Category Archives: Family

Saving Money on Eating Breakfast Out

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Every other Sunday, we like to go out to eat breakfast.  After trying a few places, we now go to a old fashion family restaurant almost exclusively.  Here’s why:

Restaurant like ours

 

  1. For the amount of food we get, it’s even cheaper than McDonalds (we still go to McDs every now and then too though, the kids love that place).
  2. The waitresses are kind and really hustle.
  3. The owner is a very friendly and greets us well.
  4. The food is best tasting in town.  Their pancakes are big and fluffy (perfect really)!
  5. Oftentime we’ll see people we know.
  6. I get that nostalgic feeling that I slipped back into time to a place when my grandparents would have gone if they were alive.
  7. It’s fairly close to where we live.
  8. There is so much food with the meals that my wife and I order, that we ask for additional plates, and give our food to the kids (except for a order of hot chocolate).  Just lately, we’ll order my son an addtional pancake, but we still share our food with him (mainly eggs and bacon)
  9. We are helping a small business in our city by patronizing it.
  10. The restaurant is downtown in our small city.  it gives it a charming appeal.

Yes, we still go to McDonalds every now and then, but the kids are starting to realize that the food is better at this local place we go to.  Now they are starting to ask to go to the local family-owned restaurant instead of McDonalds more often.

Hopefully, this will be a place of memories for my kids when they are adults.

We do a few things to make it memorable for my kids.

  1. We have them take up the bill and pay the cashier.  Then whatever coin change it left, they get to keep.
  2. We let them stack the creamers and sugar packets to make interesting structures (my daughter is great at this).
  3. We get the kids a hot chocolate (they love the whip cream), every time we go.
  4. As we leave, my son and daughter always grabs a mint candy on the way out.

Not every place in town is a good as our restaurant, but if you can find one it’s wonderful!

Try to look beyond the decor, and see the family trying to make a living selling food well prepared.

Income Loss From My Wife Being a Stay at Home Mom

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After posting “How I Have Lost Over Half A Million Dollars Having Kids, So Far!”, I started thinking about how many of my family and friend’s spouses work.

Let me start with our parents… Both sets of parents work.  All the people I know at work, their spouse works.  My boss who makes at least twice as much as I do, spouse works.  Where I live, only one other neighbor’s spouse doesn’t work, the rest do.  My college-educated sister and brother-in-law (great people), both work.  My sister is having a baby in Feb. 2010, and she claims she’s going back to work a few weeks after the baby is born.  They already make more than me…

So, I decided to go out to the website:  money.com to use their calculator for net worth and see what the median (the median, mind you) net worth would be for someone in our conservatively theoretical income range!  The number came out to be $644,100.

Missed Income

Missed Income

And that is the median!  Both my wife and I are very frugal and based on our frugality habits, I recalculated the number…  I figured for us it would be somewhere in the $800,000 to $900,000 range, Grrrr!

Who is to blame for this?  Well, unfortunately, me!  My wife and I discussed whether she would work or stay home raising the kids years before we had our first child.  I told her once I make over a certain amount, she could stay home.  Ironically, I accomplished that number more quickly then I imagined, and so she stayed at home after my son was born. In hindsight, I don’t think this was the most prudent move on our part.  It especially hits home seeing my 20 something sister start to pass me already with respect to net worth, did I mention that both she and my brother-in-law are both studying for their MBAs?  In a future post, I’ll have to tell the story about how my sister won a free house. So now that I know I’m behind compared to our theoretical income group’s class, what can I do?  I’m thinking it’s time to start some side hustling (frugaldad.com’s coined-phrase).

How do I feel about my discovery?

Sad, but not too disappointed.  My kids are doing very well in all aspects of their development.  It’s a hefty price to pay though, especially when we’re practically the only ones doing it these days in a world of the two-income earner households.  Shoot, If we had that money now, I could go into a semi-retirement state if I wanted to (I’m not old enough to think about that now though)… Oh well, the moral of the story is, think twice before and your significant other decide to quit work to raise your kids.