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These dutch oven baked red potatoes make an easy side dish for any dinner. Prepping goes quickly and they cook in about an hour. I made these to go with some grilled honey chipotle glazed boneless chicken thighs and it … Continue reading
First of all, happy Mother’s Day to all of you moms out there.
Mother’s Day, for the past couple of years has been a time of quiet introspection in our house. Liz was a mom before Timothy arrived. She has a daughter. She didn’t have any of the physical mothering duties to attend to, but that doesn’t change the fact that Samantha is her child.
We celebrated by going out for breakfast at the recently opened Daily Diner in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul (which was really good, by the way). We had to hold and feed a fussy baby, but we’re happy to have the opportunity this time.
While we were out, it was amazing to me how many people wished Liz a happy Mother’s Day and asked if it was her first. We’d say yes, not interested in explaining the whole thing. This was to strangers.
What surprised me is how many people that walked with us after Samantha passed that specifically called this Liz’s first Mother’s Day. I know they didn’t mean anything by it, but it amazes me how soon we forget what others have gone through.
Happy THIRD Mother’s day, Liz!
We’ve been out of debt, aside from our home mortgage, for 4 years now. We realized we couldn’t get ahead by being behind.
We were never in particularly bad shape. By the time we got serious about paying off our debt, all we had was about $12,000 in student loans. We had been working through for a few years just paying the minimum payment. If we had continued on that path, we’d still be paying now and have a few years to go. We talked about how we *should* really get around to paying this thing off, but we never executed the plan.
One day, I realized that when my 13 year old car died, we couldn’t replace it. That was the day everything became real. We started looking at our finances and realized that we had been slowly bleeding cash for 2 years. We looked for ways to cut expenses and found a few, but it wasn’t enough.
Within 3 months, we both found better paying jobs — we doubled our income. And that was it. The squeeze was gone. With that, we started putting at least $1000 a month toward that loan. With an income tax refund, we finished paying it off in 9 months. Debt free. What a relief!
We continued saving that $1000 per month to be able to replace my car, cover some home improvement projects, and to save for emergencies.
As I said, that was 4 years ago. But we cheated.
Since our income went up so dramatically and so quickly, we never practiced a real budget. When money comes in faster than you can spend it, you get sloppy. We sure did.
We never took the time to really iron out our budget. I knew how much our bills were going to be in a given month, but I didn’t pay attention to any of the other spending. We didn’t have to.
Now we’re paying for it. We are just starting to do the real work of writing up the monthly budget, categorizing everything, and most importantly, examining the results at the end of the month.
Here’s the weird part: It’s actually fun. I didn’t push the issue for years because I didn’t think it would be worth the effort and I didn’t want to accept what the outcome might be. We found so many ways that we were wasting money that it is sickening.
We model the budget and our personal finances based on Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover
What do you do to keep your family finances in line? What could you be doing better?
He was born on April 11th, 2013 at 8:21PM. He weighed 9 pounds, 2.5 ounces and was 22 inches long. That’s a big boy!
In the week and a half since his arrival, I’ve noticed a few things:
Last week, I told you about our decision to cut cable TV. I did a lot of research to determine what our options are. It turns out that there are lots of possibilities.
There are a couple of qualifications I want to make before digging deeper:
From this point, we have a few choices to make. We could completely avoid any additional investments, we could purchase equipment and/or services for a one-time fee, or we could sign up for monthly subscriptions. I’ll start with no new investments and work up from there.
We could watch YouTube videos or standard Hulu programming on the computer. We could plug the computer into the TV by HDMI and watch from there. That is an option, but it could be a bit cumbersome.
Some networks allow you to stream entire episodes of shows onto your computer.
We decided these options weren’t going to cut it, but if you really don’t have any budget to work with, this is probably better than nothing.
This is where options really start to unfold. Most of us forgot about over the air stations long ago, but they are still there. When Congress required OTA stations to broadcast in digital rather than analog, many stations added additional subchannels. In order to receive channels, you’ll need a digital tuner and an antenna. Any TV built after March 2008 is required to have a digital tuner built in. Larger TV’s built in 2005 or later probably have them as well.
Depending on where you are in relation to transmission towers, you may be able to pick up quite a few channels just from the TV. We needed an antenna. I searched and read reviews of several different types and brands of antennas. A great resource to help you determine what type of antenna you need and what channel options you’ll have is Antennaweb.org. You simply enter your zip code and it gives you a list of channels you should be able to receive and a map of where the towers are along with the distance between you and them.
We’re only 6 miles away from our local towers so we only needed a small indoor antenna.
We settled on the Mohu Leaf Paper-Thin Indoor HDTV Antenna
Mohu Leaf Digital TV Antenna
Putting aesthetics aside, it actually works too! We are able to pick up 43 channels in full HD. We didn’t have HD service with cable, so this is a step up. The best part is there are no ongoing costs for this. We’ve been pleasantly surprised with how many good programs we’ve been able to watch that we didn’t even know existed before.
We also decided to jump into the content streaming market. There are several devices on the market that stream video content directly onto your television including Apple TV, the Boxee Box, and Roku. We chose to go with Roku. We picked up a Roku 3
Along with the free channels, there are many channels with paid subscriptions. The most popular channels are Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Instant Video.
I think Netflix has the best selection of content and at $7.99 per month, it could be a great deal for you. It is the only paid service we have subscribed to. I have found lots of shows that are worth watching. It will take me years to go through it all if they don’t add another bit of content to the library, which isn’t the case.
Hulu Plus is also $7.99 per month and does have a lot of content available. I’m not particularly interested in most of it. They also have some weird restrictions that prevent you from watching certain shows on the TV. You can stream them on your computer, though. Seems strange to me.
Amazon Instant Video comes with a paid Amazon Prime membership. This gives you access to lots of free content and gives you the opportunity to pay for individual episodes or full seasons of several shows. We thought about doing this, but I just can’t see enough value to pay the $80 per year to the Prime membership. Maybe someday, but not now.
We bought an antenna, and Roku 3, and a new cable modem (so we don’t have to rent one from the cable company. These 3 items cost a total of $200.
Our high speed internet access costs $50 per month. We purchased a Netflix subscription for $7.99 per month. Our total monthly cash outlay is less than $60.
Our monthly TV and Internet bill dropped from $165 to $58. The new equipment will have paid for itself in only a couple of months. Not too bad!
Are you thinking of cutting the cord? What’s stopping you?
