Surviving Downsizing

Don't believe the big box stores! CHECK EVERY price on every consumable. Turns out costco is no better on average than any other grocery store.

don't get sucked into the super discount thing- you will find they produce those discounts at a higer profit. It's not you who benefits. (I've seen the SAME chips sold for 99 cents in a grocery store and at a dollar store with the bag at the dollar store having only 2/3 the quantity!!!!!!!)

Take your time. You've got a bit now, you can afford to bake instead of buying bread, process a lamb instead of buying burger meat. You can save a lot of money that way.

Biggest thing of all, since money is just a game people play- Don't sit! get up- especially for mental health get OUTSIDE- and do stuff. not fast, just constant. if you Do Stuff, then Stuff Happens.
 
chewbacca said:
Since you asked, my wife has a pretty good job, and we have two little ones that are soon going to be taken out of daycare and home with me. We have a mortgage, and saved some money for an event like this, but I thought it would be a wise idea to start making cuts, and get my butt in gear sooner rather than later when the savings is all gone.
Click to expand...

If you can find a way to make a bit of money at home (I turned into a full time knifemaker!) you are SET. I'm not sure what you spent to have a job, but it was probably in the neighborhood of $100 a week if you did lunch with the guys periodically and drove in.

Child care, maybe it's cheap where you are, but for us it is about $9 an hour per child. Assuming you pay $4.50 an hour per child, that's a minimum of $15k (!!!!) a year full time and close to $9k a year for after school care.

So you are looking at the possibility of cutting 10 to 20 thousand a year off expenses before you turn a light switch off.

I don't remember exactly, but back in 03 when I was cubicle diving full time and Jessica was trying to decide whether to stay home or not (now she's in nursing school and I stay home) we figured that the total cost of her having her standard job as a systems administrator for the university, once child care was added in, was about $30,000 a year (might have been 32. there was a 3 in the first significant field there). Clothes, gas, maintenance, insurance, extra food costs, etc. Since she was making about 36k, she stayed home with baby. we took the extra deductions.

The first place I ran into the style of thinking that included jobs as having costs to figure in and calculate the 'true wages' was "Your money or your life", which is a good book to read. i'm not sold on the malthusian economy they seem to believe in macroeconomically, but the individual tactics and calculations are amazing.
 
Chewbacca,

Perhaps you and Han Solo should take the Millennium Falcon and make a Kessel spice run.


Sorry, but someone had to say it!;)
 
You know, if I didn't have kids, I might think about making a spice run, I hear the money is good!;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top