!

It’s easy to throw our hands up in the air and decide there’s nothing we can do about the price of gas. While gas may feel like the toughest budget category to cut because we’ve got places to go, I want to show you a simple calculation that will help you reduce your gas spending.

If you’ve seen our most recent budget update, you might wonder why I’m giving advice on saving money on gas. We spent $1,154 on gas last month! But it would be A LOT more if I didn’t take this tip into consideration.

First I’ll show you the simple three-step calculation, then I’ll explain why it matters and how it can save you real money every month! At the end I’ll give you an important warning and then some good news.

STEP 1: Figure the gas mileage your car gets

Do you know how many miles per gallon your vehicle gets? Don’t just go off of what it was rated at when it was originally sold, but the gas mileage it gets now (yes, the fuel economy of a car decreases over time).

First, figure out how many miles per gallon your vehicle gets. If it’s not automatically calculated by your vehicle you can easily figure it by zeroing out your odometer (trip meter) when you fill up. Fill your tank completely (but don’t top it off). Then, the next time you get gas, fill up the tank completely and pay attention to the odometer’s trip meter reading AND how many gallons you put in.

Get out your calculator and do the following equation:

Miles driven / Gallons of gas put in

That will give you the average miles per gallon (mpg) on the previous tank of gas.

For example, if I start with a full tank, then drive 377.4 miles and refill my tank with 19.2 gallons my math would look like this:

397.4 miles/ 19.2 gallons = 20.69 mpg

Repeat this exercise several times to get data for a longer period of time and different driving situations (around town vs road trip, etc).

STEP 2: Calculate the cost to drive ONE mile

STEP 3: Figure the cost of individual trips.

When you know how much the gas costs to drive a mile in your car, you can figure out how much any individual trip anywhere will cost you.

(number of miles to destination) x (cost per mile) = one-way trip cost

Don’t forget to double it because you will have to also drive home afterward.

For example, if Sam’s Club is 20 miles away away from you (as it is for me), that would be:

20 miles x $.25/mile = $5

It costs $5 to drive to Sam’s Club, so $10 round trip.

Knowing how much each trip costs you is powerful knowledge.

What you can DO with this knowledge

Knowing how much it costs to drive places empowers you to make informed financial choices. Instead of thinking that there’s nothing you can do about your gas budget, you can decide if each trip is worth the cost.

The key is to think about the cost when you are deciding to make the trip.

Are you driving the right car?

If you have multiple vehicles, figure the cost per mile for each of them to help you decide which car to take. Drive the car that gets the best gas mileage unless you have a good reason to drive your gas guzzler.

If gas were just $5/gallon (crazy that now that sounds good right now), our big van (which gets 12 mpg) would cost $.42 per mile to drive. So that above $10 round trip to Sam’s Club would cost nearly $17 in the big van.

Are you being efficient?

Can you combine the trip with another time you have to go out? Try to not make trips out for just one thing. Plan flexible outings like shopping around firm appointments.

I have this efficiency down to a science. I make sure to bring books and snacks for my kids so that they are prepared to wait in the car for an hour between dropping some kids off and picking up others, to avoid a trip home and back out again.

Is it worth paying for postage or shipping instead?

This goes both ways- whether you are sending or receiving. When you look at the cost of gas, suddenly a stamp doesn’t seem expensive at all. Instead of dropping off a card, drop it in the mail.

Like most people, I want to avoid paying for shipping when I buy something online. One way to do that is to do a store pick-up, but depending on where the store is, that might not be the most economical. The closest JoAnn fabric store is 24 miles away. If my cost was $.25/mile that would cost me $12 to get there and back home. Unless I am already driving by for another reason, it’s cheaper to pay for shipping.

Does other transportation make sense?

Knowing the cost per mile allows you to figure out how other transportation options would compare to driving. Let me illustrate with two examples.

When I first heard that schools charge families for riding the school bus where we live, I thought it was nuts! You have to pay $220 a year for your kid to ride the bus? It was free when I was a kid. But doing the math is actually shocking. There are 180 days of school, which is 360 trips to school (morning and afternoon) and these are all roundtrips because I am dropping my kids off since they can’t drive themselves yet. Each round trip from home to school costs me $3, so a year of driving my kid to school would cost $1,080. Suddenly paying $220 for the year sounds like a sweet deal. The bus doesn’t work for my kids though, because they have sports practice after school and an early morning scripture study class before school.

Here’s another example. Eventually the mom of the Ukrainian family that we are sponsoring will get her license and be able to drive. Currently she rides the bus to her English school every day. The school is 35 miles away. She takes a bus then a train. The school gives her a free pass for the train and we pay for the bus. The bus cost $1.50 per ride, or $3 per day, for a total of $60 per month with 20 school days. If she were driving, using the cost of $.25 per mile (from step 2 above), it would cost $8.75 in gas for her to drive to school. That would be $17.50 per day or $350 for 20 school days a month. When she does get her license, we will encourage her to continue taking the bus to school. She’ll save $290 each month just in fuel costs!

Driving the right car, being efficient, and making informed spending decisions will help you to make the most of the gas in your tank. One decision at at a time, your gas will stay in your tank and your money in your pocket.

Be careful! Small trips add up fast!

The danger of  knowing the cost of each trip is that you might look at the cost of a single trip and think, “That’s not very much!” and you will justify more trips because on its own one trip might not look too bad.

That is a dangerous temptation. Look at our gas spending as an example of how little trips add up.

Most of the places I drive regularly right now (school, sports practices and games, music lessons, taking the Ukrainian mom to and from the bus stop) are 6 to 8 miles away. That’s $1.50 to $2.00 each way or $3.00-$4.00 roundtrip. I make that roundtrip 6-10 times a day. That costs $18-$40 per day if I’m driving a minivan that gets 20 mpg (or $30- $65 per day if I’m driving the 15-passenger van that gets about 12 mpg).

Our $1,154 gas spending is made up of a bunch of $3.00-$4.00 trips. They are efficient trips getting 10 people where they need to go, but they still add up!

If zooming in to see the cost of individual trips tempts you to justify more trips, then zoom out and calculate the big picture.

You’ll actually even save more!

In this article I’m focusing solely on the price of fuel. The good new is that by driving less and foregoing unnecessary trips, you’re going to save a lot more than just at the pump.

Driving less will mean more time between oil changes. Your tires will last longer. Your brakes will last longer. The list goes on and on. Factoring in wear and tear on you vehicles may be tricky to calculate, but they are real expenses. Your insurance will also go down if you drive fewer miles.

So even though we’re only calculating the cost of gas per mile, the actual savings will be even higher than the gas alone.

It’s worth the effort!

Have you ever counted calories or logged your time for the mile run? Recording data gives you the information you need to make improvements.

It’s no different when it comes to your budget.

To start lowering your gas spending, grab a calculator and go through these simple steps. Taking the time to calculate the actual gas mileage that your vehicles get will allow you to figure out the cost of driving a mile. When you know how much it costs to drive a mile, you can figure the cost of any trip you make in your car.

Armed with these numbers, you can now compare costs, make informed decisions, and keep your gas costs down! You can do this!

The post The simple 3-step calculation that will save your gas budget appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Welcome to another Family Budget Update where we share our real numbers with you!

Why do we share all the details? Budgeting is such an important skill for everyone, but very few people are taught how to do it! It isn’t taught in most schools (except, eventually, in the School of Hard Knocks!) If you were lucky, your parents may have taught you how to manage your money and budget, but did they actually show you their budget?

Personal finance is full of confusion and mystery for many people. Society’s “rules” that make it taboo to talk about money encourage that confusion.

At Six Figures Under, we are doing our best to open up the conversation about money so you don’t have to learn the hard way. We are open and honest about our finances, so that you can see how a living, breathing, real-life budget works for real people.

We started sharing our family’s budget updates back in 2013 when we earned a fraction of what we earn today and had six figures of student loan debt (it’s paid off now!). You can look back on ten years of our past budget here.

If you are new here, welcome! Please feel free to ask any questions you have and I’ll do my best to answer them! Oh, and it might be useful to know that we are a family of 8 in Northern California who recently took in a refugee family of 4.

Okay! Let’s just jump into the numbers for August 2023!

Spending in August

After years of trying different different budget techniques, starting with what we “learned” from our own parents and advancing from there, the only consistent success we’ve found is when we budget by living on last month’s income. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, check out this video explaining how learning to live on last month’s income changed our lives or this post explaining how we got to that point.

We start each month’s budget plan with all of the income we earned the previous month. So in August, we budget and spend the money we received in July. We will allocate every dollar earned in the previous month into our budget categories for the current month.

As our priorities change throughout the month we move money around to accommodate and changing needs. A successful budget is a flexible budget!

Giving

Tithing – $1,374 We always pay a 10% tithe on our income. Like all of our August spending, this comes from the money we earned in July. You can read our thoughts on paying a 10% tithe here.

Fast Offering – $100 Each month we take one day to fast (go without food and drink) for two meals and contribute to a program that provides assistance for local folks who need it.

Monthly Bills

Mortgage – $2,823  We have a 2200 sq ft house in Northern California with a 15-year mortgage. With mortgage interest higher now, and potentially still climbing, we’re so grateful we could lock ours in at 2.375%. If you’re interested in the details of our Dec 2020 refi, you can check out all of the numbers and details. We currently have about $184,00 remaining on our mortgage.

Electricity – $6 We are finally reaping the benefits of our $70K investment into solar. We produce enough solar energy to cover all of our current usage, plus some credit toward winter months. The small bill is for a random service fee that can’t be avoided. We are still very conservative with our electric usage (we only turned on our air conditioning three times this summer) while we wait to see what an entire year of solar production looks like.

Car Insurance – $211 Our car insurance increased with the 15-passenger van we use to drive ourselves and our Ukrainian refugee family together in one vehicle (see this post for details ) and because we’re driving many more miles now. Our insurance is through USAA and we love them! If you, your parent, or your spouse were/are in the military, you’re probably eligible for USAA too!

Internet – $70 Our cable internet bill is back to $70 a month. Between working from home and 7 kids constantly using the internet for school, consistent high-speed access is absolutely essential. Six years ago we paid Comcast $5,000 to run cable from the adjacent property to our house, and have never regretted it.

Water – $200 Our water bill comes every other month, so I put set aside about half of what I expect the bill to be. This is always higher during the summer as we irrigate the garden and fruit trees.

Garbage- $50 This bill also comes every other month, so I allocate the money for half of the bill each month.

Cell Phones – $201 We now pay for seven cell phones: four for our family, and three for the Ukrainian family that we sponsor. They are all through Visible. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary that offers wifi calling and unlimited cell calls and data on the Verizon network, at much less than Verizon prices. We’ve been using them for years and love paying $25 per phone each month with unlimited data. We also have a Gabb watch and a Bark subscription.

Music – $256 Our music teacher generously offered his time and talent to teach our 11-year-old Ukrainian girl free of charge. What a blessing! The hybrid charter school that our younger kids attend started offering guitar classes this year. Two of the kids are in one class and two are in another, so we purchased a 3/4 size guitar and a baritone ukulele (we already have two full size guitars) so they will have some size options. All of the guitar excitement at our house got the older kids (who are super busy with school and sports) interested in guitar too, so I’ve been teaching them a little on the weekends. Look for our family album at this time next year!

Everyday Expenses

Food – $692  Being so busy with transportation and logistics for the past four months has really made intentionally planning meals and grocery shopping more difficult. I haven’t been doing a big monthly grocery haul like I used to. I cook several big meals a week and we eat lots of leftovers. I’m thankful that our “survival mode” doesn’t include take-out or anything too outrageous.

Food prices are definitely higher than they were a few years ago, but I still believe almost everyone can spend a lot less than they currently do on groceries. You can learn all about my strategies and method in Grocery Budget Hero now. Get $20 off with the coupon code STARTNOW.  That puts your total cost at $59, and I promise you’ll earn that back many times as you build your grocery budget hero skills.

Fuel – $1,154 Looking at our gas spending, you’d never guess that my husband works from home! Or that he and I are the only drivers out of the 12 of us. Most of those miles are driven by me. With six of our own active and involved kids to drive around and our four Ukrainian friends who also have full schedules, I spend many hours on most days on the road. I combine trips and try to do things in the most efficient way, but it still adds up!

Household Misc – $408  We paid for the online portion of drivers education for our oldest. We bought some school supplies, including a box of 10 reams of paper. I stocked up on several toiletries when Sam’s Club had a discount on the products we use. I got a new ironing board because my old one bit the dust. That doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly taking up ironing clothes–I use it almost exclusively for quilting.

Clothing – $76 – I got some cross country racing flats (shoes) for our oldest boy and a few other clothing items for the family.

Animals – $42 We bought two bags of chicken feed.

Allowances – $84 We give our kids “practice money” as a weekly allowance.  You can read all about why we decided to pay our kids allowance that’s not directly tied to chores, as well as all the details of when and how much in this blog post.

Sports – $175 In addition to club wrestling, we paid for a high school athletic boosters family pass that lets us into all of the kids sports events for the year. Our high schoolers also use the pass to attend football games and other sports events that their friends are participating in.

Refugees Misc – $64 I decided to have a separate category for the expenses for our refugees that don’t fit in other categories. We spent $40 on bus transportation for the Ukrainian mom to attend her daily English classes. We also bought some soccer socks and shin guards for the daughter.

Sinking Funds

For all of the budget categories above we zero out any money still left in the category at the end of the month and send it toward our big financial goal. As an example, we started the month with $150 in our clothing budget, but when we only used $76 of that, the other $74 was sent toward paying off our solar panels, our current major financial goal. Well, that’s what we normally do, but in August we had a minor “emergency” come up (more on that below), so we put the extra from all of our normal budget categories toward that unplanned expense.

In contrast to the budget categories above that we zero out each month, the categories below are our sinking funds, where we set aside money each month for periodic expenses and let it roll over and build up until we need it.

The amount in bold is the amount we added to the fund this month, followed by spending notes and the current balance of each fund.

We do not have separate bank accounts for these funds. All of the money sits in our checking account. We’re not worried about getting the money mixed up because we spend according to our budget category balances, not our checking account balance. We seriously never even look at our checking account balance unless we’re reconciling the account. We track our budget categories and spending in YNAB, a budgeting tool we absolutely adore. Yes. You can adore a budgeting tool. Don’t believe me? Try it out.

Medical/Dental – $0 added. We spent $403 in August on a bill for an x-ray from several months ago. Current category balance is $2,181.

Car Maintenance – $400  added.  We didn’t spend anything on our car maintenance in August, though Mike did some legal work for our mechanic in exchange for looking into a mystery going on with one of our vehicles. Current category balance is $744.

Christmas – $130 added. We spent $17 on Christmas 2023. Current category balance is $1,448.

Disability Insurance- $190 This will replace about 2/3 of Mike’s current income if injury or illness leaves him unable to work as an attorney. Our income potential is our greatest financial asset right now and disability insurance helps us protect it. We put money aside each month to pay the premium when it’s due each year. Current category balance is $977.

Life Insurance – $100 added. Next year’s life insurance premiums will be due in November. Current category balance is $900.

Birthdays & Gifts – $80 added. We spent $102 in August for birthdays.  Current category balance is $37. 

Car Registration & Smog – $40 added. We didn’t spend anything in August. Current category balance is $120.

Family Fun Fund – $130 added. We didn’t spend anything in August. Current category balance is 154.

