Category Archives: Life

Providing for your kids does not have to be expensive

As my wife is getting closer and closer to her due date we are starting to get really excited about meeting our new little guy. We are packing all our hospital bags and making sure everyone knows “the plan” when the day finally arrives. We are also preparing ourselves mentally for the long months with lack of sleep. One thing we are not particularly worried about is the additional costs of having another baby.

In fact I can’t wait to take my two months of paternity leave when my son is born! I will be able to spend time with both of them during the summer months and help my wife with the first 2 months of having our 2 boys under 2.

How are we able to afford a second baby without any worries? It’s because we make boat loads of money of course!

OK, just kidding, I’m guessing you already know that I turn to the income side of the equation only as a last resort. In fact, my wife has only been working part-time since returning from maternity leave after our first son was born, and I took a sizeable pay cut in order to have a job within a shorter commuting distance.

Yet, we bought a new house last year and I took last July and August off to spend with my son. We’ve even managed to somehow increase our total savings over the course of last year. How is that possible?

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words so I’ve decided to show you guys what we’ve been able to give my son at little to no cost.

Vintage Glider Chair

Cost: $0
Comparable Retail Cost: $400 – $1,100 (or maybe infinity)

Vintage glider

Gliders are EXPENSIVE!!! You can really spend a ridiculous amount of money on these.

This baby found its way into our hands through our awesome friends who saw a neighbour throw it out on the curb. It squeaked a bit initially but we WD40’ed it and cleaned the crap out of it, while my mother in-law sewed up those cushion covers. Since she’s retired she loves little projects like this. This glider would command a serious price at a “Vintage” furniture store in a hipster neighbourhood.

Chest

Cost: $0
Comparable Retail Cost: $200 – $1,700 (I’m just googling West Elm <insert item> to get the highest possible price)

Awesome free chest

This is where we keep our baby supplies. You can see there is a little work that needs to be done on the bottom drawer to make it look completely respectable, however, I think it has a very nice modern look. We inherited this from my brother in law as we bought our in-laws house and he eventually moved out. Thanks Andrew!

The best part is it has a friend…

Dresser with mirror

Cost: $0
Comparable Retail Cost: $500 – $2000

Free dresser with mirror!

These drawers are where we keep the majority of my sons clothes. Again thank you uncle Andrew! This piece is actually in an even better shape than the chest. Score!

Crib

Cost: $100
Comparable Retail Cost: $80 – $1,100

This is the most expensive thing I’m going to list in this post. It was bought for a crazy $100 on sale at IKEA. It wasn’t even the cheapest IKEA crib. Horrors! However, we are going to use it for at least 4 years, and we really wanted to spoil ourselves with a brand new crib. So there!

As I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog my philosophy is not to cut costs down to the bone. Sure we could have found a cheaper second hand crib, but we could have also spent $1,100 on some hard-wood Pottery Barn monstrosity. Because, you see, it’s worth the $1,100 because it’s going to last forever and even has storage! Never mind that your kids are not some baby vampires that will stay 2 years old for eternity. Or maybe they are and that’s why this crib even exists?

Toddler Tricycle

Cost: $5 (including delivery to my door!)
Comparable Retail Cost: $60 – $160

One of my sons first words was car. It wasn’t dada or mama or please or thank you. It was CAR!

He absolutely loves anything on wheels that makes a vroom sound or that he can mount. Leads to some pretty funny scenes when he tries to ride his one-foot long fire truck.

I was biking down to the local Shoppers Drug Mart when I saw this beauty sitting on the curb at a garage sale. I didn’t stop because even if I liked it I couldn’t strap it to my back and bike it home. However, on the way back I stopped and inquired about the price. I immediately liked the home owner, good guy, and after a little banter he answered “Whatever you think is good, we just want it gone”. I told him I can give him $5 but I’ll have to go home and drive over first. “We’re going to be packing up soon. Do you live nearby? My car is right there, would you like me to drop it off at your house?” he inquired. How could I say no? A $5 tricycle with delivery included!

Toddler Wagon

Cost: $0
Comparable Retail Cost: $70- $200

Toddler Wagon

I take my son everywhere in this thing. I think it’s his second favourite form of transportation after my coupe. It makes getting to all 4 neighbourhood playgrounds a breeze without having to worry about him falling out, and it gives me some exercise in the process. Who needs a gym membership?

Yes, I actually walk to the playgrounds, I was shocked to discover this is not the normal thing to do around here. People I spoke with were apparently equally shocked that I actually walked the 5 minute walk rather than take out my car to get there. One conversation went like this:

Them – “You took the wagon here?”
Me – “Yes, he loves riding in it!”
Them – “So you must live near the playground?”
Me – “Yes, not too far away, on street abc, where do you live?”
Them in an awkward tone – “I live on cba street” – which happens to be closer than my house
Me – “Ahh I see”

More awkwardness and eye contact avoidance happens later when they take their kids into their gigantic SUV to drive them home.

