Vacation Education

  To enjoy the Vacation Education lifestyle, it takes time and money. Making money takes time and energy too. To help my family earn our way to free time and vacation education, I like to find ways to NOT spend the money we have worked so hard to earn. Making laundry soap is one of those projects that pays for itself over and over again.  I invested $17 in these two items, Washing Soda and Borax. That was nearly five years ago. I have made enough laundry detergent to do laundry for our family and still have lots of these ingredients left for years to come. We do about 15 loads of laundry per week for comparison. (This seems excessive to me, so I am looking for ways to reduce this, but for now my best strategy is to save on the soap itself) You can DIY this laundry soap too. There are lots of variations of this recipe on the internet since making laundry soap was made popular by the Duggars tv show. I can get a bar of Fels-Naptha at my local grocer for about $1. Walmart has the...

This post is a little different than what I normally write about. It isn't directly related to travel or homeschooling, but if you are passionate about saving money like I am, you may appreciate what I have to say here. And, sometimes, I get sick of hearing something so much that I get a bug in my ear and write until it's satisfied. Here is t he link to the article  from CNN that has me up and typing like mad this morning. It begins something like this: "... inflation can actually be a good thing for many working-class Americans, especially those with fixed-rate debt like a 30-year mortgage." She argues that your house is increasing in value while your mortgage payment stays the same. This is true. However, this would be happening even if the prices on every other thing you buy wasn't tripling in price at the same time. And, this ONLY applies to that specific situation - renters don't benefit, those with variable rate mortgages don't benefit. And, if your ...

 First, I have to put in a plug for Kohl's Cash! The department store is mostly overpriced in my opinion, but if you need something, like dress shoes for kids to wear to church, that you can't find at the budget options, like Walmart, then you might as well go when they are offering Kohl's Cash. Usually, it is something like $10 when you spend $50. It is easy to spend $50 on a pair of nice men's shoes. The catch is you have to use the $10 coupon at a later date, usually the following week. I am guilty of forgetting I have these coupons in my purse and not taking advantage of them. But, sometimes, I do well with them. Like this week.  Sneaky Statues of Easter Island was on the clearance rack for $7.39 (original price $36 and some change). So, with my Kohl's Cash - FREE! The question is, was it worth it? I did have to drive over the store and spend the gas and the time to get it, so was it a good use of my coupon? Sneaky Statues is a head to head strategy game for two...

Day One of our trip across the east coast was spent packing and planning and buying lots of things we thought we would need. Day Two and Three were spent just getting across the Midwest to our first Eastern state of New York. Then, we had to figure out how to use all the cool gear we'd brought along for our life on the road.   We arrived at our chosen campground, “ Niagara County Camping Resort ” – it was $58 for a tent site, not our best bargain, but more reasonable than the hotels in the area. The tent sites are on a loop around a small pond which does have a playground and swimming beach. We were late in the day when we arrived, so we did not give the beach a try. The bath houses were just down the road a bit in the center of the RV sites, and they were clean and had everything we needed. This was the first time we saw any Covid signs. They looked old and just reminded people to stay six feet apart and asking them not to loiter in the bathrooms. Our big Coho cooler that we ha...

 This is our final harvest of our very first season ever growing tomatoes. We are super excited to try some recipes and can some sauces and salsas in the coming weeks. Here is what we learned from our first time. 1. We should have planted them farther apart. When they are little, six inches seems like a lot of room, but they just grow and grow and tangle all up in each other. It's a big mess. Next year, we will give them plenty of room. 2. We should have spent the money on the tomato cages. This would have helped with the tangling. We did try attaching them to straight metal rods that we already had thinking that it was better to use something we had on hand rather than buying something new for just this one purpose. But, if we had used the cages, we would have had a better harvest throughout the season and not had so many green ones buried in the mess. 3. It's good to pick them green. They will ripen on the counter over several days. Those ones in the middle were picked green ...

 I'm going to write another post about saving money on food. It is the easiest category for me to control and so it is the place where I have spent the most time being creative. You might ask what the grocery budget has to do with Vacation Education? The answer is everything. First, there are so many things you can teach your children in the kitchen, and second, until someone is willing to pay me to take my kids to see cool stuff, I have to find a way to pay for it, and every penny I don't spend is a penny I can use toward something else I want. In  Your Money Or Your Life , Robin teaches that money is all about trading. If it takes you one hour of your life to earn a $20 bill to trade, then you use that $20 to buy an admission ticket, then you have actually traded one hour of your life for that ticket. I read that book when I was about 20 years old and I have been evaluating trade value ever since. Even this week as I process apples into applesauce and pie filling, I am consi...

  It’s tough right now. I know it. A cart of groceries at Walmart cost $250 yesterday. We didn’t even buy meat. It can be really devastating to look at your budget, to look at your life, and see that all the hard work you put into your career to get to where you are, and all the hard work you put into cutting bills and expenses so that finally the income exceeds the expenses more often than it doesn’t… and then see the prices of everything you need skyrocket so fast that all that work is lost. It feels like a punch in the gut, and then the government follows it up with an uppercut by telling you that inflation isn’t really that high. If you’re young, you still have a lifetime of earning to make up for it. But, if you’re over 50 you’re looking at some harsh realities. You can’t afford to dip into savings now and you don’t have a lot of opportunities to increase earnings. If you are still working, you can still be saving, so there’s no time like the present to figure out how much...