Tuesday, February 7, 2017

The Struggles of A Homeschooling Mom

Today is one of those homeschooling days that I am pretty sure that I am going to be bald by the end of the day. The kids are struggling with not wanting to work and whining today. I am kind of at the end of my rope today and I have to admit it was a pretty long rope. I have to say that homeschooling is very rewarding as I see all three of my homeschooled kids exceed expectations for their grade level.

We have implemented some new homeschool tricks around here and yes, most have hidden lessons. One of the classroom management techniques is they will be earning a paycheck for their effort and grades. They will get a paycheck of classroom money every week. They will be able to deposit them into their account and buy rewards with them. They will learn how to balance a checkbook and write checks with this method.

They now have to earn video games an hour at a time. Now... I am letting them have the TV going while they do their independent worksheet time. I have always been able to focus better with background noise. It seems that they do too. One of the rewards from their paycheck is to be able to buy an extra half hour of video games.

DS3 is wanting to start a blog as a school project. We shall see how that goes. He wants to do a video game blog. I think its a trick to get to play more video games. Mama is on to you mister! But in the spirit of unschooling, I will help him and maybe advise him to expand to other things as well.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

January 2017 Financial Checkup

We are starting to get settle down into getting ourselves out of debt. We are working our butts off to get ourselves to where our family has everything they need. We had to jump around baby step 1 this month to get ready to move. But on a side note we did pay off some debts. We did our first of the month money meeting... Yup, we are that couple...and came up with our game plan. Here are a few things that helped our budget this month: 

We discovered that our cellphone company was over changing us for over 8 months! We definitely will be paying more attention to the bills. I called fussing and begging them to fix it. They credited my account $197 dollars. So that paid this months phone bills. That helped. We quit smoking. This saves us over $320 a month and almost $3900 a year. That really increases our monthly budget. That could be a car payment. I've learned to do my nails myself. Thank goodness for Pinterest and YouTube. This saved me $60 this month. I also learned to cut the boys hair at home. This saves my $45 a month. That is $425 a month savings and with the cellphone $622 this month. That all went to closing costs, but starting next month we can put that back into our emergency fund and it will be fully funded in just over two months. Next month we will get our taxes back and have our two big bills paid off and have a lot extra in savings.

Every Dollar App is most definitely a life saver for me. I can just type in our budget and it does the math for me. It lets me know what I am over or under budgeting on. I really love it. As I am saving money, I am going to be able to lower our bills and put more back in savings.

It's tax season. While we are not able to get our refund back until next month. The place that does it for us, will advance us $1500

With mile up I have been able to earn a little money toward Christmas so yay for saving for Christmas!

Money Matters:
Pest and Home Inspection: $397 we have to start paying on it next month
Savings: $27
Christmas: $6.75