OK sorry about the rant. Where was I again? Oh right, the wagon came to us courtesy of my wonderful frugal parents who overheard a neighbour saying they wanted to throw it out.

Playroom full of toys

Cost: $0
Comparable Retail Cost: ????

Playroom full of toys

Nothing you see in the screenshot above cost us any money. Some of these toys are old toys that my wife and my brother in-law used to play with as kids. Other toys are gifts from family and friends, and often things that their own kids have grown out of. There is one particular item that deserves extra special mention though.

Matthews Playhouse

Cost: $0
Comparable Retail Cost: $150 – $400

This piece of art is truly magnificent! It is the brain child of my extremely talented sister and my ridiculously frugal dad. The whole thing is made of discarded cardboard boxes which means its light and therefore very safe. My boy loves to run in and out of it and I can’t count how many times he has smacked his head right on the top of the door way. Thank goodness its cardboard!

I’m lucky because my sister is an amazing artist which you can see through the attention to detail and level of personalization of this play house. It is not something everyone can do but it is something that we are taking full advantage off.

Thank you Ciocia Sylvia and Dziadek Janusz!

Note: If you have any art or graphic design work you need done don’t hesitate to contact sylviat.design@gmail.com for a quote!

What does this all add up to?

Let’s do some quick math here, this is after all a personal finance blog.

Our total cost for all 7 items: $100
Comparable retail cost – Low end: $1,460
Comparable retail cost – High end: $6,600

Overall savings: $1,360 to $6,500

My personal feeling is that most people fit somewhere in the middle of the above range. They buy some things high end, some low end and most mid-range. This means we saved approx. $2,500 over the average family on just these 7 items!

If we invest this $2,500 into the stock market at the average 10% total return for 25 years we will have $27,000 more in our retirement account for virtually nothing!

Obviously these items are not all the costs associated with having a child. The post would be much too long if I tried to list everything we saved money on. It’s the right mental approach when making purchasing choices across the board that makes the big difference.

The thing is we are not even actively trying to be frugal. We are not going out of our way to clip coupons or scour garage sales or check every flyer for a sale. You could do much better than us if you did! All we do is take advantage of all the opportunities that fate provides us with instead of passing them up for silly superficial reasons.

You can say were lucky to have awesome friends to pick up the glider for us, to have a brother in-law who decided to leave his furniture behind, or to have such a talented sister. I agree completely! Yes, we’re lucky, but we try to take advantage of all the opportunities we are presented with. Have you grabbed a hold of and taken advantage of all the opportunities you’ve been presented with?

Look around you and try not to get tunnel vision as to what is you need to get. When it comes to chance there are the things you can control and the things you can’t. You cannot control what opportunities will present themselves. What exact brand or type of item will become available to you free or at a ridiculous discount. I could have easily decided that my brother-in-laws furniture wasn’t quite the right color or style and purchased an entire new baby room furniture set. What you can control is whether you take advantage of the opportunities that do present themselves to you.

Focusing on the part that you can control, rather than worrying about what you can’t, applies equally well to savings money on kids items as it does to everything else in life.

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Choosing to stop living paycheque to paycheque

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A friend messaged me recently after seeing some of my articles to tell me that, while interesting, the advice is not something he can practically use. In his particular case this is absolutely true. I spend most of my time on this blog discussing how to make better financial choices with whatever existing income stream you might already have. This post is a bit different in that I want to make clear there are cases where it really is impossible to save without fixing the income part first. Let’s start with a little background on myself.

I grew up in a government subsidized building with at least one of my parents unemployed a large percentage of the time. The building was a new one and it was one of the first to be built in a residential home area as part of a government initiative to integrate us “poor people” into middle class society. The thing is I can’t with good faith complain about the living conditions. Sure we did not have a dishwasher, or even a washing machine, and you can forget about a dryer. OK, so once I did wake up to a bomb squad SWAT team knocking down the door to a unit on the floor above me. However, whatever was provided worked well, and it wasn’t a big problem to take your dirty clothes to the laundromat downstairs in the building. There were 3 bedrooms so me and my sister did not need to share a room and the square footage was adequate enough to fit a dining table, sitting area and a TV in the living room. Everything one could possibly need, what would be considered luxury living in the vast majority of the world, and yet most people in Canada would thumb their nose at this as inadequate. Most importantly the building was kept clean and well maintained and the rent was very affordable.