Home Projects- $738 added. In August, our dishwasher decided to break down. Is it possible to live without a dishwasher? Of course, but cooking and eating at home with a large family every day makes a LOT of dishes, and hand washing all of those take a lot of time, and time is already so full. We have been through several new-to-us (aka used) dishwashers in the past several years and decided that this time we will buy a new one instead of buying expensive parts to try to fix another old one. We spent $1,049 on a new dishwasher. Since that wasn’t an expense we knew about at the beginning of the month, we had to get creative in moving money around to cover the cost. Our “home projects” sinking fund only had $311 at the time. To make up the difference we contributed less to other sinking fund categories and also put the extra from our regular budget categories toward the dishwasher instead of toward our solar payoff goal. We do have an emergency fund that we could have used, but we try hard to not need to use it. The category balance is currently $0.

Garden & Orchard- $0 added. We moved $100 from this category to put in the “home projects” category to go toward the dishwasher. The category balance is currently $32.

Investing

Kids’ 529s – $150 We know that $25 per kid per month invested for college isn’t much, but college costs are not our highest concern. Scholarships, grants, loans, and jobs during school worked for us. We may accelerate this savings later, but we’re ok with small, consistent payments right now.  The kids like to see their balances growing, and it adds up and teaches them good savings principles, even if it won’t entirely pay for school. You can read about our decision to start saving a little for college in this post.

IRA (Steph) – $542 With $542 monthly, I’ll max out my $6,500 IRA contribution for the year.  Mike has about $1,000 each month deducted directly from his paycheck into the state pension fund for his retirement.

Goal Progress

We are getting close to finishing paying for our solar installation!

We shared all the details here about why we are getting solar, how much it costs, and how we’re planning to pay for it here in this post.

The total cost of getting solar was $70,000 (plus about $3,000 of interest on the $50K loan when we pay it off in 2 years). We started making payments on the $50,000 loan in April 2022. Our payments are $1,502 per month.

Our contribution to our solar goal in July was $2,206.

Our remaining balance for solar is $17,573 and we can’t wait to finish paying it off!

I made a chart to keep track of our progress. I color in a little square for each $250 we put toward our solar purchase.

Income Earned in August – $10,316

I put the income section at the bottom of the budget update because I think it makes more sense there. We saved ALL of the money we earned during August and set it aside to fund September’s budget. This concept of getting a month ahead, has made the biggest impact on our finances. It takes some work to get to the point where you are living on last month’s income, but the effort is completely worth it!

The income section below shows the money we earned in August, which has all been set aside to use in our September budget.

Attorney Income – $9,316 Mike works as an attorney for the state of California. This is his take-home pay after taxes, social security, his pension contribution, and health insurance premiums.

Rental Income – $0 For years we rented out a one-bedroom apartment on our property through Airbnb. We gave that up to take in a Ukrainian refugee family for a couple of years. We loved Airbnb and will likely go back to that in the future. If you’re thinking about renting out your space on Airbnb, check out Mike’s post about dealing with insurance for your Airbnb rental or our explanation of how we handle our Airbnb finances.

Law Firm- $0  Before working for the state, Mike did estate planning and business transactions. Over the last few years he has had a steady stream of potential clients, most of whom he refers to other attorneys, but he still occasionally helps former clients. He doesn’t cut himself a paycheck each month, just a couple of times a year.

Blog – $0  I only pay myself a couple times a year now. My blogging income took a major hit when I put the blog on the back burner during Covid to start homeschooling my kids. Since then it really hasn’t recovered. The income still covers my fixed blogging expenses (which are a lot more than most people would guess).

Gift – $1,000  We were given a completely unexpected monetary gift from a kind friend with the instruction that it should go toward our family’s budget. They said they wanted to help support us because they know that we are using a lot of resources to help our refugee family. What a thoughtful and generous gesture.

Come back next month to see how we use this income to fund September’s budget.

How’s Your Budget Working for YOU!?

Congratulations for making it all the way through our Family Budget Update for August 2023! That’s a lot of words and numbers!

Now let’s hear from you!

What financial goals are you currently working toward?

How is your budget helping you reach your goals?

What struggles are you having with your budget?

Let’s chat in the comments!

This post contains affiliate links for products or services that we love and recommend.

The post Here’s a detailed look into everything our family 8 spent and earned in August appeared first on Six Figures Under.

After sharing our cost breakdown for our 10-day Washington DC trip for our family of 8, I’ve had a lot of requests to share the numbers for other recent trips. I’ll start with the trip we took in April 2022 when we went drove out from California to Ohio and upstate New York.

The main purpose of the trip to Ohio was to help my parents clean out the house that I grew up in to get it ready to sell. That’s a long way to travel to just do some dirty work, so we decided to make it into a fun family adventure and add in lots of fun along the way. We visited some awesome historical sites along the way from California to Ohio, then headed up to Niagara Falls afterward.

Before our trip we put together a vacation budget. I will share both our budgeted amount and our actual spending on gas, lodging, food, and entertainment. While your family might have a different budget and priorities when it comes to family trips, I hope this article will give you some ideas for making family adventures more affordable.

Gas- $1,248

We drove our 2007 Honda Odyssey which seats all 8 of us, albeit tightly.

My estimate for gas spending was $1,500 based on the calculation below:

~6,000 miles / 18 mpg  x $4.50/gal

I try to err on the high side so I am pleasantly surprised when we come in under budget. We probably get closer to 20 miles per gallon and  the average price per gallon was less than my estimated average (but coming from California where the current gas prices were well above $5/gallon, an average of $4.50/gallon sounded too good to be true). I would much rather budget too much for a trip and have extra to put toward our next adventure than come in over budget and have to skimp on other budget areas to make it all work.

Divided by eight people, that’s $156/per person. Not bad for a cross country trip!

We came in $252 below budget on gas.

Lodging- $1,207

My budget estimate for accommodations was $1,575.

Our trip included 20 nights. Of those nights, 2 nights were at my brother’s house in Utah (one on each end of the trip), 6 nights were at my parents’ house in Ohio, 1 night was with friends in Columbus, Ohio, and 2 nights with friends in Champaign, Illinois.

That’s half of the nights that we didn’t have to pay for. We are pretty low maintenance guests who don’t mind crashing on the floor. The best part isn’t saving money, it’s that we can stay up late and catch up with friends and family without having to hurry back to a hotel to put kids to bed. It’s a great chance for kids to bond with cousins and family friends.

We did pay for 9 nights of lodging on the road and at our destinations. I booked some of the accommodations ahead of time, so I had some real prices to figure into my total estimate. The others I use the fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants method, which I actually find fun. I’ll explain more on that below.

In Nauvoo, Illinois we stayed at an Airbnb for 3 nights for $447. We were there in the off-season (Summer is the big tourist season there), so we found very affordable, wonderful, close accommodations! Airbnbs have a lot going for them for a family like mine because we can all be together in one place (versus a motel where we have to get more than one room). Plus, having a kitchen means we can have home-cooked meals!

The other booking that I made in advance was for Buffalo, New York. We stayed 2 nights in 2 adjoining rooms for a total of $327. This was by far the nicest of the hotel/motel stays of the trip. The place included a nice pool/hot tub and a hot breakfast buffet.

For the nights we were on the road or just stayed one night in a spot, I estimated a cost of $200/night total for 2 rooms. Like with gas, I like to estimate on the high side of what I would like to spend.

We don’t require a lot when it comes to a place where we’ll doing nothing but sleeping for a few hours. When we are driving cross country, we usually arrive late and carry in a few sleeping kids and the rest of us fall asleep quickly. We shower and leave in the morning and that is all. As long as it seems to be in a safe area, I am not picky. I use google or a travel search engine to find whatever place has the cheapest nightly rate. Since we are getting two rooms, the savings is doubled! I also look at Airbnbs that can accommodate 8, which is sometimes cheaper than two rooms in a motel.

I love the flexibility of not having reservations so if we aren’t tired we can keep going or if something comes up and we need to stop earlier, we don’t need to stress. I also enjoy the “thrill of the chase” if you will. It’s fun to find the best deal by comparing upcoming towns on our route and make reservations just before we arrive.

Lincoln, Nebraska (1 night x 2 rooms) = $117

Richfield, Ohio (1 night x 2 rooms) = $93

Sidney, Nebraska (1 night x 2 rooms) = $111

Ogden, Utah (Airbnb, 1 night) = $113

All of those one night accommodations came in well under the $200 estimate, as I had hoped. All of them were just fine, except the place outside of Cleveland ended up being a dump. In the website pictures it showed a lovely pool. In actuality the pool was empty and covered in caution tape. One of our rooms smelled terribly of smoke. We were glad it was just for one short night. Other than that our accommodations were either awesome or sufficient.

We came in $368 below budget on lodging.

Food- $405

When I was planning the budget for our trip, I decided that we would just try to stick to our normal food budget. We were gone for 3 weeks in April, so that was the majority of the month anyway.

We definitely “ate out” more than we do at home, but our idea of eating out isn’t very extravagant. We got pizza a couple of times and got sandwiches at a couple of sandwich shops. We also can’t resist the $.75 ice cream cones at Little America, so we stop there on every trip through Wyoming. All that eating out added up to $152

When we stayed with family and friends we usually ate with them. We also ate with some family and friends who we didn’t stay overnight with!

Other than that, we brought snacks with us or bought food at grocery stores along the way. I prepared snack bags for the kids for each day of the trip that we spent in the car. Each child gets a gallon ziplock bag full of snacks, some fruit, some sweet, some salty, that they can eat throughout the day whenever they want. I usually buy snacks in bulk and divvy them up myself (or have the kids do it) rather than buy all prepackaged foods. That tip alone will save lots of money.

For meals in the car, we have sandwiches, rolls, or bagels, string cheese, carrot sticks, apples or oranges, and whatever else we have in our snack bags. For meals at Airbnbs, we’ll make spaghetti and salad, taco soup and cornbread, or another easy dinner.

I know for some people the idea of sticking to your normal food budget while on vacation sounds miserable, but for us it really isn’t. We very rarely eat out in our normal life, so none of our kids know any different. With 8 people in our family, the cost of eating out, even just fast food, adds up quickly. For us, the expense is just not worth it.

In the month of April, we spent $629 total on food with $405 of that being the three weeks on our trip. That was right on budget.

Activities- $188

Like I mentioned in the beginning, the main purpose of the trip was to help my parents in Ohio. We figured that while we were driving across the country was a great chance to see some historical sites. Most of the sites we visited were completely free.

Winter Quarters, Nebraska– $0 After attending church, we visited the Mormon Trail Center museum and toured the pioneer cemetery and temple grounds. We drove into downtown Omaha to explore the amazing statues of Pioneer Courage Park.

Nauvoo/Carthage, Illinois– $0 There is so much to see in Nauvoo and it’s all free. We learned about life in the mid-1800s by touring a blacksmith shop, cobbler, print shop, gunsmith shop, bakery, tinsmith, and more. We learned about making barrels, rope, quilts, and carding wool. We took a carriage ride, wagon ride, and ox cart ride. We could have spent a week here, but we packed as much as we could into three days.

Kirtland/Hiram, Ohio– $0 I grew up not far from these historic towns, so I have been there many times. They have restored and added many buildings since I was a kid. It happened to be Easter afternoon when we toured Kirtland (hence the matching Easter outfits in the picture).

Niagara Falls, New York– $73  After finishing all of the hard work at my parents’ house, we headed up to the American side of Niagara Falls. We hiked around to all of the various views of the different falls on the American side. We stopped by a thrift store to get jackets/coats for some of us. We paid $10 for parking and $63 for the Cave of the Winds tour which included a museum, video, elevator ride and walk to where you are splashed by the water and mist. We had hoped to take the Maid of the Mist boat tour but found that the boat hadn’t started running yet; we were just a couple of days too early in the season.

Palmyra, New York– $0 While we were in upstate New York, we saw a few Palmyra historical sites including tours of homes, museums, a printing press, farm, and a nature walk.

COSI Science Museum– $115 I remember going to Columbus’s Center of Science and Industry as a child and I was eager to take my kids there. In order to get the best deal on tickets, I bought a $75 family pass to a (much smaller) science museum here in California that is part of the reciprocal entry program. That pass gave us free entry for 2 adults and 4 children at COSI, so we only had to pay for two additional kids ($40) at the door. Normal COSI entry would have cost our family $180. By buying the reciprocal pass in California, we saved $65, plus we got access to the science museum here in California for a year.

Amish Country of Ohio– $0 Whenever we would have visitors come to Ohio when I was a kid, we would take them to Amish Country. Everyone loves seeing the horses and buggies. I wanted to go into all the quilt shops, too, but no one else really did. We checked out the cheese factory too, but they weren’t working that day. We had lunch at the Weaver farm and furniture store deli. (The cost of lunch was part of our food budget.)

We knew that most of our activities would be free and we had researched the other ones, so we knew exactly how much to budget. We ended up being $146 under budget because the Maid of the Mist wasn’t running yet.

Other Trip Spending $224

I won’t include these random other expenses in our trip total, but I figured I would at least mention them since they are expenses that happened on our trip.

Uhaul $159

As we were helping my parents, we came up with lots and lots of things to donate. My mom had planned on taking car loads to the thrift store, but Mike quickly recognized that with the quantity that we would be donating, it would take too much time and manpower to drive back and forth to the thrift store all day. He rented a U-haul for a couple of days so we could be more efficient. We packed it full twice with thrift store donations!

Thrift Store $13

Speaking of the thrift store, we had to buy a few warmer things for Niagara Falls. Our oldest also lost one of her dress shoes (it must have fallen out of the car at one of our stops), so we grabbed her a new pair for church.

Cabela’s $52

This spending wasn’t related to our trip at all, but we stopped by Cabela’s when we went through Nebraska. It’s always a fun place to walk around. We got some new flashlights, some socks, and a bag.

That covers it!

We spent just over $3,048 in gas, lodging, food, and entertainment for 8 people for 20 days. Per person, that comes out to $381 per person! Of course, staying with family and friends for half of the nights definitely helped keep the cost low.

There are challenges too, with squeezing 8 people into an 8-seater when your crew includes tall teenagers (sometimes Mike and I take turns to sit in the squashed seats in the back). But if you can manage the tight quarters, a road trip is a great way to have a very affordable family vacation where you can visit lots of different places.

Does your family take road trips? What are some of your favorite places that you have gone?

The post Cost Breakdown for Our 3-Week Cross Country Road Trip — Family of 8 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

The great thing about personal finance is that it’s personal. Some people take “personal” to mean that it’s private. I think of the “personal” in personal finance as meaning that it’s about your individual choice. No one can tell you what you should do with your money. The choice is yours! It’s personal.

The way you spend your money is an outward display of your values. You can tell what’s important to a person by the way he or she spends money.

Our priorities might be most obvious in the more discretionary spending categories like entertainment or savings, but really, all of our expenses reflect our priorities.

• Your utility bill might reflect your priority of keeping the house at a comfortable temperature.
• Your car payment reflects your priority of having a reliable, new vehicle.
• Your money saved for a family vacation shows that traveling as a family is important to you.

While we don’t want to embrace a scarcity mentality, for most of us the reality is that we don’t have endless available funds.

That’s normal. That is fine!

It just means we can’t buy everything. We can buy anything, but we can’t buy everything. We have to prioritize.

If you don’t consciously prioritize your spending (with .. ahem.. your budget), then the default is that you will spend your money on whatever comes up first. Does it seem like you somehow never have money for the things that you think are your priorities? If so,  it’s probably time to rethink the way you are allocating your money. It’s time to get serious about budgeting

But that’s a conversation for another day. Today I want to share with you 7 normal things that our family doesn’t spend money on.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t spend money on these things. If some of these are among your priorities, that’s totally fine! No judgment here. This is just an illustration to show how we intentionally try NOT to spend money on things that come up if they aren’t priorities. There are probably things that I buy that you don’t!

