How to Save Money (Sort of)

Who doesn’t want to save a buck?


Everywhere you look these days you can find tips for saving money. Websites abound with advice from clipping coupons to learning how to make things less expensively than you can buy them. There are books upon books about how to save money on everything from groceries to vacations to car or home purchases.

These are tough times, and our family is no different than any other. I’ve been “doing the coupon thing” for almost a year and have saved thousands of dollars in the last twelve months just by making that simple change to our lifestyle. I plan meals according to the items that I have stockpiled in the pantry and freezer, and on a typical weekly shopping trip, I save around $100.

We, like most other families in America, used to buy on credit. Notice that I said “used to”. Two years ago this month we made our last purchase on credit: a one-pound, four-ounce Chihuahua whom we named Razzle. My jewelry business was doing well, so we justified the purchase by planning to pay her off the following month. I probably don’t need to mention here that during the following month I didn’t end up making the money that I had been hoping for, “other things” came up, and we were unable to pay our tab in full. We had major buyers’ remorse over that dog, but our children loved her, so we were stuck. (Until we gave her away a year later. We think of her each month when we make that payment to the pet store…) One day, about a week after we’d brought her home, Greg and I spent an emotional time in prayer, asking the Lord to forgive us for being so irresponsible with the money that He had entrusted to us, and we vowed to stop buying anything that we could not purchase with cash.

It took some getting used to, but we LOVE the freedom we have as we climb out of debt rather than spinning our wheels each month by paying minimum payments and racking up interest that would have us shelling out (in the long run) hundreds of dollars for a $20 purchase. A little more than three years from now, we will have no debt except our house. It is a wonderful feeling to know that by the time we start the first of five kids on braces, we’ll be able to pay cash.

You may be wondering how you, too, can save money and get out of debt. If you’re like me, it is really easy to run into the store for a couple of things and end up with a cartload of stuff that you don’t really need. Maybe you’re asking yourself, “How do I stop doing that? How do I make myself stick to buying only what my family really needs?”

Well, I want to share with you the VERY best advice that I have gleaned from my experiences raising five children. It’s not rocket science, but let me tell you, it is keeping me so closely to my budget that it makes me SICK to think of spending money on anything unless it is an absolute necessity. So here it is. The #1 BEST way to stop spending money on useless stuff:



Take up an extremely expensive hobby.



For me, that is photography. A year ago, I asked a dear friend of ours to take the kids’ pictures because I got sick of telling the people at the Target Portrait Studio that we wanted appointments for five kids, making sure they understood that we wanted individual portraits and group shots, then we’d get there and they had given us one 15-minute time slot. The pictures taken by our friend turned out so well that that very day I started saving money for a nice camera.

I was able to purchase my new camera (the Canon T1i) in December. It didn’t take me long, however, to discover that photography is not a cheap hobby. Lenses cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars. My wish list grows every day: portrait lens, macro lens, wide-angle lens, polarizing filter, studio background and lighting, 5-in-1 reflector/diffuser, Mac Book laptop, photo editing software, photo printer…the list goes on and on. And this is just for personal use! At least at this point, I’m not making plans to do this professionally. But check out what this baby can do!!!

(I took all of these pictures myself.)

I have great motivation to not spend money on the movie I saw in the $5 bin at Walmart that I watched one time in elementary school and that I think might have been funny. My children don’t really need new socks…the holey ones they’re wearing are allowing their feet to breathe, and breathing is a good thing. According to the First Lady, obesity is a threat to our national security, so I can stop buying snack foods to keep in the house. In the afternoon when the kids come asking me for something to eat, we just sit around the table together looking at my fancy camera bag. You see? There are all kinds of corners you can find to cut when you have a hobby that would otherwise drain you dry.



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