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What Would We Do if My Husband Lost His Job?
We’ve been talking about recession-proofing your family lately, and it’s mainly because we have so many readers asking this question: What will I do if my husband loses his job? (or wife, if she’s the main breadwinner). If you haven’t been following our series on How To Recession-Proof Your Family, catch up with it now by reading how one SAHM recession-proofed her family. Although not all subjects we talk about at Home Ever After apply to all people’s situations all of the time, sometimes they really hit home. In this case, this topic may be hitting my household and my family. Let me explain. Layoff News While Shopping A week…
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How one SAHM Recession-Proofed Her Family
Editor’s note: With the current state of the economy, many one-income families are especially worried about the security of their employment. We’ve been talking to moms and dads a lot lately about the measures they are taking to make sure their families are recession-proofed. In other words, what can you do now to ensure that a possible layoff would have the smallest possible impact on your family’s lifestyle and well-being? This week, Phoebe Hendricks was kind enough to share her tips and strategies with us. The following is a guest post by Phoebe Hendricks. She is married to the most amazing and supportive husband and is a stay at home…
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How I Saved $228 with These Grocery Tips
Home Ever After has partnered with Oscar Mayer and Ellie Kay to bring you grocery tips that can revolutionize the way you spend your family's grocery money!
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Get Frugal with $5 a Week
Financial situations can change dramatically without warning, and have enormous effects on your household’s spending money. Whether your main breadwinner has lost their job, had work hours reduced, or you’ve lost the second income in your family, there are ways to make ends meet even when the going gets rough. Get Frugal with $5 a Week A while back, a reader shared this problem with me. She described how, after many years of two incomes, they now have only $5 a week leftover after paying for necessities. She had gone back to school, leaving their family of 5 to get by on only her husband’s income. We may forget how…
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Learn the Difference Between Needs and Wants
Learn the Difference Between Needs and Wants It can be difficult to learn the difference between needs and wants when you’re used to having a little flexibility in your shopping budget. When that flexibility disappears suddenly and you have to cut back your spending, identifying needs and wants becomes crucial. This is a great exercise for children and teens to do with you. It’s true that frugal living can cut your shopping expenses dramatically, but the decision always lies with you, the frugal homemaker, to say what’s really needed. These easy questions can help get your mind discriminating as you distinguish needs vs. wants. Take this list with you to…
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Fight Vampire Electricity Thieves
Fight Energy Vampires and Lower Your Electric Bill Vampire taps might be sucking the energy out of your home right now! Chances are, they’re inflating your energy use and raising your electric bill, silently draining the money out of your household budget. We’ve talked before about vampire energy taps. What is vampire power? I know Halloween is just around the corner, but vampire energy taps don’t have anything to do with dracula or evil undead creatures! A vampire tap is an electrical device that uses electricity while plugged into an outlet, even if it’s not turned on or in use. Vampire power means you end up paying extra for electricity…
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Save Money and Paper with Kids' Gift Tags
Say Goodbye to Cards and Hello to Gift Tags! Large families mean a lot of birthdays, and a lot of birthdays mean a lot of parties to attend. Parties mean presents and cards. A card to each person, and sometimes even a card on each gift for the same person, adds up to a lot of greeting cards going around. Giving birthday or other cards to adults is socially acceptable and expected; after all, many adults like to read and keep cards as keepsakes. However, is it socially expected to give a card to each child with a gift? I first took this into consideration when my husband and I…
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Sometimes Expensive Can Be Frugal After All
My husband and I gave up our gym membership when we started tightening the household budget several years ago. It was the first thing to go, as a matter of fact, because it was the most expensive item of spending that we had control over. It’s not as though we couldn’t work out still because we do have some exercise equipment at home that was given to us for Christmas. The home equipment is limiting, however, and without weights our home gym is pretty inadequate. We missed the gym membership a lot, and although it made us sad to let it go, it certainly helped toward paying off some debts.…
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Personal Finance: Eliminate Annual Fees on Credit Cards
What most people don't know is that annual fees on credit cards are negotiable. It is completely possible to eliminate annual fees...
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Frugal Friday: What I’m Willing to Give Up
Peer pressure can work for you in some cases. I’m using the positive influence of my frugal peers to trim the fat in these lean economic times, and I’ll tell you why. The recession is hitting many of us hard, some of us medium, and some of us not at all. My family falls between the hard and medium categories, and the only reason we’re not in the “hard-hit” category is because we’re so frugal already! I realized just how many people are in the “hard-hit” category as I scrolled through my RSS feeds a few days ago. I saw headline after headline about giving things up: one blogger said…
