Making the Most of Your Earnings
August 4, 2023- In: Managing Life at Home
Dawna's Notes from the Home Front. Tips and tricks for managing finances and life at home for spouses and partners or truck drivers. Shopping strategies and more to make ends meet on a trucker's income.
One of the things Jeff frequently gets asked is how we have managed to raise 6 kids on a trucker's income --and that is even before people realize we are a single income family since I am a stay-at-home mom. That question is one reason why I am sharing so much about what I do to keep expenses down at our house. The other reason is because several struggling drivers have reached out to Jeff and Charley for help---mentioning some astronomical amounts their family spends on things.
Delving into the numbers, things like grocery bills almost as high as our mortgage, hundreds of dollars a month on dog food, and thousands a month on door dash came up. And that does not count the drivers who are struggling to make their bills each month, but just bought a new boat, or motorcycle, or something else like two personal vehicles with high monthly payments.
Just like finances on the road, the margins at home are often tight between having enough or spending more than we can really afford. Like what Colton Lawrence of Trucker CFO said last week on the show, about how trucking is a business with margins in the pennies. --That's how we have to manage expenses at home. Our family budget is like that, too. Each purchase is a decision between whether our family is financially secure or not. No matter how much income comes in, if we are not managing expenses at home, it will never be enough.
Two places that are really easy to overspend on are food and entertainment. Mostly I have been writing about the family food budget, because keeping food on the table is so essential. Even though it is essential, it is even more essential to do it without breaking the bank or going into debt.
True story. I know a lady, who, when she was first married, would buy her groceries with a store credit card because she could not afford groceries! Decades later she has kept that pattern and is over $50,000 in debt! If you are eating food you have not paid for yet, you have a serious problem and need to come up with a better plan.
If you cannot afford something, how are you going to pay for it plus interest
next month? When Jeff and I were newlyweds we went to a self-reliance seminar, and one of the things they said there was that if a credit card company can get you $2,000 in debt and make only minimum payments, they can keep you in debt for the rest of your life. Beware of debt. It is a trap! Eliminating and avoiding as many monthly payments as you can is absolutely an essential key to getting through tough economies, bad breakdowns, and any other financial challenges or hardships.
Now, as far as entertainment spending... We all like to have fun and do fun things as a family, but if we are not careful, we are shortchanging ourselves and our family by spending money on fun first before meeting more essential needs. I will share a true story here to make a point. About a decade ago I got frustrated with the mess our kids constantly made with our DVD collection-- taking them off the shelf, removing them from the boxes, and leaving them strong everywhere to get scratches up and unusable. I had the bright idea to get a big storage case that zips shut and then ditch the boxes, free up shelf space, and then keep them stored up high out of reach.
Which was a great solution by the way. However, as I was doing all that and tossing out the cases the DVDs came in, I started thinking about how much each of them had cost. I started adding it up in my head, and at between $15 and $30 a piece, we had bought enough movies over the previous decade and a half that we could have paid off our student loans instead! How much would it have blessed our family if we had made more economical entertainment decisions and just put that money towards that debt every time we felt like purchasing a movie? Instead, we still owed 11k on loans we were still struggling to make payments on. Thankfully, we paid those off since then.
I hope some of thee things I share will help you and your family be inspired to make positive changes that will bless your family. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the video I made yesterday about bringing home the bacon. 😀
#homefinances #groceries #familybudget #budget #manageexpenses #foodbudget #avoiddebt #howtomakeendsmeet #entertainmentbudget
Making the Most of Your Earnings
August 4, 2023- In: Managing Life at Home
Dawna's Notes from the Home Front. Tips and tricks for managing finances and life at home for spouses and partners or truck drivers. Shopping strategies and more to make ends meet on a trucker's income.
One of the things Jeff frequently gets asked is how we have managed to raise 6 kids on a trucker's income --and that is even before people realize we are a single income family since I am a stay-at-home mom. That question is one reason why I am sharing so much about what I do to keep expenses down at our house. The other reason is because several struggling drivers have reached out to Jeff and Charley for help---mentioning some astronomical amounts their family spends on things.
Delving into the numbers, things like grocery bills almost as high as our mortgage, hundreds of dollars a month on dog food, and thousands a month on door dash came up. And that does not count the drivers who are struggling to make their bills each month, but just bought a new boat, or motorcycle, or something else like two personal vehicles with high monthly payments.
Just like finances on the road, the margins at home are often tight between having enough or spending more than we can really afford. Like what Colton Lawrence of Trucker CFO said last week on the show, about how trucking is a business with margins in the pennies. --That's how we have to manage expenses at home. Our family budget is like that, too. Each purchase is a decision between whether our family is financially secure or not. No matter how much income comes in, if we are not managing expenses at home, it will never be enough.
Two places that are really easy to overspend on are food and entertainment. Mostly I have been writing about the family food budget, because keeping food on the table is so essential. Even though it is essential, it is even more essential to do it without breaking the bank or going into debt.
True story. I know a lady, who, when she was first married, would buy her groceries with a store credit card because she could not afford groceries! Decades later she has kept that pattern and is over $50,000 in debt! If you are eating food you have not paid for yet, you have a serious problem and need to come up with a better plan.
If you cannot afford something, how are you going to pay for it plus interest
next month? When Jeff and I were newlyweds we went to a self-reliance seminar, and one of the things they said there was that if a credit card company can get you $2,000 in debt and make only minimum payments, they can keep you in debt for the rest of your life. Beware of debt. It is a trap! Eliminating and avoiding as many monthly payments as you can is absolutely an essential key to getting through tough economies, bad breakdowns, and any other financial challenges or hardships.
Now, as far as entertainment spending... We all like to have fun and do fun things as a family, but if we are not careful, we are shortchanging ourselves and our family by spending money on fun first before meeting more essential needs. I will share a true story here to make a point. About a decade ago I got frustrated with the mess our kids constantly made with our DVD collection-- taking them off the shelf, removing them from the boxes, and leaving them strong everywhere to get scratches up and unusable. I had the bright idea to get a big storage case that zips shut and then ditch the boxes, free up shelf space, and then keep them stored up high out of reach.
Which was a great solution by the way. However, as I was doing all that and tossing out the cases the DVDs came in, I started thinking about how much each of them had cost. I started adding it up in my head, and at between $15 and $30 a piece, we had bought enough movies over the previous decade and a half that we could have paid off our student loans instead! How much would it have blessed our family if we had made more economical entertainment decisions and just put that money towards that debt every time we felt like purchasing a movie? Instead, we still owed 11k on loans we were still struggling to make payments on. Thankfully, we paid those off since then.
I hope some of thee things I share will help you and your family be inspired to make positive changes that will bless your family. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the video I made yesterday about bringing home the bacon. 😀
#homefinances #groceries #familybudget #budget #manageexpenses #foodbudget #avoiddebt #howtomakeendsmeet #entertainmentbudget
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The Road Warriors Entrepreneurs (RWE) is a powerful network of owner-operators and independent truckers committed to turning time on the road into successful, profitable businesses.