Coffee

Starbucks gets a bad rap in the budgeting space, but I’m not just talking about “fancy” coffee (that’s certainly included though). We don’t drink coffee at all, ever, so we don’t need to budget for it.

Food at Events

Whether it’s a swim meet, football game, theme park, or the county fair, our family doesn’t buy event food. Our kids don’t ask for snacks, treats, or drinks when we go to events because they know that we aren’t buying them. When it’s an event that allows outside food, then we pack our own food to bring in. If food isn’t allowed, we are conscious to eat before we go. If we’re at an amusement park that doesn’t allow outside food to be brought it we will go out to the car where we’ll have lunch and dinner packed in a cooler. We’d rather spend that money on fun activities than overpriced, non-nutritious food. We’ve saved so much money over the years with this “rule” and our kids have learned delayed gratification and money management skills in the process.

Purses

I know some women who have a closet full of purses and others who care a lot about designer labels. For me, that doesn’t matter at all.  For years I didn’t carry a purse at all because I brought a diaper bag everywhere I went. At the risk of making some of you cringe, I’ll admit that I usually just buy a purse from the thrift store and use it until it wears out. Seeing the price of designer purses does not make me regret this decision!

Make-up

Besides a little mascara, I don’t wear makeup. While make up is a completely normal expense for most women (and that’s totally fine!), it has never been my thing. I have my mascara on Amazon’s subscribe and save, so it automatically gets purchased and delivered to me every six months.

Alcohol

My husband and I don’t drink when we’re out or when we’re at home. Our decision has nothing to do with money, but when I see how much others spend in this area I can’t help but appreciate that we don’t need a budget category for alcohol.

Mani/Pedi/Massage

I’ve never paid to have my nails done or to get a massage.  Having nail polish or anything else on my nails makes them feel like they can’t breathe, so I prefer naked nails. I paint my own toenails in the summer, but it’s nothing fancy. For some, these expenses are priorities, but for me they just aren’t.

Haircuts, colors, etc

It probably doesn’t surprise you that I’m also very low maintenance when it comes to hair. I’ve always kept my natural color. When I was as in college my roommate and I would get our hair cut very inexpensively at the local beauty school, but other than that I’ve had my hair cut by my mom or husband. My husband cuts his own hair (with touchups from me) and our boys’ hair. I usually cut the girls’ hair myself.

You do you!

Some of you nodded along with me through that list. Others are screaming inside about our deprived life. Isn’t it wonderful that personal finance is personal!? We don’t spend money on things that aren’t priorities for us. We would rather spend our money on things that are important.

I want the same for you! Decide what things don’t matter to you (or that matter less than your higher priorities) and limit the money that you spend there. That frees up your money to spend on the things that are most important to you.

Whether your spending priorities are totally the same as or completely different than ours, harnessing the power of priority-based budgeting will get you to a better place financially. So own your spending and the lack of it. You do you!

How about you?

What are some “normal” things that you choose not to spend money on?

The post 7 “Normal” Things We Don’t Spend Money On appeared first on Six Figures Under.

I am back on track with budget updates! If you missed our May 2023 budget update and June 2023 budget update, that will catch you up on what has been going on.

Also, last week I published a post explaining the details of how we are working the finances for the Ukrainian family that we’re sponsoring.

For those who are new here, we are a family of 8 in Northern California who recently took in a refugee family of 4. We share our real family budget in an effort to break the taboo about family finances. If you are like most Americans, the only family budget you’ve ever seen is your own and you probably learned how to budget from your own trial and error, not from any direct instruction. Our budget will look completely different from yours since our financial details and individual priorities are different, but hopefully you can look past the numbers and see the principles behind them. My hope is that being open about our finances will help other families to see ways that budgeting can work for them.

Okay let’s take a look at our numbers for July 2023. We had lots of extra income in June which was helpful for July’s budget. July also had some extra income, which we are putting to good use in August. As always, feel free to ask if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense or you would like me to clarify.

Income Earned in JULY – $12,444

We live on last month’s income. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, check out the video explaining how living on last month’s income changed our lives or the post explaining how we got to that point.

This income section shows the money we earned in July, which has all been set aside to use in our August budget. The spending section below shows the money we earned in June and spent in July.

Attorney Income – $9,026 Mike works  as an attorney for the state of California. This is his take-home pay after taxes, social security, his pension contribution, and health insurance premiums.

Rental Income – $0 For years we rented out a one-bedroom apartment on our property through Airbnb. We gave that up to take in a Ukrainian refugee family for a couple of years. We loved Airbnb and will likely go back to that in the future. If you’re thinking about renting out your space on Airbnb, check out Mike’s post about dealing with insurance for your Airbnb rental or our explanation of how we handle our Airbnb finances.

Law Firm- $3,418  Before working for the state, Mike did estate planning and business transactions. Over the last few years he has had a steady stream of potential clients, most of whom he refers to other attorneys, but he still occasionally helps former clients. He doesn’t cut himself a paycheck each month, just a couple of times a year.

Blog – $0  My blogging income took a major hit when I put the blog on the back burner during Covid to start homeschooling my kids. Since then it really hasn’t recovered. The income still covers my blogging expenses (which are a lot more than most people would guess). I only pay myself a couple times a year now.

Spending in July

Each month we allocate every dollar earned in the PREVIOUS month into our budget categories for the current Month. For July, we budget and spend the money we received in June.

Giving

Tithing – $1,802 We always pay a 10% tithe on our income. Like all of our July spending, this comes from the money we earned in June. You can read our thoughts on paying a 10% tithe here.

Fast Offering – $100 Each month we take one day to fast (go without food and drink) for two meals and contribute to a program that provides assistance for local folks who need it.

Monthly Bills

Mortgage – $2,823  You may notice that this is up about $450. This was because of an increase in home owner’s insurance. We have a 15-year mortgage on our house. With mortgage interest higher now, and potentially still climbing, we’re so grateful we were able to lock ours in at 2.375%. If you’re interested in the details of our Dec 2020 refi, you can check out all of the numbers and details.

Electricity – $6 We are finally reaping the benefits of our huge investment into solar. We are producing enough solar energy to cover all of our current usage, plus some credit to go toward winter months. The small bill is just for random service fees that can’t be avoided. I should also note that we are still very conservative with our electric usage (we very rarely use our air conditioning) while we wait to see how the year’s solar true up goes.

Car Insurance – $189 Our car insurance went up now that we have a third vehicle (see this post if you don’t know what vehicle I’m talking about) and we drive much more. Our insurance is through USAA and we love them! If you, your parent, or your spouse were/are in the military, you’re probably eligible for USAA too!

Internet – $130 You may notice that this cost is up from the normal $70 per month. Apparently our plan had a cap of 1.2TB limit. We had never even come close to using that much even when renting out our guest house, so the limit never really mattered to us. With our Ukrainian guests, we have been going over, so Comcast bumped us up to the unlimited plan which is an additional $30 per month. In August we had to pay the extra $30 for the previous month as well.

Water – $344 Our water bill comes every other month. Our bill was higher than we expected so we had to contribute a big chunk in July to pay the bill. I really don’t like not being able to track our water use. Getting to the meter is a 4 mile drive or a very long, steep hike. With the bill only coming every other month, it is hard to pinpoint the problem.

Garbage- $50 It seems like this bill creeps up a few dollars about twice a year.

Cell Phones – $228 We now pay for seven cell phones: for me, Mike, our oldest child, one used as a home phone, and three for our Ukrainian friends. They are all through Visible. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary that offers wifi calling and unlimited cell calls and data on the Verizon network. We’ve been using them for several years now and have no complaints at all. It is $25 per phone with unlimited data per month, but right now you can get the first month for just $5 through my link. We also have a Gabb watch and have a Bark subscription.

Music Lessons – $0 We have paused music lessons because our daughter is extremely busy right now. Our music teacher has generously offered his time and talent to teach our 11-year-old Ukrainian girl. What a blessing!

Everyday Expenses

Food – $698  Being so busy with transportation and logistics for the past three months, I have not been very intentional about planning meals or grocery shopping. I haven’t been doing a big monthly grocery haul like normal. I cook several big meals a week and we eat lots of leftovers. I’m thankful that our “survival mode” doesn’t include take-out or anything too outrageous.

Food prices are definitely higher than they were a few years ago, but I still believe almost everyone can spend significantly less than they currently do on groceries. You can learn all about my strategies and method in Grocery Budget Hero now. Get $20 off with the coupon code STARTNOW.  That puts your total cost at $59, and I promise you’ll earn that back many times as you build your grocery budget hero skills.

Fuel – $837 Our gas spending went down from $1,000, probably because many of the summer activities (like swim team) ending in mid-July. The older kids and I went to a church camp for a week, and the next week our family (and Ukrainians) went camping. (Spoiler: August gas will be much more!)

Household Misc – $434  This is a fraction of what we spent in this category last month, but it’s still amazing how all of the “little things” add up. We had normal, household things along with a couple of subscriptions.

Clothing – $130 – We didn’t do back-to-school clothes shopping for the most part, but we did need to buy a few things for some of the older kids.

Animals – $50 We bought dog food and chicken feed.

Allowances – $84 We give our kids “practice money” as a weekly allowance.  You can read all about why we decided to pay our kids allowance that’s not directly tied to chores, as well as all the details of when and how much in this blog post.

Sports – $60 We paid for wrestling in July.

Sinking Funds

For most of our budget categories, we zero out what is left at the end of the month and send it to whatever our big financial goal is at the time, but in our sinking funds we set aside money each month for periodic expenses and let it build up until we need it.

The amount in bold is the amount we added to the fund this month. Any spending is noted in the comments along with the current balance of each fund.

We do not have separate bank accounts for these funds. All of the money sits in our checking account. We’re not worried about getting the money mixed up because we spend according to our budget category balances, not our checking account balance. We seriously never even look at our checking account balance unless we’re reconciling the account. We track our budget categories and spending in YNAB.

We have skipped some of our sinking funds in the past several months since the budget has been tighter due to extra expenses related to our newcomers. Since June’s income was higher, we were able to put some extra toward our sinking funds.

Medical/Dental – $300 added. We spent $106 in July on an x-ray. I’m convinced that there is another bill coming as soon as the insurance company realizes that we haven’t met our deductible. Current category balance is $2,584.

Car Maintenance – $1,200  added.  We spent $1,840 in July getting the radiator fixed on one of our vehicles. Current category balance is $344.

Christmas – $400 added. We didn’t spend anything for Christmas 2023. Current category balance is $1,335.

Disability Insurance- $190 This will replace about 2/3 of Mike’s current income if injury or illness leaves him unable to work as an attorney. Our income potential is our greatest financial asset right now and disability insurance helps us protect it. We put money aside each month to pay the premium when it’s due each year. Current category balance is $787.

Life Insurance – $100 added. Next year’s life insurance premiums will be due in November. Current category balance is $800.

Birthdays & Gifts – $50 added. We spent $113 in July for birthdays for two of the kids in the Ukrainian family.  Current category balance is $59. 

Car Registration & Smog – $80 added. We didn’t spend anything in July. Current category balance is $80.

Family Fun Fund – $350 added. We spend $673 in July. We didn’t plan any major family trips this summer because we weren’t sure how things would go with welcoming our refugees. We decided we needed to do something fun before school started, so took a camping trip at the end of July. Camping itself didn’t cost anything, but we bought two fun additions to our family. This stand-up paddleboard and this kayak were used from dawn until after dusk each day that we were camping. They will be fun for years to come! Current category balance is $24.

Home Projects- $100 added. We didn’t spend any in this category in July.  The category balance is currently $311.

Garden & Orchard- $200 added. In July we spent $68 on a hose timer. The category balance is currently $132.

Investing

Kids’ 529s – $150 We know that $25 per kid per month invested for college isn’t much, but college costs are not our highest concern. Scholarships, grants, loans, and jobs during school worked for us. We may accelerate this savings later, but we’re ok with small, consistent payments right now.  The kids like to see their balances growing, and it adds up and teaches them good savings principles, even if it won’t entirely pay for school. You can read about our decision to start saving a little for college in this post.

IRA (Steph) – $542 With $542 monthly, I’ll max out my $6,500 IRA contribution for the year.  Mike has about $1,200 each month deducted directly from his paycheck for retirement.

Goal Progress

We are just paying normal mortgage payments for a few more months while we finish up an interim goal–paying off our solar installation.  Mike and I shared all the details here about why we are getting solar, how much it costs, and how we’re planning to pay for it here in this post.

We are so excited to finally have solar all set up and running (it took over a year, which is ridiculous!!)! We are hooked up to the grid, so what we produce (over what we use) during sunny hours will be sent back to the grid and will help offset what we use during non-sunny hours. Our system doesn’t include any batteries.

The total cost of getting solar was $70,000 (plus about $3,000 of interest on the $50K loan if we pay it off in 2 years). We started making payments on the $50,000 loan in April 2022. Our payments are $1,502 per month.

Our contribution to our solar goal in July was $5,007.

The way we have it set up in our budget is kind of like a sinking fund. We put money into our “solar” category each month. Some months it is a lot; some months it is a little. There is an automatic payment of $1,502 toward the solar loan each month that comes out of a separate budget category.

That brings the total we’ve paid towards solar so far to $51,540.

I made a chart to keep track of our progress. I color in a little square for each $250 we put toward our solar purchase.

How About You?

• How did your budget and/or debt repayment go in July?

This post contains affiliate links for products or services that we love and recommend.

The post Family Budget Update- July 2023 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Since our new Ukrainian friends arrived three months ago we’ve had a lot of questions about our experience sponsoring a refugee family. Some questions are cultural. Others are about the more personal experience. Many questions are also financial.

Most people know that we believe talking about money is helpful, not taboo. Every family has to make financial decisions and it’s better to learn from each other than to try to figure it all out without help. So when someone has a question about the financial changes that come with sponsoring a Ukrainian family, they often just ask us. 

To save you the trouble of asking, we’ve compiled some of those questions, with our answers, here. If we missed anything that you’re dying to know, feel free to add your question in the comments. 

You can also see our actual spending for every budget category in our monthly budget updates. It’s not always obvious what portion of that spending is due to helping support our Ukrainian family, but we’ll try putting together some trends over time soon to make that easier to see.

We’ll cover the actual monetary costs of sponsorship, our philosophy in approaching this adventure, and some more detailed responses to frequent questions. For anyone considering sponsorship, we have had a wonderful, rewarding experience so far, and we hope our shared experiences can be useful to you. For everyone else, we hope this is at least interesting.

First, the birds-eye view of the finances.

Our family’s initial sponsorship costs

I am having a really hard time putting a number on the initial sponsorship costs because so much of it was covered by generous friends, family, and even strangers. Just thinking back on it now, is filling my heart with joy and gratitude!

Converting our Airbnb guest house to a long-term apartment for four required changing out much of the bedroom furniture. Most of the furniture was donated by friends, including a leather couch, several bookshelves, a desk, and a couple of dressers. I was particular about the beds in order to use the space most efficiently. After searching Facebook marketplace for a while, I found a twin/full bunk bed and a twin loft bed for a good price.

I set up a Target registry where friends (including many of you!) could purchase specific needs that were shipped straight to us. This included mattresses, towels, diapers, wipes, pillows, bedding, toiletries, and more. Seeing the love pour in in the form of brown Target boxes brought tears to my eyes!

We used cash donations to cover three new phones (more details on the phone situation below), summer swim team fees, a new Chromebook (they had been doing school on Google Classroom in Poland only using phones), and other incidentals to get the apartment ready for them.

