Stepping WAY Out Of The Box

**forHISglory** · 11-26-2007, 11:20 AM

I'd be interested in hearing what some of you creative frugal folks have done to simplify your lifestyle/save money that perhaps raised some eyebrows among your friends, famiy or neighbors. How did you get your idea? What did you do? Did it work? Was it worth stepping way way way out of the box? Here's our story: Hubby and I were teachers with a dream of being debt free. We had bought our first little bitty starter home for $19,000 in 1975. Sounds like a little now, but it was a huge debt step for us then. Three years later, we sold the house for $32,000, and began to build our dream solar home. This is where we began our grand experiment that raised some eyebrows. We researched for 2 years, studied building manuals, talked with builders about techniques, and then drew our own blueprints, based on an article we had seen in Mother Earth News. It was for an envelope house, and the major heat source was passive solar. As soon as school was out in May, we began building. Yep: WE. We did not hire a contractor or a builder. Can two people with no building experience build a house? Yes. Did we make mistakes? Yes. Would we do it again? Yes. We did contract out the basement foundation. But we learned to build walls, how to roof, lay flooring, do plumbing and electric. I built our kitchen cabinets, although it was from a kit. Every once in a while, we had to go back to experts and get advice. We knew what our limits were! We ended up with a 2500 sq. ft. house that has minimum heating and cooling costs. It cost us in total, including the 5 acre lot, $60,000. But that's not the only part of our huge step out of the box. We also talked a banker into giving us a loan to build a house in increments. We didn't have to build it turn-key. And we told the banker that we would have it all paid off in 5 years. So we built the shell, and moved into it. We had no interior walls at that point, no cabinetry, very little running water and electricity installed. We were back in school by that point, so we worked at night on the house, and each payday, we finished off a little bit more. People were not a bit shy in tellling us how crazy we were. One lady said she couldn't stand to live that way. It wasn't easy, for sure, but we pretended that we were just camping out, and that made it easier. Today our house has quadrupled in value. Yes, we paid it off in 5 years. The sacrifice was worth it. We stepped out of the conventional box, and landed on solid ground. How about you?

**DAAC3DEC** · 11-26-2007, 11:33 AM

I would love to do something like you did, way to go!!!!!!!!!!!!

**brenda67** · 11-26-2007, 11:50 AM

I think thats great...Do you have any children?

**brenda67** · 11-26-2007, 11:52 AM

Originally Posted by brenda67

I think thats great...Do you have any children?

Sorry... I just read you have a son. Did he help you also?.I bet he is a very frugal man today..

**forHISglory** · 11-26-2007, 12:03 PM

In answer to your question, we had one son and he was 2 years old when we built the house. Nothing like a 2 year old wanna be carpenter! Today he works in the building trades. Go figure....
But what about you all? What have you done that made others think you had fallen off the good-sense wagon? Why did you take this step?

**AmyMCGS** · 11-26-2007, 01:53 PM

WTG!

Originally Posted by forHISglory

But what about you all? What have you done that made others think you had fallen off the good-sense wagon? Why did you take this step?

As for us, I am being completely serious when I say that several family members raise their eyebrows and make snarky comments because we... get this... aren't in debt and we built (had it done) our house a few years ago. Our mortgage is our only debt. We do not beg money from family members and go into debt for fancy vacations, which is what the rest of that part of the family does. Seriously, one relative is about to declare bankruptcy, yet she went to several NASCAR races over the summer-- hello??

Along the same lines, the same family members make comments about me clothing the kids from Goodwill. They just don't get it that the reason we can afford this house is because we're frugal in every other area.

And yes, I realize that neither of those things are even worth talking about in this particular forum- most of you do them, too!

**powerfm1** · 11-26-2007, 02:06 PM

The best out of the box thing I did was move in with my two best friends and their daughters when I left my ex-husband. My oldest boy was living in Chicago and my daughter and my younger boy moved in with me. The other two women were just going through divorce at the same time.

We had a blast. The kids had known each other for years and the other women and I had been friends for many years and worked on the same political causes.

We cleaned house to Aretha Franklin, cooked dinner with the Pointer Sisters and generally giggled a lot.

Wonderful year. We still call their house the ancestral home, do holidays with them. These two women are two of my dearest friend (over 20 years).

Of course all three of us are considered odd by many people - that's okay by me. We all have our own drums.

**sdrjeolsen** · 11-26-2007, 02:12 PM

Just wanted to say I found your story facinating. I think you did great!

**cottageliving** · 11-26-2007, 06:10 PM

Two things I've done have raised eyebrows intitially, then most (not all) began to see the benefits of my ways.

