Hello

Five years ago, on a whim, I decided to give college a try. Turns out I liked it and it liked me. Now here I am in graduate school, pursuing a master's and then doctorate in sociology. In order to do this my husband and I left our relatively comfortable life and moved to a new city. One major decision we have made is that my husband will be a stay-at-home dad for the next year. Our income has been cut in half and since we want to keep our debt level as low as possible, we are going to be living near the poverty level. If it were just my husband and me, it might not be too much of a challenge, but we have three school aged boys along for the ride.

I have decided to keep a blog to help keep us accountable and also show what can be done with little money. I will be posting big and little monetary triumphs and failures as we try to navigate our new income bracket.

We moved to our new town at the beginning of August. Of course, moving is never inexpensive and this time was no exception. But we got here safe and sound and that is the most important thing. Before we moved we did a huge declutter and pare down so the unpacking was done pretty quickly and clean up in the new place is a snap.

One place we could save money is in housing, but we chose not to go that route. We could have moved into an apartment, either part of an older house or in a complex. However, our children are loud and need space to roam. We were also searching for a place online from across the state. Keep in mind this is a college town with very limited housing options. But I think we did good overall. Sure we could have saved about $200 a month in a smaller place. But this house is big enough, is charming and was still $150 a month less than we had been paying. But it is a lot on our meager income, so we are finding other ways to economize.

This blog will focus on those things that we do to economize. One of my major goals is that my family not feel deprived.


Although a lot of real life friends will be reading this, I want to keep it somewhat anonymous to the rest of the world. Therefore, I will be using pseudonyms and keeping my location somewhat vague. So, our cast of characters:

Me: Already introduced
The Dude: The SAHD (Stay-at-home-dude)
Magnus: Oldest son
Rin: Middle son
Luigi: Youngest son
Stumpy: Bad little dachshund #1 (Girl)
Waddles: Bad little dachshund #2 (Boy)