Other friends gave gently used dishes, household items, and clothes and shoes in the specific sizes we needed.

I stocked the fridge, freezer, and pantry with about $500 of food to get them started.

It was such a blessing to have an outpouring of love and support to get the apartment set up for our Ukrainian friends. Not knowing what the specific future financial needs would be, it was a big burden lifted to have so many people step in to help shoulder these initial costs.

Our family’s ongoing sponsorship costs

• $2,000/month
  This is the missed income for not renting our guest house as an Airbnb. Over the past two years we averaged $2,000 per month in Airbnb income. Because our Ukrainian friends live in the apartment, now converted for a family of four, that income is no longer part of our monthly budget.
• $75/month
  This is the cost of three unlimited-data phone plans with Visible, the Verizon subsidiary we use for our phones as well.
• $53/month
  Additional cost of auto insurance on adding the 15-passenger van.
• $300/month
  Increased gasoline cost. New people means more driving to shopping, appointments (so many appointments!), sports, classes, and activities. The gas mileage on the big van is also about half of what our minivans get, so when we are all driving together it costs a lot more than it used to.
• $30/month
  We increased the max data on our Comcast internet plan to cover the much higher data needs of three new high-volume users. We had a 1.2TB limit for five years, but ran over that significantly the month our friends arrived.

Their government benefits were recently approved and will cover their food, health insurance (which includes dental coverage), and with the temporary cash assistance program, some of their other expenses. 

Q: How does the refugee sponsor program work?

A: The federal  program for Ukrainian war refugees is called Uniting for Ukraine.  The premise of the program is that the United States government supports the idea of some Ukrainians displaced by the war coming to the United States, but does not intend to create any new government-sponsored programs to take care of them once they arrive. Instead, the government crowdsources the care, transition help, and support of the refugee arrivals to current U.S. residents who meet basic security requirements and can show evidence of the ability to financially support the refugees. Because every refugee must be matched with a sponsor before they are permitted to come to the United States, the number of displaced Ukrainians allowed to enter the U.S. is entirely dependent on the number of volunteers able and willing to sponsor them.

(Note: technically the Ukrainians under the program are called “humanitarian parolees,” not “refugees,” because “refugee” has a distinct meaning in immigration law. We use the more common “refugee” because everyone understands it.)

Q: How long will you be responsible for supporting your Ukrainian family?

A: We expect to financially support our new friends for at least two years. Refugees are initially given permission to remain in the United States for two years. If it’s still not safe to return to Ukraine after two years, the government may decide to extend the length of their stay, something they have done for refugees from other countries. 

That said, we also expect that our financial support may look a little different two years from now. Our Ukrainian family includes a mom and her 16-year old boy, 11-year old girl, and a toddler. We started out covering almost everything, including housing, utilities, phones, food, diapers, transportation, clothing, and household and personal item, but as they improve in English and the mother and older boy are able to work, we hope they can begin to build their own financial platform to work toward independence.

Q: What about government benefits?

A: While the government does not have any new programs specifically to take care of Ukrainian refugees, they can benefit from many of the programs that already exist for low-income families. In California that includes things like food assistance, Medicaid for health insurance, and a temporary monthly cash allowance. Because the mother doesn’t yet speak English, her opportunities for work are pretty limited. With no current income and no real assets, our friends qualify for all of those programs. It does take some time for all that paperwork and processing. We’ve spent over a hundred hours traveling to county, state, and immigration offices, filling out forms and applications, and getting everything set up.  Now that they have social security cards, work authorizations, bank accounts, insurance, and benefits all approved, we expect that initial heavy time commitment will decrease.

One other big government benefit is school. The school-age kids are enrolled in the same high school and middle school as our children. The mother is enrolled in free English classes at a public charter school which focuses entirely on adult education, including English as a second language and vocational training. Through her school she also has access to public transportation passes so that she can more independently take the bus and light rail to school and back.

Q: Can Ukrainian refugees work?

A: Yes. They are able to work immediately upon arrival, but it does take up to a few months to receive their social security cards and their formal employment authorization papers. One sponsor we know is hosting a young lady who speaks excellent English, and she was able to find work quickly. It’s much more difficult without English. Because we have seen other friends with limited English working so hard in low paying jobs that they can’t take the time to study, we encouraged her to focus first on English for now while we are able to support her. Once she has a good language foundation, she’ll have much better work opportunities that let her both earn and continue studying.

During the summer our teenage son usually works several days a week for neighbors or others who need a hard worker with a young man’s energy and strength. Sometimes our 16-year-old Ukrainian boy goes with him and he’s very proud of what he has earned. That work has ended now that school has started, so we’re encouraging him to not spend it all when he gets it. He does make some contributions to his family expenses with his income.

Q: How much did it cost for them to come to the United States?

A: In our case, all the costs of getting Ukrainian paperwork in order and the actual flights, luggage, and incidentals were covered by the generous volunteers and donors of the non-profit Reach Humanity. Actual costs were probably about $5,000, with a majority of that being airfare.

Our Philosophy

A couple days after our Ukrainian family arrived we had a friend who could interpret over so we could have an initial conversation without relying on Google Translate. Mike explained that we were happy to have them here and that we consider them as part of our family. We want the Mom to have access to the same opportunities and experiences that we as adults in America have, and the kids to have the same opportunities that our children have. We would essentially take care of them as if they were our own family for as long as they needed it.

An example might help illustrate how that works. One of the first things we needed to buy for them was cell phones. Phones are more than internet devices for them; they’re essential interpreters. Using the Google Translate app, they can speak in Ukrainian and have their words translated instantly to English text. They can also have English speakers talk to their phones and read or listen to the Ukrainian translation. They brought three cell phones with them from Ukraine, but they were on their last legs, with broken screens that didn’t work consistently and short-lived batteries that required a bulky external battery to be toted around. The biggest problem though, was that their phones don’t work with US cell carriers.

The teenage boy told us that he wanted a Google Pixel. Knowing that it was pricier than the phones we had in mind, Mike laid out a couple of choices and said we would give him the same options we gave our daughter. 

• Option 1 was that we would pay the entire amount, about $150, for a Moto G Power, the same phone that Mike and our oldest daughter have, or something equivalent. 

The boy explained all of the reasons why the Pixel was superior to the other Motorola. Mike agreed that it certainly was a better phone, which was why it cost $599 instead of $150. 

• Option 2 was that he could choose the Pixel 7, and we would pay $150 toward the cost if he could cover the additional $449.
   
• Option 3 was a Pixel 7a, which has most of the benefits of the Pixel 7, but cost $100 less. We would pay the $150 toward the Pixel 7a as well, and he would cover the additional $349. 

The mom and daughter were happy with the less expensive phones, which were a big step up from their phones from Ukraine, but the son chose the Google Pixel 7a. We had already found some work for him with our oldest son, so he was able to pay us his $349 share in the first week and a half.

Live and Learn

We approached our sponsorship knowing that there would inevitably be occasional misunderstandings due to language, culture and disparate life experience. We’ve been delighted to find those misunderstandings are less frequent than we expected, but they do happen. Here’s one example.

Summer swim team is a big part of the summer for our family. The kids have practice for an hour or more 5 days a week, with swim meets every Saturday throughout the summer. When our new friends arrived we invited them to watch a swim practice to see if it was something they wanted to do. They both eagerly said they wanted to participate. I did a little legwork and was able to secure a need-based scholarship that brought the cost down to $215 each. I didn’t tell them about the cost because I didn’t want them to feel bad or have the cost deter them from participating. I just paid it and signed them up.

After less than a week of practice, the boy sent us a message saying “I realized that swimming does not bring me pleasure. This will be my last practice.”

Here’s where our treat-them-like-we-would-treat-our-own-kids philosophy fails.

If it were our own kid who told us he wanted to do a sport and then wanted to quit after a week, that would not fly! Our kids know that quitting wouldn’t be an option, so they wouldn’t even ask!

In fact, some of our kids were pretty upset about the situation. “You can’t just let him quit! You already paid for the whole season!”

While that’s kind of how I felt too, I kept my calm and explained that I’m not his mom so it isn’t my place to tell him to stick with it. He didn’t know that we paid for it and if he was miserable then forcing him to continue wouldn’t be very kind. We had a little talk about sunk costs, which helped me to remind myself to let it go.

While we couldn’t do anything about what happened in the past, this experience taught us how we can be more clear in the future. Next time we will make sure he is aware of the cost and commitment involved ahead of time. Depending on what it is, we may have him split the cost with us so there is some sacrifice/buy-in involved. That has worked well with our own kids.

We continue to tune our financial support as the situation changes. The same 16-year old boy who chose a Pixel 7a also really wanted to continue boxing, a sport he had begun in Ukraine. We found a gym that offers boxing and offered to pay for a portion of the membership cost, letting him contribute through matching, something we do for our kids when they have activities that cost money.  Proud of how much he earned over the summer, and feeling his 16-year old independence, he chose to pay the membership himself.  We drive him to the gym and back every day, but he pays his way once he’s there. He hasn’t saved enough to do that all year, so we may adjust again as the situation changes.

Q: Would We Recommend It?

A: Yes! We absolutely love having our Ukrainian friends with us. In a lot of ways it’s like having favorite cousins move in next door and doing everything together. We have loved seeing our kids. If you’re thinking about sponsorship, we can’t recommend it highly enough. 

On the whole, the most surprising things have been 1) how smooth everything has gone and 2) how much time that we’ve spent. We knew there would be misunderstandings and challenges, but they’ve been less frequent and less severe than we expected. We knew there would be a significant time commitment, but somehow we hadn’t taken into account quite how many new things we would be doing, especially the initial setup for immigration compliance and government benefit programs. Now that everything is in place, we’re getting deferred doctor and dentist visits taken care of. Hopefully after that, things calm down a little with just normal school, sports, and activity schedules.

The other thing that has been surprising (in a delightful way) is how very very quickly the kids are picking up English. In three months, both the 16-year old boy and the 11-year old girl have completely transformed their communication. Now that they’re starting school, we expect that transformation to accelerate. It’s not that fast for the mom, but she’s making really noticeable progress too.

Q: What Happens in the Future?

A: We don’t know what will happen in two years. Either our Ukrainians will be required to return to Ukraine or they will be allowed to stay for longer. The war doesn’t seem to be a on fast track to resolution, but at the moment the United States government doesn’t offer a clear path to citizenship or permanent residency. We’ll see what the future brings.

In the meantime, we know we have two years. We’ll work to help launch our new friends into independence as if they were staying forever. Right now, that would be their preference if they were allowed. If they aren’t allowed, and they end up returning to Ukraine or elsewhere in a few years, we’ll be rooting for them as they rebuild. Today we just have today, so we’ll try to be the best friends we can.

In our next installment, I will talk about managing money and money mentality as it relates to our Ukrainian friends.

The post Handling Finances For Sponsoring a Refugee Family appeared first on Six Figures Under.

I am back on track with budget updates! If you missed our May 2023 budget update, that will get you up to speed on what we have going on.

For those who have been waiting for the post explaining the details of how we are working the finances for the Ukrainian family that we’re sponsoring, that is still coming. (It’s waiting on Mike’s edits and he’s as busy as I am!) Of course, you can get a general idea just by looking at our budget here. June was our second month of having our guests here.

We had lots of extra income in June (which will be nice for July’s budget), but June’s budget was on the tight side with the increased expenses and cutback on income. We didn’t fund most of our sinking fund categories in June, as you’ll see outlined in this post.

Okay let’s take a look at our numbers for June 2023. As always, feel free to ask if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense or you would like me to clarify.

Income Earned in JUNE – $16,721

We live on last month’s income. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, check out the video explaining how living on last month’s income changed our lives or the post explaining how we got to that point.

This income section shows the money we earned in June, which has all been set aside to use in our July budget. The spending section below shows the money we earned in May and spent in June.

Attorney Income – $9,016 Mike works as an attorney for the state of California. This is his take-home pay after taxes, social security, his pension contribution, and health insurance premiums.

PTO Buyback- $5,144 Once a year, Mike’s employer allows him to cash in some of his paid time off. Since he accrues PTO faster than he uses it, he usually cashes some of it out each year.

Rental Income – $0 For years we rented out a one-bedroom apartment on our property through Airbnb. We gave that up to take in a Ukrainian refugee family for a couple of years. We loved Airbnb and will likely go back to that in the future. If you’re thinking about renting out your space on Airbnb, check out Mike’s post about dealing with insurance for your Airbnb rental or our explanation of how we handle our Airbnb finances.

Law Firm- $0  Before working for the state, Mike did estate planning and business transactions. Over the last few years he has had a steady stream of potential clients, most of whom he refers to other attorneys, but he still occasionally helps former clients. He doesn’t cut himself a paycheck each month, just a couple of times a year.

Blog – $2,561  My blogging income took a major hit when I put the blog on the back burner during Covid to start homeschooling my kids. Since then it really hasn’t recovered. The income still covers my blogging expenses (which are a lot more than most people would guess). I only pay myself a couple times a year now.

Spending in June

Each month we allocate every dollar earned in the PREVIOUS month into our budget categories for the current Month. For June, we budget and spend the money we received in May.

Giving

Tithing – $1,032 We always pay a 10% tithe on our income. Like all of our June spending, this comes from the money we earned in May. You can read our thoughts on paying a 10% tithe here.

Fast Offering – $40 Each month we take one day to fast (go without food and drink) for two meals and contribute to a program that provides assistance for local folks who need it.

Monthly Bills

Mortgage – $2,380 We have a 15-year mortgage on our house. With mortgage interest higher now, and potentially still climbing, we’re so grateful we were able to lock ours in at 2.375%. If you’re interested in the details of our Dec 2020 refi, you can check out all of the numbers and details.

Electricity – $6 We are finally reaping the benefits of our huge investment into solar. We are producing enough solar energy to cover all of our current usage, plus some credit to go toward winter months. The small bill is just for random service fees that can’t be avoided. I should also note that we are still very conservative with our electric usage (we very rarely use our air conditioning) while we wait to see how the year’s solar true up goes.

Car Insurance – $189 Our car insurance went up now that we have a third vehicle (see this post if you don’t know what vehicle I’m talking about) and we drive much more. Our insurance is through USAA and we love them! If you, your parent, or your spouse were/are in the military, you’re probably eligible for USAA too!

Internet – $70 Having good internet access is super important with Mike working from home. We’re so glad we invested in bringing internet access to our property when we first bought our house. That $5,000 investment was worth every penny!

Water – $75 Our water bill comes every other month, so on months that we don’t have a bill due, we set aside half of what we expect the next bill to be.

Garbage- $88 We normally set aside half of our trash bill each month, but we didn’t do that in May, since things were extra tight, so we had to pay for nearly the whole bill in June (there was only $6 in the category from previous months).

Cell Phones – $184 We now pay for seven cell phones: for me, Mike, our oldest child, one used as a home phone, and three for our Ukrainian friends. They are all through Visible. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary that offers wifi calling and unlimited cell calls and data on the Verizon network. We’ve been using them for several years now and have no complaints at all. It is $25 per phone with unlimited data per month, but right now you can get the first month for just $5 through my link.

Music Lessons – $0 We have paused music lessons because our daughter is extremely busy right now. Our music teacher has generously offered his time and talent to teach our 11-year-old Ukrainian girl. What a blessing!

Everyday Expenses

Food – $757  Being so busy with transportation and logistics for the past two months, I have not been very intentional about planning meals or grocery shopping. I haven’t been doing a big monthly grocery haul like normal. July will probably be crazy too. In August  I will get back to monthly grocery hauls.

