Working Overtime

Hubby and I both agreed that for the time being, we will work as much overtime as possible without over killing ourselves. His work allows him to pick up an extra shift each week.  So he works six 12 hour shifts and then has one day off.  He is home every evening and this works out well for him.  I am nannying for two families.  I work from midnight-7 taking care of two twin 2 month olds.  They are so precious and I can nap inbetween feedings.  Then I go home and nap before going to my second family.  They have 3 kids and homeschool during the mornings.  I go in the afternoons to take them to their activities while the parents go to work.  So I am working 60-70 hours a week right now and hubby works 72. 

 do you see BOTH babies?

  You might wonder why we are working so much when we try to live a simple life.  We spent most of our savings to buy the rv.  Right now we are living off Hubbys income and mine goes directly into savings to rebuild our emergency fund.  We will be needing a new truck in a few years so we want to start saving for that now.  Since we dont have kids (but are starting fertility treatments) we realize that this is a unique time in our lives where we can afford to work a ton.  Hopefully by the time we do have kids, we will have our emergency fund in place as well as some non emergency savings.  We both want me to stay home with any potential kids so it is essential that we learn to live on hubbys income now.  I don't recommend doing this long term (and I really only have my overnight gig until the boys can sleep through the night) but it works for us, for right now. 

I taught one of my afternoon kids how to knit!

Lessons I Learned From Shopping at Sams Club

I am constantly taking notes of prices of items I buy.  I like to keep my meat under $2/lb.  I won't pay more than 25cents for a can of Diet Coke.  Bananas cost 48 cents/lb here in Texas... etc.  I try not to go to Sams Club too often because things tend to jump into my shopping cart.  This shopping trip I wanted to really see what is cheaper at Sams Club and what is cheaper in the grocery store.  Fyi, Sams Club has diet coke for 31cents/can.  Not a deal!
   They DID have a good deal on chicken breasts.  $1.88 per pound was the cost for boneless skinless breasts.  Ill let you know one of my tricks when buying packages by weight.  The packages vary slightly in weight and I always buy the smallest one.  Each package had 5 breasts but they varied in price from $10-$13.  I buy the $10 packages and don't even notice that the chicken breasts in my package are slightly (and I mean slightly) smaller than the $13 package.  Instant savings of $3!  As soon as I got home I vacuum sealed each breast (these suckers are HUGE) and froze them individually for meals later.

(notice the crockpot with tonights dinner in the background?)

  Another lesson that once again hit home, was that typically individually packaged items are smaller than "bulk".  Most of us understand that 50 pounds of rice bought at once is cheaper than 50 pounds purchased in 1 pound packages.  But what so many people forget is that buying snack pack size items is more than double the cost of a regular size package.  I bought a bag of Veggie Straws.  It weighs 1.2 lbs for the whole bag and cost just under $5.  I could have bought the lunch pack of perfectly portioned Veggie Straws.  The lunch pack weighed 1 lb total and cost just under $10.  To save over $5 I think I can portion out my own snacks. 

  I bought 50 lbs of rice, 10 lbs of pinto beans and 15 lbs of potatoes to make some frugal meals in the future. I managed to defend my shopping cart against the "extras" that tried hard to jump in...

Be Weird!

I have a bumper sticker on my truck that says "Debt is Normal...be weird" and weird you might think we are!  Sick of throwing money away on rent for a run down apartment and not in a position to buy a house, we naturally decided to move into an rv.  Ok well maybe that's not a natural decision for most people.  Since Hubby got his new job and was commuting over an hour a day, we started looking at other living options.  We thought maybe we would move to the town his job is in... then we saw the rent prices and decided against it.  Somehow I got the idea that rv living would be an adventure and once I presented it to Hubby, he was thrilled!  We are now the proud owners of a used house on wheels.  

  We went to RV Outlet Mall first but the salesman was an a** hole.  When we told him we don't finance and were going to pay cash and were prepared to buy if we found something we liked in our budget, he told us to come back when we were serious and ready to buy.  Nobody pays cash for an rv.  We told him what our budget was and he showed us rvs double our price "so we could put that much cash down and finance the rest".  I think he got the point when he walked us to our truck with our debt free bumper stickers.

We then drove down the road to Crestview RV.  Our salesman was awesome!  Shout out to Gabriel!  We told him what our budget was and he thought it was awesome that we don't do debt.  He only showed us rvs in (and under) our budget.  When we found the one we wanted, he negotiated the out the door price to over $1100 less than the top of our budget.  We bought a 2006 Zinger and its definitely a fixer upper! 

This post shows all the before pictures so you can get an idea of what we are living in.  There is a master bedroom with a queen bed (when they say queen, they mean rv queen... our nice mattress only fits when we flip it sideways- more on that later).  The only "closets" are the cabinets in the pictures.  Then there is a living/dining/kitchen room all together.  The kitchen is teeny tiny but we will make it work (we did buy a new grill so we can cook outside).  The back room is a bunk room.  It has 4 bunk beds and a small cabinet/closet.  Technically the rv can sleep 8-10 people, or at least it could when we bought it.  

Since we brought it home, we have taken out the dinette and folding couch.  We have also removed 3 of the 4 bunks to make room for an office and storage.  I will post after pictures as we complete them.  Its tough to live and remodel/fix up the rv while working overtime..

We parked the rv at an awesome rv resort.  We are right on the river and Hubby loves to sneak down and go fishing.  Our "rent" is $300 which includes water, trash and the space.  We pay for the electric we use, which last month was only $60.  We are definitely saving money vs renting an apartment.  We factored in the cost of paying cash for the rv plus the space and we will break even after 1.5 years.  Anything after that is gravy on top for savings, and if we sell the rv, its pure profit.  So we need to live in the rv for at least 1.5 years!  Ill be posting the struggles and advantages of living in the rv as we go along.  

 What do you think?  Could you do it?