While my friends were getting driven around to hockey games and got their parents to buy them the newest snowboard and ski equipment I was working a paper route to pay for mine. I bought my own baseball glove and paid the league fee myself to join a baseball league. The skis I learned to ski on were from play-it-again sports and were over 2 meters long with old style straps instead of brakes. Those of you that ski will recognize how ridiculously difficult it was to learn on these things!

Once when I told a friend the story of how I bought my own equipment and paid my own fees she remarked as to how sad that is. It caught me by surprise, I’ve never though of it as sad, and I don’t regret any of it today. The lessons I learned during those formative years are the reason why I am the person I am today and I wouldn’t change any of it. I may have had horrible ski equipment but I still made the ski team, and once I got better skis, I was actually able to ski far better than if I had gotten high end equipment to start with.

Once it was time to choose a university to go to I made sure that the school I chose had a co-op program. I knew I could not take any money from my parents as they were already tight as it was. I applied and got some student loans to get me through the first 2 semesters but after that the school was paid for from my own pocket and some bursaries I was able to dig up. Sure I couldn’t go party as much as some other kids and I had to actually hold down a part-time job. Is that such a bad thing? I don’t believe it is and once again the lessons I learned were invaluable. In addition feeling the cost of that education in my own pocket, I never took it for granted, which made me work harder to make sure it wasn’t a waste. I even got into credit card trouble one semester and had to live on bread and instant noodle soup for the last few weeks of the term to make the money last. This taught me the danger of overusing high rate credit and I paid off the entire card through my co-op term earnings over the summer.

I know many of you want to give “more than I had” to your kids, but the fact is I believe my parents helped me a great deal despite not giving me much monetary support. They gave me a free place to live when I was working co-op terms in Toronto and they set the example of how to live on very little income. They helped me understand what was essential and what was just fluff and I thank them for this every day.

I want to emphasize that this entire time I NEVER felt like I was poor. I guess at some level I knew that my friends driving expensive cars and buying expensive toys without actually working were “wealthier” than me but it never bothered me in the least. I didn’t feel inferior to them or bitter like so many other people in my situation would and that inadvertently helped me keep these people as friends. No one likes an envious person and jealousy is a quick way to kill any friendship. I again credit my parents for this and the fact that they instilled values in me that raise personal character, humility and intelligence above material wealth.

I am able to afford some more spoils these days and I do indulge but I make these choices knowing they are choices and not necessities. I know I can live on far less than I do currently I just choose not to and I make sure my finances are balanced without short changing my future. It is this understanding of it being a choice that I believe is the key to achieving financial Independence rather than just pure frugality.

What does all this have to do with the title of this post?

The friend I referenced at the beginning of my post truly does not have a choice. He makes far less than the 70K median family income in Toronto and has children to raise while his wife can’t work. Yet he gets through every month and is working hard on improving his situation. If you are in this situation it’s incredibly tough and your first step is to find a better source of income with saving money a far distant priority. I don’t want anyone out there thinking I’m making light of a truly difficult situation such as his. However, for most families at or above the median family income, living paycheque to paycheque likely is a choice.

I’m not advocating extreme frugality here such as that advocated by some other bloggers who live on 25K in total family costs a year (it IS possible, just google it!). I am advocating taking a serious look at the discretionary choices being made and not ending up like this now famous house-poor couple. If you are in this type of situation you need to get angry. You need to say average or adequate is not enough. Just because everyone else seems to be living paycheque to paycheque too does not mean you can’t do better. Average choices, by definition, can (at best) only lead to average outcomes.

If you own a house that you mostly don’t use because there are only 2 of you remember that’s a choice you made. If you decide to buy in the “hottest” area of the city that is also a choice. Private pre-school? a choice, brand new car, a choice. Buying a second car, a choice. Living in a place with no public transit access, a choice. Driving everywhere instead of walking or biking, a choice. Doing that second degree or pursuing a masters, a choice. Going shopping at that artisan organic grocery store, a choice. Buying a new wardrobe every season because the old stuff is out of style, a choice. Redoing your kitchen to the latest style and installing exotic marble counter-tops? Most definitely a choice.

None of these choices are bad in and of themselves. There are real reasons why people make these decisions and I do respect those reasons. There are benefits to making many of these choices, but are those benefits worth the cost to their future? Not in all cases will the answer be “no” as peoples’ preferences and values are a personal thing. The key is to do the calculation and then decide which of these choices are most important to you and which and how many can you afford without jeopardizing your future.

I think I needed to outline my background before being taken seriously when I say the following: once both costs and benefits are analysed there are probably some relatively painless CHOICES that most people can make to save money. They might not seem like choices, but this is where I hope this blog can help.

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The Unassuming Banker

Category Archives: Life

Providing for your kids does not have to be expensive

Choosing to stop living paycheque to paycheque

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