Food prices are definitely higher than they were a few years ago, but I still believe almost everyone can spend significantly less than they currently do on groceries. You can learn all about my strategies and method in Grocery Budget Hero now. Get $20 off with the coupon code STARTNOW.  That puts your total cost at $59, and I promise you’ll earn that back many times as you build your grocery budget hero skills.

Fuel – $1,006 Our gas cost was nearly the same as last month. With the kids out of school, we’re doing a lot more driving. Our two oldest (along with the 15-year-old Ukrainian boy) work 4-6 days a week. None of them drive yet, so I am their taxi. We also have almost everyone doing summer swim team, plus two in cross country and one in wrestling.

For a week and a half Mike drove our Ukrainian mom to her English school (45 minutes away). He would work in the car or at the library while she was at her class for 3 hours, then drive her home. She now rides the bus both ways which takes about two hours each way, but she loves the independence it gives her and now we only have to drive her 10 minutes to the bus stop. We also drive her to lots of appointments related to getting settled and receiving government benefits in the United States.

Household Misc – $1,024  Mike needed to upgrade some things on our home computer (which he also uses for work), so about half of this spending was computer related. We also renewed our Sam’s Club Plus membership. We bought a dresser at the thrift store and some kitchen things at a garage sale. Of course there were normal, small household things along with a couple of subscriptions.

Clothing – $238 – I ordered probably a dozen pairs of running shoes for my two oldest kids to try on and choose from (and then return the ones they didn’t like). Mike is a buy-in-person kind of person. I prefer to order lots of options online, try on at home, and make returns as needed.

Animals – $114 We bought dog food, cat food, and chicken feed. The price of chicken feed has nearly doubled from three years ago! Chickens are basically pets with benefits, not a money-saving strategy (and ours even free-range all day long)!

Allowances – $84 We give our kids “practice money” as a weekly allowance.  You can read all about why we decided to pay our kids allowance that’s not directly tied to chores, as well as all the details of when and how much in this blog post.

Sports – $150 We paid for basketball and wrestling in June.

Sinking Funds

For most of our budget categories, we zero out what is left at the end of the month and send it to whatever our big financial goal is at the time, but in our sinking funds we set aside money each month for periodic expenses and let it build up until we need it.

The amount in bold is the amount we added to the fund this month. Any spending is noted in the comments along with the current balance of each fund.

We do not have separate bank accounts for these funds. All of the money sits in our checking account. We’re not worried about getting the money mixed up because we spend according to our budget category balances, not our checking account balance. We seriously never even look at our checking account balance unless we’re reconciling the account. We track our budget categories and spending in YNAB.

Both May and June saw higher spending in part due to the arrival of our newcomers. Since the budget was tighter than normal, we didn’t add to most of our sinking funds in June. We will make up for some of this in July since June’s income was higher.

Medical/Dental – $0 added. We spent $57 in June on a doctor visit for a wrist injury as well as a wrist brace. Current category balance is $2,390.

Car Maintenance – $0  added.  We spent $0 in June. Current category balance is $984.

Christmas – $0 added. We didn’t spend anything for Christmas 2023. Current category balance is $935.

Disability Insurance- $190 This will replace about 2/3 of Mike’s current income if injury or illness leaves him unable to work as an attorney. Our income potential is our greatest financial asset right now and disability insurance helps us protect it. We put money aside each month to pay the premium when it’s due each year. Current category balance is $597.

Life Insurance – $100 added. Next year’s life insurance premiums will be due in November. Current category balance is $700.

Birthdays & Gifts – $0 added. We spent $0 in June.  Current category balance is $122. 

Car Registration & Smog – $43 added. We spent $231 in June for a car registration renewal. The sad part of that is that $75 of that was a late fee. We got the renewal notice months in advance and both thought that it was paid. We didn’t realize it wasn’t paid until we got the late bill. I hate making dumb mistakes like that. Current category balance is $0.

Family Fun Fund – $0 added. We spend $0 in June. Current category balance is $347.

Home Projects- $0 added. We didn’t spend any in this category in June.  The category balance is currently $211.

Garden & Orchard- $0 added. We didn’t spend anything in June. The category balance is currently $0.

Investing

Kids’ 529s – $150 We know that $25 per kid per month invested for college isn’t much, but college costs are not our highest concern. Scholarships, grants, loans, and jobs during school worked for us. We may accelerate this savings later, but we’re ok with small, consistent payments right now.  The kids like to see their balances growing, and it adds up and teaches them good savings principles, even if it won’t entirely pay for school. You can read about our decision to start saving a little for college in this post.

IRA (Steph) – $542 With $542 monthly, I’ll max out my $6,500 IRA contribution for the year.  Mike has about $1,200 each month deducted directly from his paycheck for retirement.

Goal Progress

We are just paying normal mortgage payments for a few more months while we finish up an interim goal–paying off our solar installation.  Mike and I shared all the details here about why we are getting solar, how much it costs, and how we’re planning to pay for it here in this post.

We are so excited to finally have solar all set up and running (it took over a year, which is ridiculous!!)! We are hooked up to the grid, so what we produce (over what we use) during sunny hours will be sent back to the grid and will help offset what we use during non-sunny hours. Our system doesn’t include any batteries.

The total cost of getting solar was $70,000 (plus about $3,000 of interest on the $50K loan if we pay it off in 2 years). We started making payments on the $50,000 loan in April 2022. Our payments are $1,502 per month.

Our contribution to our solar goal in June was $742 which is actually only half of what our normal monthly payment is. Don’t worry- we made the full payment, as we have funds built up in YNAB.

The way we have it set up in our budget is kind of like a sinking fund. We put money into our “solar” category each month. Some months it is a lot; some months it is a little. There is an automatic payment of $1,502 toward the solar loan each month that comes out of a separate budget category.

That brings the total we’ve paid towards solar so far to $46,533.

I made a chart to keep track of our progress. I color in a little square for each $250 we put toward our solar purchase.

How About You?

• How did your budget and/or debt repayment go in June?

This post contains affiliate links for products or services that we love and recommend.

The post Family Budget Update- June 2023 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

It has been about eight months since I’ve shared a family budget update. That’s a long time, considering I published monthly budget updates for NINE years without missing a month.

As you probably know, there have been some major changes since our last budget update in September. The most notable is that we took in a Ukrainian refugee family of four.

I’ll be dedicating an entire post soon to explaining how we handle financial matters with them, but I wanted to get May’s budget update published before it’s July, so I’m going with the budget update first.

Let’s take a look at our numbers for May 2023. As always, feel free to ask if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense or you would like me to clarify.

Income Earned in MAY – $9,016

We live on last month’s income. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, check out the video explaining how living on last month’s income changed our lives or the post explaining how we got to that point.

This income section shows the money we earned in May, which has all been set aside to use in our June budget. The spending section below shows the money we earned in April and spent in  May.

Attorney Income – $9,016 Mike works as an attorney for the state of California. This is his take-home pay after taxes, social security, his pension contribution, and health insurance premiums.

Rental Income – $0 For years we rented out a one-bedroom apartment on our property through Airbnb. We gave that up to take in a Ukrainian refugee family for a couple of years. We loved Airbnb and will likely go back to that in the future. If you’re thinking about renting out your space on Airbnb, check out Mike’s post about dealing with insurance for your Airbnb rental or our explanation of how we handle our Airbnb finances.

Law Firm- $0  Before working for the state, Mike did estate planning and business transactions. Over the last few years he has had a steady stream of potential clients, most of whom he refers to other attorneys, but he still occasionally helps former clients. Nothing this month, though.

Blog – $0  My blogging income took a major hit when I put the blog on the back burner during Covid to start homeschooling my kids. Since then it really hasn’t recovered. The income still covers my blogging expenses (which are a lot more than most people would guess). Since the earnings aren’t much I don’t pay myself every month.

Spending in May

Each month we allocate every dollar of the PREVIOUS month’s income into our budget categories for the current Month. For May, we budget and spend the money we received in April.

Giving

Tithing – $1,032 We always pay a 10% tithe on our income. Like all of our May spending, this comes from the money we earned in April. You can read our thoughts on paying a 10% tithe here.

Fast Offering – $40 Each month we take one day to fast (go without food and drink) for two meals and contribute to a program that provides assistance for local folks who need it.

Monthly Bills

Mortgage – $2,380 We have a 15-year mortgage on our house. With mortgage interest higher now, and potentially still climbing, we’re so grateful we were able to lock ours in at 2.375%. If you’re interested in the details of our Dec 2020 refi, you can check out all of the numbers and details.

Electricity – $6 We are finally reaping the benefits of our huge investment into solar. We are producing enough solar energy to cover all of our current usage, plus some credit to go toward winter months. The small bill is just for random service fees that can’t be avoided. I’m definitely not complaining!

Car Insurance – $102 Our car insurance will be going up shortly, now that we have a third vehicle (see this post if you don’t know what I’m talking about). Our insurance is through USAA and we love them! If you, your parent, or your spouse were/are in the military, you’re probably eligible for USAA too!

Internet – $70 Having good internet access is super important with everyone at home for work and school. We’re so glad we invested in bringing internet access to our property when we first bought our house. That $5,000 investment was worth every penny!

Water – $125 We are happy to have a normal water bill back after some unfortunate water use months.

Garbage- $0 We normally set aside half of our trash bill each month, but we didn’t do that in May, since things were extra tight.

Cell Phones – $221 We now pay for seven cell phones: for me, Mike, our oldest child, one used as a home phone, and three for our Ukrainian friends. They are all through Visible. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary that offers wifi calling and unlimited cell calls and data on the Verizon network. We’ve been using them for several years now and have no complaints at all. It is $25 per phone with unlimited data per month, but right now you can get the first month for just $5 through my link.

Music Lessons – $0 We have paused music lessons because our daughter is extremely busy right now. Our music teacher has generously offered his time and talent to teach our 10-year-old Ukrainian girl. What a blessing!

Newcomer Expenses – $1,678 Most of this was not actually from our April income. We had an outpouring of generosity from wonderful friends, neighbors, and people we’ve never met who donated cash, gift cards, and other donations (even a van) that covered most of these expenses! This category includes the cost of three cell phones, one Chromebook, two summer swim team registrations, and some home furnishings. Thanks to the wonderful response to our Target registry on their behalf, we didn’t need to purchase very many more things.

Everyday Expenses

Food – $902  No, we didn’t drastically increase our grocery budget. In fact, we actually ate through some food storage instead of keeping it restocked like I normally do. Instead, we stocked the pantry, fridge, and freezer for our Ukrainian friends. Since their arrival they have been insistent about paying for their own food when they go to the grocery store themselves, though I still pick up things for them. In the next month or so they will be approved for public benefits that will help with food expenses.

Fuel – $992 With the kids out of school, we’re doing a lot more driving. Our two oldest (along with the 15-year-old Ukrainian boy) work 4-6 days a week. None of them drive yet, so I am their taxi. We also have almost everyone doing summer swim team, plus two in cross country, one in wrestling, and one in basketball training. We also had a couple of longer trips in a big (low MPG van) – including 2.5 hours to San Francisco to pick our Ukrainians up at the airport and a visit to Lake Tahoe for Memorial Day. Gas prices here have been around $4.39.

Household Misc – $459  We spent $100 on annual Google storage and another $100 on a pop-up sunshade tent to bring to swim meets and other sports. Some of this also included costs related to our Ukrainians like airport parking and tolls.

Clothing – $84 – We got some summer clothes and swimsuits for some of the kids.

Animals – $0 We had stocked up on animal food in April, so we didn’t need any in May.

Allowances – $84 We give our kids “practice money” as a weekly allowance.  You can read all about why we decided to pay our kids allowance that’s not directly tied to chores, as well as all the details of when and how much in this blog post.

Sports – $137 We paid for basketball and wrestling in May.

Sinking Funds

For most of our budget categories, we zero out what is left at the end of the month and send it to whatever our big financial goal is at the time, but in our sinking funds we set aside money each month for periodic expenses and let it build up until we need it.

The amount in bold is the amount we added to the fund this month. Any spending is noted in the comments along with the current balance of each fund.

We do not have separate bank accounts for these funds. All of the money sits in our checking account. We’re not worried about getting the money mixed up because we spend according to our budget category balances, not our checking account balance. We seriously never even look at our checking account balance unless we’re reconciling the account. We track our budget categories and spending in YNAB.

With our new friends coming from Ukraine in May, our spending in general was higher. With a tighter budget than normal, we didn’t add to most of our sinking funds.

Medical/Dental – $0 added. We spent $0 in May. Current category balance is $2,447.

Car Maintenance – $0  added.  We spent $0 in May. Current category balance is $984.

Christmas – $0 added. We didn’t spend anything for Christmas 2023. Current category balance is $935.

Disability Insurance- $190 This will replace about 2/3 of Mike’s current income if injury or illness leaves him unable to work as an attorney. Our income potential is our greatest financial asset right now and disability insurance helps us protect it. We put money aside each month to pay the premium when it’s due each year. Current category balance is $407.

Life Insurance – $100 added. Next year’s life insurance premiums will be due in November. Current category balance is $600.

Birthdays & Gifts – $0 added. We spent $0 in May.  Current category balance is $122. 

Car Registration & Smog – $0 added. We spent $88 in May to smog the big van and transfer the title. Current category balance is $188.

Family Fun Fund – $0 added. We paid a $332 to stay two nights at a condo in Tahoe over Memorial Day weekend. Current category balance is $347.

Home Projects- $0 added. We didn’t spend any in this category in May.  The category balance is currently $211.

Garden & Orchard- $163 added. We spent $330 on garden irrigation supplies for new garden beds that Mike built in April. The category balance is currently $0.

Investing

Kids’ 529s – $150 We know that $25 per kid per month invested for college isn’t much, but college costs are not our highest concern. Scholarships, grants, loans, and jobs during school worked for us. We may accelerate this savings later, but we’re ok with small, consistent payments right now.  The kids like to see their balances growing, and it adds up and teaches them good savings principles, even if it won’t entirely pay for school. You can read about our decision to start saving a little for college in this post.

IRA (Steph) – $542 With $542 monthly, I’ll max out my $6,500 IRA contribution for the year.  Mike has about $1,200 each month deducted directly from his paycheck for retirement.

Goal Progress

We are just paying normal mortgage payments for a few more months while we finish up an interim goal–paying off our solar installation.  Mike and I shared all the details here about why we are getting solar, how much it costs, and how we’re planning to pay for it here in this post.

We are so excited to finally have solar all set up and running (it took over a year, which is ridiculous!!)! We are hooked up to the grid, so what we produce (over what we use) during sunny hours will be sent back to the grid and will help offset what we use during non-sunny hours. Our system doesn’t include any batteries.

The total cost of getting solar is $70,000 (plus about $3,000 of interest on the $50K loan if we pay it off in 2 years). We started making payments on the $50,000 loan in April 2022. Our payments are $1,502 per month.

Our contribution to our solar goal in May was $1,502 which is just our monthly payment on the loan.

That brings the total we’ve paid towards solar so far to $45,791.

The way we have it set up in our budget is kind of like a sinking fund. We put money into our “solar” category each month. Some months it is a lot; some months it is a little. There is an automatic payment of $1,502 toward the solar loan each month that comes out of a separate budget category.

I made a chart to keep track of our progress. I color in a little square for each $250 we put toward our solar purchase.

How About You?

• How did your budget and/or debt repayment go in May?

This post contains affiliate links for products or services that we love and recommend.

The post Family Budget Update – May 2023 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

I am long overdue in offering a heartfelt THANK YOU to those of you who so generously supported us in welcoming our Ukrainian refugee family.

