good morning San Diego so we thought we would just do a fun little follow-up
video to our financial video that we did earlier this week so when we first met
Josh was definitely the spender of the two of us and I was an avid saver but
since we've been married 12 years we've kind of balanced each other out
josh has become a great saver and I've learned to relax a little bit and more
willing to spend money and have a good time sometimes so it's really been a nice
balancing act we've kind of fallen right in the middle but we wanted to share
with you some of the things that we do spend money on and some of the things
that we don't spend money on and how does this works for our family we're not
trying to give advice and tell you what to do we're just giving you a
glimpse into how we do things because that's what these are all about
so first some of the things that we don't spend money on one thing we
decided as a family to cut back on was cable a few years ago I actually worked
for the cable company and we got all that stuff basically for free so we kind
of got really used to having it around so at one point we just decided you know
what we could save a bunch of money if we just cut down to just Internet and we
did keep the home phone just so we had a phone for the kids to have here if they're here
with a babysitter or something like that but we just decided you know we can get
down to just Internet then we can watch TV by Netflix or Amazon Prime or
anything like that so that's one thing we really saved a bunch of money that
probably saved us probably about $60 a month right there just that one thing we
cut it's been about 10 years since we have cable and we don't eat at
restaurants like ever for one its just kind of stressful to take little kids to
restaurants so we don't do it sometimes we'll go out on dates together and do
that but it's because someone gave us a gift card so we save a lot of money by
eating all of our meals at home another thing we decided we didn't want to spend
money on was really expensive vehicles yeah it'd be nice for me to have a nice
big pickup truck but I really don't need one I mean we live in the city we don't
have a lot of stuff we need to haul around so I just drive a minivan I can
actually fit four by eight sheets of plywood in that thing and it's kind of
like my mini pickup truck so that's kind of something RVs you know stuff like
that four wheelers yeah that'd be fun but do we really need it it's you know
we can do so much more with that money with our family so that's something else
we decided to cut out boats we see a lot of our neighbors when we look out they
have boats parked in all their driveways we don't have a boat you know things
like that what do you need them for I wouldn't mind having a fishing boat someday but it's
really not I can fish just fine from the shore so we do have a canoe
oh yes we do have a canoe so we're boat people that's a whole other
story though I don't spend money on knickknacks and clutter I know people
like collecting things and that's great but I don't want one more thing to clean
and spend money on so I don't really collect anything or do a lot of
decorating around the house very simple another thing we save money on big time
is our phone bills for our cell phones the the big Verizon bills I hear people
constantly complaining they spend hundreds you know 150 dollars for their
cell phone plan we found this really good plan at Walmart through Total
Wireless where we actually have three smart phones three iPhones that we pay I
think it's $85 a month for all three there is a little bit of a data cap but
we've never come close to hitting it I mean we use Wi-Fi at home so that saved
us probably $50 to $75 every month that we can just reinvest somewhere else in
our family another thing I don't spend a bunch of money on cigarettes and booze
so there is that although every once in a while dang it I'll redo that one however every once in a while I will splurge and get us a nice $2.00 bottle
of sparkling cider that's left over from New Year's he poured us all some of that to drink when the ball dropped so yeah we're spendy
we don't buy name brands like for clothing or even food as long as the ingredients
are the same we just buy the store brand of everything if you see his wearing
something name brand it was probably a gift or we found it goodwill yeah we
don't care about that stuff one way we've saved a ton of money over the
years is I've been blessed to be kind of handy so all our home repairs I should
say most of our home repairs any like projects around the house I've always
pretty much been able to complete them myself with a few exceptions I
don't do HVAC or plumbing to an extent I'm just I just
can't do it very well and just when we finished my basement I had to have
somebody else to do our carpet because that's not something I'm very good at so
now that saved us a bunch of money too yeah that's been really nice we don't
buy a lot of toys we invest in a few quality toys we have a wooden train set
that we add to Legos Fisher-Price Little People and just quality toys that lasts
from child to child so we really don't spend money on toys for the kids
sometimes they'll get them as gifts but it's not something we sink a lot of our
money into we also we don't have any pets
we've had some hamsters little tiny pets that don't cost a lot of money don't
take a whole lot to clean up mainly because I mean we have seven kids so
another thing to take care of and honestly it'd be Dana
taking care of that pet so I don't put that on her I'd love to have a dog
someday but maybe when all the kids are grown up and gone but so you know until
they invent a dog that doesn't poop eat and make a mess shed shed bark we're
gonna hold off on that no pets needed it we don't spend money on
books or movies we have a great library system where I can get on there and
reserve anything we want and borrow it for free and return it when we're done
so that saves a lot for storage too we don't have a lot of those things to
store or spend money on and we actually have three library accounts Dana has one
I have one in now Tessa has one too and we pretty much max all of those out for the
amount of books and you know movies and stuff too but mostly books that we can
have out at any given time so that's you know 130 is our limit between all the
cards there you go 130 and we're maxed out sometimes so with all the readers we
have in the family but it saves us a lot of money so here are some of the things
that we do decide to spend our money on whenever we buy like a big appliance or
you know a lawn mower or something that we know has a pretty good chance of
breaking within the period of time that like an extended warranty might cover
our cell phones I've broken like five cell phones in the last year we go ahead
and kind double down and get an extended warranty