1: When living in Seattle in the 1990s I went to college - my daughter was in elem then mid school. I was a host parent to Int'l students from numerous countries: 2-3 at a time. It was a life changing experience that I continued for 4.5 years.

2: I moved back to my hometown of Niagara Falls, NY with it's low home prices and bought a fixer-upper. I LOVE to renovate old houses and do most of the work myself (no elec or plumbing tho). People thought I was nuts. Not now.
I am thankful for the courage to lead the life I want for myself, and am doubly thankful that I found this site and all of you that are so supportive.

**Jamauk** · 11-26-2007, 09:59 PM

We haven't done anything yet - but in January we are taking a class from the Log Home Builders Association. Its a class about building your own log home - for a teensy tiny fraction of the price. After the class, we will begin looking for land and then we'll start building.

We have about $100,000 equity in our current home and we're figuring that'll be about a wash in what it'll cost us to build our log home (approx 2500 sq ft). We'd like to have about 20+ acres - so we're hoping to get it all done with a less than $150,000 mortgage.

Everytime we mention it to someone, they think we're crazy. I love that just because we aren't doing the conventional "in debt up to our eyeballs" life - everyone assumes we're nuts.

**latierra84** · 11-26-2007, 10:17 PM

Originally Posted by powerfm1

We cleaned house to Aretha Franklin, cooked dinner with the Pointer Sisters and generally giggled a lot.

wow. thats awesome!

**Momof3girls** · 11-27-2007, 01:01 AM

Love these ideas!
We are planning to make some big changes. We recently started homeschooling and will split our time between two places. LOTS of eyebrows raised about both of those ideas!

**britbunny** · 11-27-2007, 06:00 AM

Hi,

This isn't a huge huge thing, but it did raise many eyebrows with friends and family just due to our lifestyle before.

The first thing we did to save money was to move from where we'd been living (York) to a less desireable place so we could buy a house and have a lower cost of living. It meant losing a lot of "friends" but well, they obviously weren't friends in the first place if they were only bothered about our postcode. Obviously this saved us tens of thousands of pounds in housing costs. And also social costs as we used to be out and about every night and it dropped waaaaay down afterwards!

Secondly we gave up eating meat. Maybe not seeming like a huge deal but it has saved us loads of money. I used to be a real meat eater - anything from venison, duck, guinea fowl to zebra and camel, you name it, I'd scoff it! lol But when we first started on a budget I couldn't get into the swing of eating cheap rubbishy meat. So we bought organic but it was so expensive we cut it out. And we haven't looked back.

There is another added bonus to this one too, it helped us cut back on going out to eat too! I have never liked cheese and so many of the vegetarian options are cheese based a lot of the time it's hardly worth going out to eat. (I refuse to pay £8 for penne pasta with tomato sauce!).

We became debt free (other than the house) earlier this year and it feels great!

**TheRootedNomad** · 11-27-2007, 07:04 AM

I would say the two biggest things that we do that "raise eyebrows" of people we know are:

1) the cars my DH drives....they are always jalopys that are only good for the scrap yard once he's done with them. When we were just starting out people just flagged it with the fact that we were low income. Now, especially the people that work with DH, know he can "afford a car loan" and never quite understand him getting a thrill out of buying a $300 car, duct taping it together and running it into the ground over the next couple of years

2) We built a 400 foot extension onto our house (master bedroom bath) and have done all the work ourselves. It will finally be finished in the next week or two. Now, here's what they don't understand...It's taken us just over three years to complete. Mainly due to stopping progress when we didn't have cash, though frequently it was also because we didn't have time to work on it either. The eybrows...."Why not just get an equity loan and get it done?" Sorry guys, now we know it's ours.

**pammy** · 11-27-2007, 08:34 AM

We did two things recently that raise eyebrows of both friends and family.

1). We both left our good incomes. Dh was offered partnership in the company to stay, but we were done with the crazy, stressful, awful hours. Never being able to be together or plan things together isn't worth any amount they could have thrown at us. Currently we're living on about a third of what we were earning previously, but our needs are small and we have time together (which is priceless).

2). We purposely sold our 'nice home' in the 'nice neighborhood' with it's huge yard and 1800 sqft dream shop of dh's and was able to buy an old, smaller, fixer-upper house with cash in another state. I thought people were going to come at us with straight jackets. But it has no mortgage. We put our own blood, sweat, and tears into this old house and we just love it!

Big money with big houses just wasn't for us. It wasn't worth it to us. This isn't normal thinking to most the normal people out there. I'll happily live in my own box.