It has been two and a half months since I shared that our family was “adopting” a Ukrainian family. We gave up renting out our Airbnb apartment so that they would have a place to live. For the next two years or so we are financially responsible for taking care of a family of 4 (single mom, 15-year-old boy, 10-year-old girl, and 1-year old girl) in addition to our own family of 8. Interested in the plan or the why? Here are our thoughts.

With your help, we were able to convert our apartment from a 2-guest vacation stay to a 4-person permanent residence, with everything from mattresses and bed sheets to diapers and towels. We also received gift cards for the family to shop for themselves for specific personal items they need, along with cash donations that will help with purchasing things like phones or signing up the kids for summer swim team.

I’m happy to announce that our new friends arrived safely four weeks ago!

By the time they arrived they had been awake for well over 24 hours.  Then the final immigration process took 4 more hours (all while we were waiting at the airport wondering what in the world was taking so long). It was 1:30 am when they arrived at our house.

We have seen miracles along the way as we prepared for their arrival. I’ll share a couple of them with you.

Quilts

To add a personal touch, I wanted to make each of the family members their own custom quilt for their bed. I asked about favorite colors and hobbies to get ideas on how to personalize them. Creating four quilts (a baby, two twins, and a queen) in six weeks was no small task! I recruited wonderful friends to help me in cutting the fabric (my least favorite part of quilting) and some of the piecing.

Two weeks before our refugees’ scheduled arrival I had finished piecing together all the quilt tops. I got them done just in time to bring them to “show and tell” at my monthly quilt guild meeting. I told my guild that I wasn’t sure how I was going to quilt them in time, but I was going to try, so if anyone wanted to come over and quilt with me, they were invited.

Well, the sweetest lady came up to me afterward and said she would love to pay to have the quilts professionally quilted on a longarm machine. Knowing that this is very costly (probably $200-300 per quilt), I hesitated at first. She was so generous and determined to help me. We met at the local quilt shop that Friday and explained the urgency of the project. They were quilted by Monday! My mom and I worked on binding them by hand so they could be finished and on their beds when they arrived.

Van

We weren’t sure how transportation was going to work for 12 of us! We have two minivans: one that seats 8 and one that seats 7, so with two drivers we would be able to get all of us around. That would work fine for going to church on Sundays or family outings on Saturdays, but not when I have to pick up and drop off more than 7 people at a time or when we all want to go on a longer trip together.

Still, we were going to try to make it work. We had looked at the price of buying a used, large capacity van. And it was scary! Since covid, the prices for used vehicles have skyrocketed.

At just the right moment, we heard from a good friend who knew all about our situation (it was through their daughter that we first learned of the opportunity to sponsor a refugee family). They have a 15-passenger van for their big family. Recently their van was having engine trouble and the wait for a new engine was too long. They looked online and found a surprisingly great price for the same model of van. They scooped up the deal just minutes before another offer came from across the world (the deal was so good that someone in Japan was willing to pay to have it shipped there). Then a mechanic suggested a much cheaper alternative to a new engine for the old van and it worked like a charm. For several months they had two working 15-passenger vans. They thought about selling the old one, but they knew that at some point (maybe two months, maybe two years) it would need a new engine. It just didn’t feel very ethical to sell something so iffy, but they decided they could just give it to us and we could get as much good out of it as we could. We offered to buy it or trade them for one of our vans, but they insisted that they wanted it to be a gift.

We are so, so grateful for such a generous gift. We just took our first family trip with our “dozen” and it drove perfectly, even at 7,500 feet as we crossed the mountains to introduce our friends to Lake Tahoe.

It has been delightful to get to know our new next-door friends. We are settling into a summer routine and getting better at communicating both with English and signs and with Google Translate. We love sharing our activities and food and space, and love that they likewise share (if you ever have a chance to get good homemade borscht, varenyky, cabbage rolls, or other Ukrainian cuisine, don’t let it pass you by.) We look forward to the next few years, and we’re so thankful for all your help making this possible for them and for us.

Later this month I’ll be covering our financial experience thus far with our new Ukrainian friends, including our rule of thumb when it comes to paying for their wants and needs, as well as differences I’ve noticed in our respective money mindsets. If you have specific questions regarding this topic, ask in the comments or send me an email and I will address it in my next post.

I’m also thinking about going back to posting monthly budget updates. Is that something you would be interested in seeing? Or maybe looking at a budget for 12 would be too weird and unrelatable. Let me know what you think!

Once again, THANK YOU so much for being part of our village to give this wonderful family a fresh start!

The post THANK YOU (… and They’re Here!) appeared first on Six Figures Under.

I love making the most of what I have and hate being wasteful. Today I want to share with you some hacks to make the most of one of the most wasted items from your home, the bag that the cereal comes in.

Years ago, I saw Money Saving Mom reuse those cereal bags to store waffles in her freezer and it got my wheels spinning. What other great uses could we have for that lovely, strong, waxy cereal bag? Well, you’re in luck because I’m going to share four of my favorite ways to recycle these treasures!

Book Cover

When I was a kid, brown paper grocery bags were our go-to for covers for school textbooks. That was back in the day when grocery bags were included with our purchase of groceries (maybe that’s still a thing where you live, but it isn’t in California). It probably won’t surprise you that this frugal mama doesn’t pay extra for bags. Don’t worry though! I have found the perfect solution for free book covers. Recycled cereal bags are the perfect solution. Not only can you see your beautiful book through the cover, but they’re also waterproof! (They also work better than brown paper to save books when your second grader leaves a banana in her backpack and it gets all smashed up on everything inside.)

Sock Covers

One of the best ways to give your cereal bags new life is by using them to prevent soggy feet. We actually got a bit of snow (and lots of rain) at our house this year and this hack has more than tripled the kids’ outside play time. Simply slide your children’s feet into empty cereal bags before putting their boots on. Say goodbye to wet feet once and for all!

Insta-Boots

The beauty of cereal bags is that you can actually skip the boots altogether! We don’t get snow every year, so we don’t have boots in everyone’s size. Cereal bags can turn any sandals or shoes into waterproof footwear! Add a rubber band at the top for even more protection.

Kitchen Trash Bags

Are you tired of purchasing garbage bags just to put them straight into the trash can?! What a waste! Instead of throwing away your hard-earned money by buying trash bags, start making your own! With the most basic sewing skills you can stitch together recycled cereal bags to create your very own garbage bags for free! Smooth, waxy cereal bags are the ideal material for trash bags. In addition to their waterproof quality, the opacity allows you a good view of your refuse as you take out the trash. I could never go back to Hefty again!

APRIL FOOLS!

I try to reuse things and be frugal, but this post is totally an APRIL FOOLS!

For more April Fools jokes to share with your friends and family, check out:

• 5 Genius Ways to Save on Toilet Paper
• How to Get Meat for Free or Cheap
• How to Make Money from Your Random Talents
• 6 Hacks for Storing Food in Small Homes
• Our Post-Covid Financial Goals

The post Frugal Recycling Hacks You Need to Try! appeared first on Six Figures Under.

If you get my emails, then you know that our family has a big financial undertaking coming up. We have never done anything of this magnitude before and that’s exciting and scary at the same time.

We are preparing to sponsor a family of Ukrainian refugees through Uniting for Ukraine, the US government’s program to help people fleeing from the war. The program allows them to come to the United States and stay (currently for a 2-year period) if they have a resident sponsor who is willing to provide financial support during their stay.

We learned about the program through a friend who was volunteering with REACH Humanity, an organization on the ground in Poland to help with the refugee crisis. The organization helps to match sponsors in the US with refugees who are looking to go to the United States.

We are just waiting for the paperwork to go through so that our new Ukrainian friends (a single mom with three children) can get their travel authorization.

As I have talked with friends and family about our experience preparing to sponsor a Ukrainian refugee family, many have asked the same questions. I thought it might be helpful to share some of those discussions here. If you have other questions that I don’t cover, feel free to ask. I’m happy to share our plan and thoughts (and experience once we have some!).

Q: Do you have a big house?

A: Compared to many people in the world, yes. By American standards, our house is pretty average. Our family of 8 lives in a 2200 square foot home. Adding four more people to our home would be tight, but doable. But, we actually have an additional 600 square foot apartment on our property. In the past be have rented it out, both as a long-term traditional rental and through Airbnb as a short-term rental. For the past year or so we have been earning about $2,000 per month from our rental, so that is income we won’t be earning while we are sponsoring the refugee family.

Q: What will you be financially responsible for?

A: Ultimately we are financially responsible for everything, though there are some resources that will help (I’ll cover that in a minute).  This includes but is not limited to:

• Housing
• Utilities
• Phones
• Food
• Diapers
• Transportation
• Clothing
• Household and personal items

The idea is that in the beginning they will be totally reliant on us, but as they learn English and find work, they can become more self-sufficient.

Q: How long will you be financially responsible for the refugee family?

A: The Uniting for Ukraine program allows for a 2-year parole. Currently the program requires them to return to Ukraine after two years, but that could change depending on what happens with the war.

Q: What will they be able to bring with them?

A: Different refugees will have different situations, but the answer is generally, not very much.  For the family coming to stay with us, because Kherson was under Russian military occupation when they fled, they could only bring a few of the kids’ things in a car full of refugees. Between the destruction of property since the invasion and living as refugees in Poland for the last six months, their financial resources are pretty well used up.

Q: What government and community resources are available?

A: Government and community resources to help Ukrainian refugees vary by state. Until our new friends arrive we won’t know exactly what is available, as different programs have different requirements and eligibility depends on their particular circumstances. They will eventually qualify for food assistance and state-sponsored health insurance, though it may take several months to get that all set up. There may be other aid available from community and faith-based organizations, but we can’t be sure what that will be at this point. Many of them have limited resources that are renewed and exhausted as donations arrive and are used.

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: Usually this “question” is phrased more like “Woah, that’s a huge commitment!” or “Wow! That will be a lot of money!”

It’s been a while that we’ve been feeling like we should give a little more. We feel very blessed with the life that we have and feel like we can share what we have with others.

Years ago I remember reading something from C.S. Lewis that struck me and has stayed with me.

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.

In addition to having a desire, there are a few ways that our family is uniquely equipped to serve in this particular capacity.

Not everyone has space for another family in their house, but we have a second residence on our property. Having a private apartment next door is pretty ideal to help out in a situation like this, as the refugees will need lots of one-on-one support as they get settled in a completely foreign country where they don’t know the culture or speak the language.

As a family of eight already, we’re kind of equipped for chaos. While I don’t think it could ever by trivial to suddenly adopt a family of four, it might be even more overwhelming for a single person or a smaller family to take on those additions. We’ve been easing in to increased complexity for years as our family grows. Although this is a different sort of complexity, we feel maybe less intimidated by four new family members than a smaller family might feel.

There’s nothing really stopping us. There are a lot of people whose situations might wholly preclude them from sponsoring a refugee family. We are so fortunate right now. We qualify under the federal requirements for the program. We aren’t facing any really challenging illness or disability. We have space. We aren’t living on the teetering edge of financial solvency. There is no hard barrier that would stop us from sharing. So we’ll try it.

We’ve spent many years learning and practicing frugal living. Knowing how to budget and live frugally can help us  provide for another family most cost efficiently. We can help them be wise in managing money in a foreign economic system so that they can be successful when they are out on their own.

My own experience includes a unique qualification because I studied TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in college. Before our children arrived, I was an English teacher to adults from all over the world. Learning English will be the one of the biggest factors in their successful integration.

We are hoping that with us taking care of the complexity, housing, teaching English, and helping with language and culture integration, we will be able to count on help from our “village” with regard to finances. We realize that’s taking a leap of faith to count on our community (both locally and virtually) to help with the financial burden that comes with wholly supporting a new family, but we have a pretty amazing community.

Q: How can we help?

A: This is my favorite question because in I envisioned this being a community effort. We have the apartment, our time, and our talents that we are willing to dedicate to the cause, but we want to share the opportunity to give and serve (along with the blessings that will surely come).

Here are some WAYS YOU CAN HELP from anywhere:

• Donate any amount— If you have the flexibility in your budget to make a monthly recurring donation, you will have that option through that same link. Having your support on a recurring basis would be really amazing! One-time donations are, of course, also much appreciated!

• Target registry— I made a wish list of the items that the family will need so that we can have the apartment stocked when they arrive. They’ll be coming essentially with just the clothes on their backs.
• Target gift cards (at bottom of registry)– In addition to the specific items on the registry, you can simply order a gift card. This will allow our Ukrainian friends to choose and purchase clothes, shoes, and other personal items themselves. There is no shipping or tax on gift cards and there are no extra fees, so if you buy a $20 gift card, the family will get the full $20.

The post Sponsoring Ukrainian Refugees- Answering Your Questions + How to Help appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Back in November when I was taking a break from blogging, we were blindsided by a massive, completely unexpected bill. If you’ve been around here much, you know that Mike and I faithfully budget each month and are pretty on-top-of our finances. So how could we get surprised by a $1,500 bill?

I’m finally ready to talk about it.

If you look back at our September 2022 budget update, you’ll see that our water bill was surprisingly high. To make it easy, I’ll paste the excerpt from that budget update below.

Water – $260 We got a shocking water bill of $445. We had set aside $185 in August and had to budget the remainder in September (this bill comes every other month). Last weekend Mike discovered the reason. Most of our garden terraces are on timers, but the orchard terraces weren’t on timers yet. We water the fruit trees overnight, once a month. He had turned the water on the orchard and forgotten to turn it off the next morning, so the drip system on the trees was running for an entire month. Now looking up on the hill, standing out against the general landscape colored by drought, I see the vibrant green weeds growing through the woodchips around our young fruit trees. Sadly, our next bill that comes in November is also going to reflect part of this expensive oversight.

The thing about water bills, at least where we live, is they aren’t a direct reflection of water used during the dates of the bill because we don’t have smart meters. About half of the meters in our county use technology that allows meters to be read automatically. The other half of the meters, like ours, are not easily accessed and read by the water company on the exact day of your bill. The meters are actually read by a person– a meter reader.  The meter reader cannot read everyone’s meters on the last day of the billing cycle, so even though your bill says it covers a certain time period, what your actually paying for is the water used between the last two times the meter was read.

So when we got the “shocking” $445 water bill in September and then found the orchard water running full tilt, we thought we had caught and solved the problem before it would have very much effect on our next bill. I didn’t think about it too much, but I did keep my eye out for the next bill.

Expecting a slightly elevated bill of maybe $200 (our November bill the previous year was $160) to a worst case scenario of $300, I nearly had a heart attack when I opened the email that showed November’s bill as $1,556!

Not thinking about the meter reader situation explained above, I was sure there was some other problem besides leaving the orchard water running for a month or so straight.

I thought back to the trenching we had done recently to bring water over to the garden. Instead of hoses going from the house up to the terraced hillside garden, we now have spigots with good pressure on every terrace. Did the workers somehow make a leak underground somewhere? This whole project already left a bad taste in my mouth because the cost came in much higher than expected! You can imagine my frustration now as I suspected that they also caused us to have a $1,500 water bill.

Mike was pretty sure that we had already discovered the sole culprit– the orchard water that was left running for a month. He explained that the meter must have been read just after the beginning of the watering oversight (September bill) and then the next meter reading included the majority of the expensive mistake (November bill)

I wasn’t convinced.

Mostly, I was afraid of waiting two months for our next bill and having another insane bill to face.

For some perspective, In 2021, we paid $950 total for water, for the entire year. This one bill was more than 150% of what we spent for the entire previous year.

