Save money now

The boys totally rocked their Odyssey of the Mind tournament. For a first year team with zero experience in the program from team members or coaches, they all did great! In fact, they did so great that they took first place in the state tournament!!!

The most stressful part for me was the trip to the tournament and back. It was a six hour round trip drive, and we had to be there at 8 am. That left us with three options for travel:

1) Go down the night before and stay in a hotel.

2) Throw the tent in the back of the car and find a KOA or other campground.

3) Wake up at 4:00 am and get on the road by 5:00am.

We opted for option number 3. The hotel was pretty much out of the question. A minimum of $70 most likely, even if we brought our own food. Camping is our normal way to handle these sort of things, but option 2 wasn’t going to happen. It’s still March and it was in the 20s last night, so still a bit cold. Especially since the boys needed to be well-rested for their tournament.

Instead, we loaded them in the car before dawn and let them sleep. My mom and dad joined us to keep me company on the ride, too. When they woke up an hour outside of town they hungrily scarfed down the homemade breakfast burritos (thanks Mom!) and fruit I had waiting on the back seat for them. We also brought our own lunch and drinks, along with a few road snacks.

The tournament ended with plenty of time to get back home by dark and dinner. And nope, no takeout Saturday night! I made dinner the night before so all we had to do was pop the loaf of barbecue chicken pinwheel bread in the oven to heat up, slice, and serve it with the homemade coleslaw. The entire event only cost $60 for gas!

Drew and I have been setting some pretty major goals for ourselves. Some may even call them unrealistic. But if I’ve learned one thing in life, few things are unrealistic.

Goal number one is to begin socking away 50 percent of our income. This will allow us to pay off our home, replace our roof and fix our fireplace (chimney needs rebuilt) all within the next six years. Once we do that, our living expenses will suddenly drop down to less than $18,000 a year for a pretty comfortable life.

Goal number two is to continue stashing all the extra cash for an additional five years (max), thus saving up $400,000. That’s how much we need to retire, following the 25 rule (Your annual living expenses times 25). Although we are self employed and don’t see retirement as an option we want to exercise currently, we may change our minds. Plus, we will be in our mid-40′s, the kids will be getting ready to embark on college and their own lives, and we may want to relax a bit more. The ability to retire early gives us more options, even if we decide not to follow them all.

Now these are ten year goal. A lot can happen in ten years. Increased income is likely, so we may be able to do all this even more quickly. I know how these things can snowball, we’ve been through it several times. Most recently when we bought our house.

I woke up one morning and was tired of renting. I wanted a forever home. We were barely clearing 20 grand a year for a family of four. After a few late night conversations, Drew and I began looking for ways to expand our income. Within a few months, my side work of freelance writing had blossomed into a fulltime gig with good pay, and Drew was selling more art. Over two years we saved up a sizable chunk of change for a down payment on our current home.

We probably could have begun successful freelance careers sooner, but we didn’t have the push of a major goal to get us out of the gate. I’ve seen this pattern in my life over and over. I’ll do just enough to get by until I have a goal, then I am able to achieve pretty remarkable things.

This goal is a tough one. Working the current numbers we come up about five years shy on the timetable. But, we still decided to keep them capped at 10 years because experience has taught us that we tend to rise to the challenge better when it’s more challenging. If it takes 12 years, we’ll survive just fine, but the goal is 10. The extra challenge makes it more likely that we’ll keep the goal in the forefront of our minds over the long haul, because there’s less room for mistakes.

What’s your goal setting method? Do you attend to achieve goals or do you give up?

The evenings are cold, crisp and clear — at least when the early spring rain clouds disperse. Although it’s still cold at night the temperatures are no longer arctic. We can survive outdoors for several hours before frozen fingers and toes drive us indoors for cocoa. We celebrated this week by heading to my son’s astronomy club’s dark site, a 40 minute drive from our home to the plains west of us.

I’m a big proponent of looking up. Look into the universe and you will see yourself looking back. You will see the past, since the light of some of those stars and distant galaxies has been travelling for decades (if not longer). We are made of the dust of those stars, so I look upon them as old friends, family, ancestors. We are a small part of the universe, but the universe is a large part of us.

When you get your first galaxy in the eyepiece, Andromeda is a good first target, you may be disappointed. It looks nothing like those long exposure, color enhanced Hubble pictures we are all so used to. But please, look a bit longer. It may just appear as a fuzzy light smear in the eyepiece, but it is so much more. The light from those 1 trillion stars in Andromeda have travelled 25 million years, and now that light is reflected back in your eyes to begin the journey anew.

25 million years ago the age of mammals was dawning. The first deer evolved, and hominids, our earliest ancestors, were still a distant dream that wouldn’t occur for another 18 million years. That light has fallen on distant worlds and travelled the cold reaches of space, all so you can see it right now.

My own little monkey looks at Andromeda and other wonders on these cold nights, and he becomes quiet. He smiles and looks at me. “Mom,” he whispers, because the night begs us to be quiet, “some people say the size of the universe makes them feel small and worthless. I think the universe should make us feel happy. We’re a part of all this,” he gestures at the expanse of the sky, “we’re made of star stuff, you know.”

We changed a lot up this year. In part because we had to. My eldest son is very bright, but he’s driven by literature and history. I know lit and history, being a language arts major. But my youngest is a math and science kid, and he’s advanced. Math is a game to him. We introduced addition with carrying in September, by December he was multiplying and dividing, and just this week he decided to figure out negative numbers on his own.

Previously, I pieced together a lot of our curriculum and kept it fairly lit-based. This year, I had to switch it up and bring in purchased curriculum just to keep up in math and science. Plus, my 12 year old is planning to start taking college classes in three years (GULP!), so he requested more difficult and challenging work.

All this to say, our days have become much more regimented. We actually school on a schedule now, and subjects are assigned to certain days and times. I have papers to grade, projects to help document, and the extracurriculars are through the roof! Their Odyssey of the Mind team has state competition in two weeks, astronomy club is pulling us out of our cozy home late into the night, and camping trips are quickly filling up our spring weekends.

But that’s okay. This mama’s head may be spinning, but the boys are learning, they’re happy, and I think I am finally challenging them at their level.