on those things just because we know it's gonna break before you know we want
to replace it and it saves us a little bit of money doing that and that's just
another way that we do kind of yeah we could save money by not doing that but
it actually kind of pays off to do it now the extended warranties are usually
for five years on our appliances and something almost always breaks
within the five years like the fridge here the ice machine went out this
summer and the fridge is three years old but they still send someone out to fix
the icemaker so those have come in those have really paid for themselves yeah
and you'll hear you know a lot of people will recommend not getting them because a lot
of people don't take advantage of those extended warranties but as a big family
we're hard on appliances we use our stove all the time we use our refrigerator
dishwasher washer and dryer probably way more than the average family yeah it's
worth it for us we spend money on home school curriculum and it gets a little
pricey that's a big expense for us we do invest in one that I really like that
cost a little bit of money but it's paid off we really like it and I can teach
all the kids at once with it so that's been a worthwhile investment one thing
we invested in and this was more of a Christmas gift and like I would call an
investment but we got an Xbox a few years ago and that was kind of a splurge
for us and we didn't get it when it first came out we waited a few years and
got one that was you know a couple years old so it wasn't as expensive but we
wanted the kids to have something to do in the winter time especially with the
active games like that come with the Kinect they can be down there and
they're down there in the middle winter breaking a sweat playing these video
games and you know that's that's okay with us we do limit their time on what
they what we call dumb games and so that's just you know the games where
you're just sitting there controlling and that way they're not getting carried
away with that and kind of getting addicted to video games and they can
play unlimited on the active one so they're up and
moving they can do that all day if they're breaking a sweat and really
getting into it yep keeps them active and burns off some energy in the winter
time we also invest in family pictures every maybe two years we'll get some
done this year Marissa Lewis did a wonderful job capturing our family with
new baby Essie that's something we find worthwhile investing in and those are
actually some of the pictures you'll see in our intro video those are all done by
her and they're just fantastic pictures she's amazing we'll put a link to her
Facebook page down in the description of this video
yep one thing I decided to kind of I wouldn't call it splurging but it was
something I wanted to spend a little extra money on I went out and bought
these really nice smoke alarms for every room in our house they're actually
made by Nest they communicate with each other if one goes off in one of the kids
rooms the rest of them in the house will actually say hey there's smoke in the
kids room so we know exactly where to go if there is some kind of you know smoke
or carbon monoxide it's all built into one unit and it will actually even send
those out to our cell phones so if I'm away from home I can know when Dana's
burning something on the stove or you know if the house is empty and we know
you know there's a some carbon monoxide in the house we're gonna know that
before we come home and you know put our kids into that dangerous environment
because we do have gas appliances so that is a risk that we you know every
house that has gas appliance has so that's kind of something that yeah I
probably could have put a $20 smoke alarm in each room and saved a lot of
money but this these really paid off and they have a 10-year warranty and it just
gives us a lot of peace of mind in our house well worth it we like to spend our
money on vacations and experiences we don't buy a lot of stuff and toys and
things like that but we like to go places and do things and make memories
together so we decided to spend our money that way we like going in places
like Gatlinburg and we're going to Branson Missouri this year and just
gonna we just like to allow the kids that have good experiences we do lots of
hiking lots of free stuff on those vacations
we actually pack a lot of our food too to take with us or we find a Walmart nearby
and we do a lot of our own meals in in the house that we're staying at rather
than having to eat at a restaurant every day too but we do like to spend our
money on our vacations and just to get our kids lots of experiences across the
country one thing we decided to invest in and we had a previous video on our
van was our big white mini of our big white (beep) our big white passenger van and
with that it was a little more money than our last van was but actually not a
whole lot more and it's way bigger and I decided that we needed to upgrade to
that Dana was kind of on the fence and was like you know we can probably drive
two vans if we need to go somewhere like to church or something but we were
getting to that point where we weren't all gonna fit in the minivan anymore
legally and with somebody riding in the back area but so I decided to kind of
hunker down and go ahead and make that investment it's really made a big
difference with getting around and you know traveling to on vacations and
things like that and another thing we really kind of sink some money into is
preventative maintenance on our vehicles we make sure that they are properly
maintained so they last as long as possible we do all of our our auto work
over at Billings and Clyde and they are amazing so that that saves us a lot of
money in the long run too as we've gotten older and we our family has grown
we have found that become important for us to invest money into our health
buying quality foods making sure we're not just filling up on cheap junk you
know really it does cost more to eat healthy but it's a way that we're
willing to spend our money and invest in our family's health also other health
products we use some supplements essential oils high-quality essential
oils to really put into our health as we grow older
and our kids are needing immune support it's something that we've we have found to be
a worthwhile investment and that's pretty much it those are just some
really practical day-to-day stuff on how we spend our money and how we save money
here but we want to know what do you do what are some of your tricks in your
family that you use to save money what are some of the things that you invest
in and find worthwhile we just want to know how other families do it too so
leave those down in the comments and maybe we'll feature that in one of our
future videos and then go ahead and click Subscribe up there and we'd love
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