To test Mike’s hypothesis that there was no other leak (that the problem had been solved months ago by turning off the orchard water), Mike took a picture of the water meter and we didn’t use water for 12 hours. We were sleeping for the majority of the experiment, so it wasn’t very hard to go without water. I told all the kids what we were doing, then put a sock on every faucet, taped the handle on every toilet, tape on the washer knobs, and put bags over the shower heads. We were between renters in our Airbnb, so it was the perfect time to do a test like this.

The next morning Mike hiked up to the meter to find… it hadn’t changed! Hooray for no hidden underground leaks! I could now rest a little easier until the next bill.

I’m elated to report that when we got January’s bill, our bill was a mere $120. I’ve never been so happy about a bill in my life!

So what’s the takeaway?

For us, it’s definitely to get all of our water on timers and check them regularly to make sure nothing gets left on.

But there’s a big takeaway for you too. What would you do (or what have you done) if you suddenly had an unexpected expense of $1,500 that you didn’t budget for?

How we cover unexpected expenses

I didn’t talk about how we covered the bill. While we absolutely did not want to spend $1,500 on water, I’m grateful that we had money to move around to cover the bill.

It has not always been so easy.

We have a three-part plan for covering unexpected expenses. Even when we were on a very tight budget as we paid off six figures of student loan debt we followed this same plan for dealing with unexpected expenses. Here is our plan for handling unexpected expenses.

1- Change how our money is allocated

At any time in the month we can change how our money is assigned. We can take funds from one category and move it to another category. We do this every month in small ways. If we want to spend more on clothes, we might choose to move some funds from our food category to the clothing category. Moving money around is a normal part of having a flexible budget. It’s hard to break a flexible budget.

We always try to have a big financial goal that we’re working toward, like paying off debt or saving up for something. Normally we funnel all of our “extra” funds to our goal. When we set our budget at the beginning of the month, anything that is left after funding all of our normal budget categories will go toward our big goal. At the end of the month we zero out most budget categories and put all of that toward our goal (rather than rolling it over to the next month).

Covering our $1,500 unexpected bill was a matter of moving money around. Our current goal is paying for solar, so all of our extra money goes toward this goal each month. Instead of putting extra money toward solar that month, we paid the minimum so that we would have money for the water bill.

2- Split the cost with next month’s budget

Being able to split a cost with the next month’s budget is a benefit of being a month ahead. We budget using last month’s income, so the money that has come in this month is just sitting there waiting for next month to start. We have the ability to split the cost of a bill over two months because we have the cash for the second month available.

We used this strategy most recently with the garden trenching project I mentioned earlier. The bill was more than we could have handled by just changing how our money that month was allocated. We had to budget two months tightly and split the bill over those two months. Since the funds were actually in our bank account for the two months (because we are a month ahead), we had the cash to pay for the bill.

3- Hit up the emergency fund

Our last resort (besides debt) is using our emergency fund. There have been very few occasions where we needed to use our emergency fund and that’s the way we like to keep it. Having worked hard to build up an emergency fund, we want to do all that we can to avoid using it. It is comforting to have an emergency fund, but for us the best way to use our emergency fund is to not use our emergency fund.

On the few occasions that we have used or “borrowed from” our emergency fund, we have made paying it back quickly a priority.

We usually manage unexpected expenses in the first step of this three-part plan.  When we need to move to step two, like we did last November, it’s a huge relief to have the additional flexibility. The handful of times we’ve need to resort to step 3 have been actual budget savers.  Over the last ten years we’ve been fortunate to fit every unplanned expense, from small overspending to a few thousand in unplanned costs, into our three-part plan. It has helped us keep our budget flexible and robust and saved us a lot of stress and headache.

I hope it was helpful to see how our family handles unplanned expenses. If you don’t have a plan for dealing with those frustrating expenses that pop up, now is the time to make one so they don’t completely derail your finances.

You can do this!

How about you?

What unexpected expenses have you been hit with?

Do you have a general plan for handling unexpected expenses in your budget?

The post A $1,500 Mistake– How We Deal With unexpected Expenses appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Merry Christmas friends!  It’s the last day of our Frugal Festivities series and today we’re talking about gratitude.  Specifically let’s talk about how to teach your kids to receive with gratitude.

If you’re reading this on Christmas day, then you might have a renewed desire to teach your kids about gratitude after watching them plow through piles of presents.   Or you might be appreciating how gracious and grateful your kids have been.  Either way, I hope you will share your ideas and your struggles in the comments.  I’m no expert, but I want to share what has helped in our family.

Helping kids to feel and express gratitude is something that should last all your long, not just around the holidays. And not just about physical gifts.  Helping kids to notice and really think about their opportunities and privileges, gives them a perspective that will lead them to be more appreciative and less entitled. It really is an attitude that we can model and cultivate that will lead to a happier life.

So what can you do?  Here are 5 ideas:

Recognize Blessings

As you recognize blessings in your life, point them out to your children.  You might have an inner dialogue of “Gee, I’m really thankful that…” or “What a blessing that….” but if your kids don’t hear that dialogue they won’t know.  Hearing your daily expressions of gratitude will instill thoughts of gratitude in them.

Model Gratitude

Let your kids hear you saying thank you for both big and little things.  Thank them for the things they do to help your family.  Let them see you writing thank you notes and expressing gratitude both to people in person and behind their backs.

Pray together

When we pray we give thanks out loud for blessings and tender mercies we have received from God.  Praying daily both as individuals and as families gives us a chance to reflect on what we are thankful for.  We often discuss things we are grateful for before family prayer and will often remind that child who has been asked to be the voice of the prayer, “remember to thank Heavenly Father for…”

Write thank you cards

Help your children write thank you cards for gifts they receive from anyone on any occasion. When you give a teacher appreciation gift, have your child think about the reasons they are thankful for their teacher and express those thoughts in a written card.

Don’t over-gift

Be careful not to give so many gifts so that your children are overwhelmed with stuff and can hardly even remember what they should be grateful for.  When we give our kids everything they want, we help breed an entitlement mentality.  Sometimes the best way to teach gratitude is to NOT give our kids everything they want, so they can focus on all that they DO have.

I hope these five simple tips help you build grateful character in your children.  When children (and adults) truly have an attitude of gratitude they see the world with different eyes.  I love the Alphonse Karr quote, “Some people grumble that roses have thorns, I’m grateful that thorns have roses.”

A perspective like this will increase happiness and self worth, and reduce insecurity and entitlement in kids and adults.  It may be a good thing to focus on in the new year.

The post Teaching Kids to Receive with Gratitude appeared first on Six Figures Under.

I love hearing about different families’ traditions on Christmas morning.  The beautiful thing about Christmas morning traditions is that most of them don’t cost a thing.  If your family is looking to adopt some new traditions for Christmas morning, then stay tuned because that’s what we’re sharing today!

Let’s talk about simple, frugal Christmas morning traditions.  I would love for you to share your family’s favorite Christmas morning traditions in the comments!

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

Whip up a batch or two of your favorite cinnamon rolls to bake on Christmas morning.  If you have a freezer version, you can make them ahead of time so you don’t have to stress about them at all on Christmas Eve.

Reading Luke 2

Before we start opening presents, we read together the story of the first Christmas as recorded in Luke chapter 2 of the Bible.  We’ll usually sing a couple of Christmas carols together and have a family prayer. We remind the kids that we give gifts to one another in memory of the greatest gift that God gave to the world, his Son. This sets the tone of gratitude for our family.

Opening presents one by one in age order

We always open gifts one by one.  Not only does this make the magic of gift opening last longer, but it gives everyone a chance to see what everyone got and gives them a chance to thank the giver (if they’re there).  We go around from youngest to oldest and everyone opens one gift on their turn.  Sometimes mom and dad will skip rounds since we usually don’t have as many gifts as the kiddos.  If there is an uneven number of gifts (which there often is), the children who are out of gifts will open one of the family gifts (usually a game, movie, or something to be shared by the whole family).

Calling Family

When I was growing up we lived far from family (like two thousand miles away), so we rarely got to see them. Christmas was a time when we talked to grandparents on the phone.  With all the advances in technology, our kids have many more options for communication with far away family, but it’s still special to talk to everyone on Christmas day.

How about you?

• What Christmas morning traditions does your family have?  Please share a favorite in the comments below!

Tomorrow, we’ll be talking about teaching your children to receive with gratitude.

The post Christmas Morning Traditions That Don’t Cost Anything appeared first on Six Figures Under.

We’re nearing the end of the Christmas season.  Did you stress about money?  Are you dreading your upcoming credit card bills?  Want to be in a better financial position next Christmas?

You can be in a completely different financial situation by next Christmas.  Imagine not being burdened by Christmas expenses before or after the holidays.  Think about how nice it will be to just enjoy the season and spend time with loved ones without being overwhelmed by money stress.

I’m going to share with you 3 things you can do now that will put you in a better position financially for next Christmas.

1- Calculate your total Christmas spending from this year

While Christmas is still fresh, go through all of your receipts and think back on everything Christmas-related that you spent money on.  Add it all up to find out how much you spend on Christmas this year.

Here are some categories you’ll want to be sure to include:

• Christmas cards— Include price of cards and postage
• Travel— Driving to Grandma’s house? Flying to New York? Staying in hotels and eating on the road? Include all expenses for your trips
• Gifts— Who did you buy presents for? Immediate family, extended family, neighbors, teachers, friends, bosses, co-workers? Include:
  • Stocking stuffers
  • Wrapping supplies
  • Mailing gifts
• Holiday Treats— For your family and to share
• Food— Are you hosting a meal or attending a holiday potluck?  Do you go to a certain restaurant every Christmas Eve?
• Decorations— Be sure to include the tree if that’s an annual expense
• Charitable Giving— What special giving do you do during the holidays?
• Other— Does your family have another tradition that involves an expense?  Maybe you go see the Nutcracker or ride the Polar Express.

When you’ve written down an exhaustive list of spending in each category, add everything up to get a grand total for Christmas spending.

This might sound tedious. You might feel buyer’s remorse.  You might think that you really don’t want to know how much you spent.  And you might be shocked when you see how much you really spend on Christmas! But knowing how much you spent is important for making a plan and being prepared for next year.

2-Make a plan for next year

Now that you know how much you spent on this year’s Christmas, it’s time to make plans for how much you want to spend next year.  Would you like next year’s Christmas to look the same as this year’s as far as spending goes?  Do you plan to scale back?  Or do you want to have a bigger budget to work with?

There’s not a right answer.  It’s completely up to you– it’s your holiday and your money.  Make any adjustments to your Christmas plans for next year and come up with a dollar amount for next year’s Christmas budget.

Now that you know how much your Christmas budget will be, we need to make a plan to come up with that amount of money.

–I think the easiest way to do it is to just take the total, divide by 12 and budget that amount in each month.  You don’t have to do it like that though.

–You could set aside a certain amount out of every paycheck.

–Maybe some months you get an additional paycheck (like when a month has 5 Fridays) and you decide that your Christmas fund will come from one of those paychecks.

–If you’re a cash user you could even do one of those $5 challenges where you save every $5 bill that you get.  Do what works best for you, but make a plan.

Decide where you’re going to keep your Christmas fund.

–You could get a free saving account that you transfer money into.  One of my blog readers, Rebecca, said that her bank offers a “Christmas Club” for this purpose.

–If you use budgeting software like YNAB that acts like a digital envelope system, then you can just leave the money in your checking account.  Since you spend according to budget category balances instead of your checking account balance you won’t accidentally spend that money that’s earmarked for Christmas.

–If you’re a cash envelope user, you could have a cash envelope designated for your Christmas money.  You could even have a wrapped Christmas gift box where you stash all of those $5 bills!

3- Start tracking your expenses

When you first start budgeting it’s hard to know how much money to allocate to each category.  If you haven’t been tracking your expenses you might not have any idea how much you’ve been spending in each category.

Not only will you set a better budget when you know how much you spend, you’ll also become much more aware of each and every time you spend money.  You’ll see how all of the little expenses add up. Sometimes you’ll find that what your spending money on is completely unrelated to what you think your actual priorities are! Knowing where your money is going is the only way to start making more intentional decisions about how you spend.

Much like tracking food intake when you’re on a diet, tracking your spending makes you hyper aware THAT you are spending.  Knowing you’ll have to write the expense down may prevent you from making it, or at least  make you think about it before you make the purchase.

Join the Frugal Fresh Start Challenge

We’ll talk more about tracking expenses, budgeting, and improving your finances in the Frugal Fresh Start Challenge.  When you sign up for the challenge, you can download the free workbook.

I’m so excited for you to get your finances in a better place for next Christmas.  I’m excited for you to be able to relax and enjoy the special season without the financial stress you may have felt in the past.

Making big changes won’t be easy.  It will take discipline to create new habits.  You’ll have to make sacrifices.  But staying in the same place you’re at right now? That might not be easy either.

I hope you’re feeling hopeful.  You can make huge financial strides between now and next Christmas.  You’ve got this!

The post 3 Ways to Improve Your Finances for Next Christmas appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Hands down, the single easiest way to improve a holiday meal is to add homemade cranberry sauce.

Please don’t make the mistake of associating this special treat with that jellied cranberry stuff that comes in a can. The two aren’t even related. Real homemade cranberry sauce is to canned cranberry sauce what freshly sliced garden-grown tomatoes are to canned stewed tomatoes–they each claim to have some of the same stuff, but you would never make the mistake of pouring stewed tomatoes onto your ham sandwich.

The unmistakable splash of deep red and the distinctive sweet tartness of fresh cranberry sauce is unlike anything else on your Christmas table. The good news is that homemade cranberry sauce is also probably the easiest thing you’ll make.

It’s almost as easy as boiling water.

Homemade cranberry sauce has just three ingredients:

1. 12 oz bag (about 3 cups) of fresh or frozen cranberries
2. 1 cup water
3. 1 cup sugar

That’s it.

The directions are just as simple as the ingredients.

1. In a small saucepan, dissolve the sugar into the water.
2. Add cranberries and bring to a boil.
3. Boil softly for five or ten minutes, until almost all of the berries are popped. There will be a few whole berries still, but the sauce is done if those whole berries pop when you gently squeeze them against the side of the saucepan with a spoon.

Set the sauce aside to cool. When it’s down to room temperate, stick it in the refrigerator until you’re ready to put it on the table.

Eat your homemade cranberry sauce on your meat, on potatoes, with rolls, as it’s own small side, or on sandwiches with holiday meal leftovers. You really can’t go wrong combining it with anything.

Because cranberry sauce is best after being thoroughly chilled, it’s a great dish to make the day before, or even a few days before, your big meal. That means it adds to your dinner without adding to your kitchen work on the day of dinner itself.

We usually use double or triple the recipe to make sure we have enough to feed everyone and still have some leftovers.

So when you’re getting ready for Christmas dinner this year, grab some fresh cranberries and enjoy homemade cranberry sauce!

The post Homemade Cranberry Sauce appeared first on Six Figures Under.

One of the things I love about the Christmas season is the abundance of homemade treats!  Our 25 days of Christmas Cheer on a Budget wouldn’t be complete without sharing one of my favorite holiday treat recipes: my grandma’s Molasses Sugar Cookie recipe.  I love the way these molasses sugar cookies are soft and slightly chewy.  The molasses with along with ginger, cloves, and cinnamon just tastes like Christmas to me!

Not only are they delicious, they’re simple too. When I was in elementary school I made these to enter into the fair and came home with a blue ribbon.

If you’re a visual learner, the short video below will show you exactly how to make them, or you can continue reading the instructions below.  At the bottom of the post is a printable version of the recipe.

The ingredients are pretty basic things you probably have in your pantry with the possible exception of the molasses.  Not everyone keeps that on hand.  I really only have it to make these cookies.
Besides molasses, you’ll need sugar, an egg, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, salt, and shortening.

Shortening isn’t my favorite kind of fat to bake with. I only use it for this receipe and for pie crust.  I prefer to bake with butter. I’ve tried substituting butter in molasses sugar cookies and they don’t turn out the same.  They still taste good, but they are very flat.  So we use shortening.

Ingredients

3/4 cup shortening
1/4 cup molasses
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teapsoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt

Melt shortening over low heat until is is completely liquid.  Remove the pan from the heat and allow it to cool completely.  I’m honestly not sure what this does or why it’s a step in the recipe, but this is how my grandma (who is an amazing baker) taught me, so I do it.

When the shortening has cooled, add in 1/4 cup molasses, 1 cup sugar, and 1 egg.  To minimize dirty dishes, I just use the pan instead of a bowl.

In a separate bowl mix together the remaining ingredients: flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and salt.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in the pan.  This will make a somewhat stiff dough.
Wrap in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least 30 min.

Roll dough into balls then roll balls in sugar.

Bake on a greased cookie sheet in a 375 degree oven for 8-10 minutes.

Cool on the cookie sheet for one minute then transfer to cooling rack.

Enjoy!

I wish I could share some with each of you, so you would know how yummy they are, but you’ll just have to trust me and go make a batch or two to see for yourself.

What is your favorite homemade holiday treat?

Print Recipe

Molasses Sugar Cookies

 

Print

Soft and chewy Molasses Sugar Cookies are a holiday favorite!

Author: Stephanie @ SixFiguresUnder.com

Recipe type: Cookie

Serves: 2.5-3 dozen

Ingredients

• ¾ cup shortening
• ¼ cup molasses
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teapsoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon cloves
• ½ teaspoon ginger
• ½ teaspoon salt

Instructions

1. Melt shortening over low heat until is is completely liquid. Remove the pan from the heat and allow it to cool completely.
2. When the shortening has cooled, add in ¼ cup molasses, 1 cup sugar, and 1 egg. To minimize dirty dishes, I just use the pan instead of a bowl.
3. In a separate bowl mix together the remaining ingredients: flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and salt.
4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in the pan. This will make a somewhat stiff dough.
5. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least 30 min.
6. Roll dough into balls then roll balls in sugar.
7. Bake on a greased cookie sheet in a 375 degree oven for 8-10 minutes.
8. Cool on the cookie sheet for one minute then transfer to cooling rack.

3.5.3251

The post The Best Molasses Sugar Cookies appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Would you give a second hand gift for Christmas? Does the thought of thrift store Christmas shopping make you cringe?  It’s kind of a controversial topic.

Today in our series of 25 Days of Christmas Cheer on a Budget we’ll talk about WHY you might consider doing some Christmas shopping at the thrift store and WHEN it’s okay to give a second hand gift (and when it’s not). We’ll also talk about WHAT kinds of things to look for at the thrift store as a potential gift.

If you ask around, you’ll find strong opinions on the topic of giving gifts purchased second hand, so some of you may be wondering WHY in the world you would want to buy Christmas gifts at the thrift store?

WHY you might want to shop for gifts at the thrift store

The most obvious reason would be because you have a TIGHT BUDGET.  Your dollars will go much further at a thrift store than they will at a regular department store.  You can cover Christmas gifts at a fraction of the price that you would pay if you bought everything new.

Another reason might be because you want to FOCUS ON YOUR FINANCIAL GOALS.  Just because you’re frugal and choose to budget your money does not mean you’re broke. You might have the money to buy expensive new gifts but choose to buy more economical gifts instead so that you can reach your financial goals (like getting out of debt or saving for a house) faster.

You might also choose to shop for presents at the thrift store because you want to be able TO GIVE MORE.  If you’re sticking to a certain dollar amount for each person on your list, you’ll be able to make those dollars go further if you consider second hand gifts.

As a society, we’re bigger consumers now than we’ve ever been. We have lots of stuff and we waste a lot! Shopping second hand is a way to BE MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE than buying brand new stuff.

Plus, you can find some pretty UNIQUE TREASURES at a thrift store that you wouldn’t be able to find or afford at a traditional store.  This makes for some memorable, one-of-a-kind gifts.

WHEN a second hand gift is the right choice

Is it socially acceptable to give a second hand gift? Can you go Christmas shopping at the thrift store?

The answer, of course, is… it depends.

It’s not cut and dry. Whether it’s appropriate to give “used” gifts as opposed to new depends on who the gift is for, so your answer will depend on the person and the situation.

In addition to providing something tangible for someone else, the purpose of a gift is to show love.  If your recipient will feel love from a gift that is used, then definitely go for it!

If, on the other hand, for whatever reason you think a used gift would have the opposite effect for your recipient, then buying used may not be a good idea for that person.

When it comes to kids, it will depend on what precedent you have set.  If shopping at second hand stores is a normal thing in your family, your kids probably won’t think twice about a Christmas gift that isn’t brand spankin’ new.  In fact our kids have started doing some of their own Christmas shopping at the Thrift store.  I’ll tell you more about that in a second.

HOW to find great gifts at the thrift store

Once you’ve established that a beautiful used gift would be appreciated by your recipient, how do you choose one?

There’s certainly an art to finding great gifts at the thrift store.  Gifts from the thrift store often take more thought and time than just having something shipped from Amazon, but you will save a lot of money.

Let me share with you a few general tips for getting great gifts from the thrift store then I’ll share some categories of gifts that are great to look for at the thrift store.

My first tip is to START EARLY.  Thrift stores are hit or miss. Shop all year long and pick up future gifts when you see them. Back on Day 6 of this series I mentioned taking a stroll past the game section of the thrift store every time you go in to see if there are any  great games in excellent condition. Expand that advice to anything that you would consider gifting. Maybe the picture frame aisle is one you want to check out on a regular basis all year long.

My second tip is to KNOW WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR.  If you’re just blindly walking through the store for a gift, you probably won’t find one. One of the huge differences between a regular store and a thrift store is how they’re marketng to you. In a department store you have signs and displays to grab your attention. Brands pay big bucks to have their product placed at eye level or on a prominent endcap.

At the thrift store you’re pretty much on your own to come with ideas of what you’re looking for for the people on your giving list. You’re way more likely to be successful when you’ve put some thought into the gift that you’re looking for.

INSPECT and inspect again. There’s nothing worse than thinking that you scored big at the thrift store then realize at home that that pair of designer jeans has a hole (where there isn’t supposed to be one) or that game is missing a piece. This is even more important when you’re giving a gift!  Be super critical when you inspect something from the thrift store that you’re considering giving as a gift.  You’ll want it to be in like-new condition.

Another tip is to ask yourself, “WOULD I WANT TO RECEIVE THIS?”  Would the potential gift be something that you would happily receive?  I’m much more likely to give a thrift store second hand gift than I am to regift something that was given to me. The reason is that I want to be able to stand behind my gift and give something that I love. If I’m regifting something it’s mostly because it was something I didn’t love. Unless I know the recipient would love it, then why would I give the recipient my castoffs?

WHAT to buy as a gift from the thrift store

Here are some tips about what to look for.

Books– You can find SO many great books in great condition.

Games/puzzles– Find ones that are either unopened or that you’re sure have all of the pieces.

Purses/Bags– You can often find high quality handbags in good condition for amazing prices.

Toys– Find toys that work, have all the parts, and will clean up nicely. Your kids won’t care that it’s not covered in plastic packaging.

Jewelery– You can find a huge variety of jewelery priced very inexpensively.

Sports/outdoor equipment– Look for items with little wear and use that were possibly donated just because the original owner didn’t use them.

Candles, home decor items– You’ll find candles that are brand new and a wide variety of beautiful home decor items.

Mugs– Add some hot chocolate mix and mini marshmallows for a quick gift.

Glassware, vases–  Add some treats to a serving plate or flowers to a vase.

Frames– If you can look past what’s currently in the frame, you can find great frames at thrift stores. Replace what’s in the frame with a family picture, a chalk board or dry erase board or search pinterest for upcycled frame ideas

Clothing– You have to be careful buying clothes as gifts because thrift stores usually don’t have returns or exchanges if the item doesn’t fit.  I probably wouldn’t buy clothes for most people, but for my kids and husband I totally would (and do) buy and gift clothes from the thrift store.

In the past our kids have done their shopping for members of our family at the dollar store. Before they had their own money, I would allot them each enough money for a gift for each person in our family. It was good practice thinking about what other people would enjoy and helped them focus on and get excited about giving. As our kids have grown and now have their own money to spend, they prefer finding gifts at the thrift store because they can get more for their money and give what they consider a better gift than they would otherwise be able to give.

This year one child bought another a pogo stick for $3.50 at the thrift store on half-off day.  Another child bought some fun games for the younger kids.  They also found some great books as gifts.  And some of the clothes that I’ll be giving the kids are second hand.

If you haven’t thought of looking for gifts at the thrift store, don’t be afraid to give it a try!

How about you?

• Have you ever shopped for a gift at the thrift store?
• What are your thoughts on second-hand gift giving?

The post Can You Give Gifts from the Thrift Store? appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Want to simplify Christmas and make it more meaningful, while saving money at the same time?  Today we’re going to talk about why you might seriously consider staying home with your immediate family for Christmas.  You might not be able to change your plans for this year, but as you’re considering plans for future years, here are some great things to think about.  At the end we’ll share some ideas to handle sensitive family situations.

We’re on day 19 of our Frugal Festivities series.  If you missed any of our 25 days of Christmas Cheer on a Budget posts you can see them all here.

Ok, let’s talk about why you might want to forgo the trip over the river and thru the woods to grandma’s (or anyone else’s) house for Christmas.  Sounds kinda Grinchy at first, doesn’t it?!  But this is something I’ve heard over and over from my blog readers that has really helped them to scale back their Christmas budgets and increase the joy and meaning of Christmas.

This isn’t to say that you can’t have wonderfully successful Christmases with extended family– I’ve had them, both as a child and a parent– but it’s definitely something to think about if your Christmases with extended family are causing you stress, overspending, and sadness.

Consider staying home instead of traveling

Here are four reasons you might want to consider staying home instead of traveling. I’m not even going to mention the actual travel costs, but you’ll definitely want to take them into consideration.  If you have additional ideas please share them in the comments.

Traveling with kids over the holidays is EXHAUSTING.  Well, traveling with kids is exhausting period, but doing it over Christmas is even more overwhelming.  You have to pack all of your Christmas gifts up and squeeze them into your car or luggage while keeping them a secret. Depending on where you live, the weather may be treacherous during the Christmas season. Just thinking about driving in the snow makes me feel stressed!

Having Christmas morning with extended family can be STRESSFUL and AWKWARD, especially when there are cousins or kids from other families there.  We all want Christmas to be special and magical for our kids, but that can be hard when opening gifts side-by-side with family members who have different Christmas budgets and expectations.  Even just the fear of how kids will handle the inevitable comparisons is enough to be stressful.

Having Christmas with extended family might make you feel PRESSURE TO BUY MORE GIFTS.  Whether it’s buying a gift for great Aunt Sue just because she’ll be there at the family dinner, or feeling like you should buy more or bigger gifts for your kids because they’ll be opening them alongside their cousins, a gift that’s given out of duty or reluctance isn’t good for your budget and will not put you in the Christmas spirit.

At home you can establish your OWN FAMILY TRADITIONS. Those years we have traveled, our own traditions, even decorating our house, have fallen by the wayside.  There’s just something about decorating your own home, putting up your own tree, and just taking the Christmas season in without having to add travel to the itinerary.  One of the main reasons we stopped traveling at Christmas was so we could really establish our own Christmas traditions.

How to say no to holiday travel

So how do you say no to holiday travel without being seen as a scrooge or grinch?

Give reasons that won’t offend.

Don’t blame others in your reasoning.  Use “I” or “we” statements to share how you feel rather than point fingers at others.

Say you want to try something new this year and want to have a more relaxed Christmas at home.

Explain that you feel it’s best for your kids and your family.  No one can argue with how you feel.

Try making a compromise by waiting until after Christmas to travel so you can still have your own traditions and a more intimate gift exchanging in your own home.  You won’t have to pack up the holidays and have the travel stress before Christmas, you won’t have the gift giving pressure or expectation to spend that you might have with extended family, but you’ll still have the opportunity to visit family and build strong family relationships.

How about you?

I would love to hear how you’ve handled traveling to spend Christmas with family.

• Do you do Christmas morning with extended family? Is it a great experience?
• What advice would you give to others in similar situations?

The post 4 Reasons to Stay Home for Christmas appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Homemade brownie mix in a mason jar is a fast, easy, and inexpensive gift.  Plus the fudgy brownies are delicious!

Brownie mix in a jar is a great neighbor gift, teacher gift, or hostess gift.  Mixes in mason jars are quick to make, especially when you do them assembly line style.  I love gifts like this that are consumable and don’t create clutter.

Brownie mix in a jar is a gift that children can help make too!  Your kids will love being able to give their teachers a useful, delicious gift that they made themselves!

I have a quick video below that will show you exactly how to make brownie mix in a jar along with tips to make your gift in a jar turn out beautiful.  Or you can keep scrolling for the details along with a printable recipe (for you) and printable tags (for the recipient).

Tips for layering brownie mix in a canning jar

• This recipe is for a QUART mason jar.
• The funnel that I use for canning works great to make sure everything gets into the jar without a mess.
• Adding the ingredients in the order listed works best.  The chocolate chips need to be on the top, otherwise they will be buried and hidden.  The cocoa gets on the side of the jar, so it’s a good candidate for going near the top.
• Shake each layer down so it’s flat before adding the next layer.  For brown sugar, you’ll want to use a spoon.
• If you prefer brownies without nuts, leave them out and fill their space with more chocolate chips.

Homemade Fudgy Brownie Mix

• 1 cups + 2 Tablespoon flour
• 2/3 cup packed brown sugar
• 2/3 cups sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/3 cup cocoa
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Instructions for Using Homemade Brownie Mix

Mix contents of jar with:

• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cups water
• 2/3 cup oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Pour into a greased 9″ square pan.  Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes or until an inserted knife comes out clean.  Cool and enjoy!

Click here to download the printable PDF of the tags/labels.

Printable Recipe and Instructions for Making Brownie Mix in a Jar

3.8 from 4 reviews

Homemade Fudgy Brownie Mix

 

Print

Homemade brownie mixes are perfect for your pantry. They also make great gifts when they're layered in a jar!

Author: Stephanie @ SixFiguresUnder.com

Cuisine: Dessert

Ingredients

• 1 cup + 2 Tablespoons flour
• ⅔ cup packed brown sugar
• ⅔ cup sugar
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ⅓ cups cocoa
• ½ cups chocolate chips
• ½ cups chopped walnuts (optional)

Instructions

1. Add ingredients to a 1 quart canning jar (or quart-size zip-top plastic bag) in the order listed.
2. Include the following instructions for using the mix:
3. Mix contents of jar with: 2 eggs, ¼ c. water, ⅔ c. oil, 1 t. vanilla
4. Pour into a greased 9″ square pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Cool and enjoy!

3.5.3251

Click here to see the rest of the series Frugal Festivities: 25 Days of Christmas Cheer on a Budget series

Originally published 30 May 2014 but updated to be included in the Frugal Festivities series.

The post Fudgy Brownie Mix in a Jar– Fast and Easy Homemade Gift appeared first on Six Figures Under.