According to Houzz, two in every five homeowners admitted to using their bathroom to relax. You shouldn’t have to go to your guest bathroom to find a quiet place in your home. If you’ve been thinking of transforming your backyard into your own private oasis for your family, but you’ve been worried you couldn’t afford it, no worries! Here are a few ways you can transform your landscaping and boost your curb appeal all on a budget.

Raise Your Flower Bed

One great way to improve curb appeal on your family home is with flowers. Flowers add beauty and fragrance. However, raising the flower bed can give you these benefits while also creating some more contrast between the parts of your yard. As you plan to raise your flower bed, consider the different materials you could use. If you need to go with the cheapest option, that’s alright. But if you can spend just a little bit more money, consider going with solid wood. Solid wood is more environmentally friendly and sustainable than other popular landscaping materials. It also makes the flower beds more attractive.

Plant a Functional Garden

Your garden can serve both an aesthetic and practical purpose. Consider a vegetable garden that will feed your family. Plant things like herbs, fruits, and vegetables in your yard. They’re often very beautiful, with foliage and flowers that are perfect for decorating. Then, once the edible parts are ripe, you’ll also be able to provide fresh, healthy food. If you’ve never gardened before, start simple and try a few plants that you know you like. Then experiment each year as you build your garden. It will add color and personality to your yard, boosting your curb appeal.

DIY a Walkway

Having a walkway from the sidewalk to your door is a simple way to improve your curb appeal. However, getting it done by a professional can be expensive. Look into DIY options to set it up yourself. Using paving stones can create a whimsical, yet useful walkway without having to spend hundreds of dollars on supplies. If you keep it simple, you can get very good results this way. It will not only serve a practical purpose, but it will also add some uniqueness and contrast to your yard.

Add Lighting

Landscape lighting is beautiful, adding a warm glow to the yard in the evening and at night. While there are expensive options available, you can also get great results cheaply. Use solar pegs to illuminate your walkway. These are often inexpensive and can also serve a practical purpose by guiding visitors toward the safe ways to your front door. Look into string lights, as well. With the right lighting, you can make your yard look cozy, exciting, or both at the same time!

Hang Window Boxes

By hanging window boxes and filling them with flowers, you can improve the appearance of your home’s exterior without spending a lot of money. Flowers add a splash of color to the front of your house, making it look cheerful to anybody passing by. You can do a number of different things with your flower boxes. Plant identical flowers in each one to keep a neat theme going. Or plant various flowers together to get a rainbow of colors in your home.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to improve your home’s curb appeal. With a few cheap purchases and some extra work on your part, you can have a home and yard that look expensive and comfortable. This can help if you’re planning to sell your house, but it can also just make it a more enjoyable place to live.

If you have young kids, you understand that it can be challenging to find a job that meets your needs and the needs of your family. Fortunately, a growing number of careers are becoming remote. Here are some great remote jobs with flexible hours that are ideal for parents.

1. IT Support

More and more people are setting up a presence online. With this influx comes an increased risk of cyber-attacks and therefore the need for IT experts who can help individuals and businesses stay safe from the risks that come with being online. Even with the danger aside, most people are not particularly good at working online and so they may need assistance from time to time. This means that if you are competent or interested in IT, you may find an amazing remote job if you take some training or leverage any that you may already have to begin with. The gaming industry, which is the industry that is the second most targeted for Layer 7 DDoS attacks, may especially need IT to support so this is one of the places you could start looking for an opportunity.

2. Social Media Specialist

As different businesses strive for a market share on the digital space, they are starting to see the weight that social media has and the benefits that they can get from it. This means that there are many opportunities for social media specialists who are needed to handle the social media presence of these different businesses. If you are passionate about helping a business grow and you know a thing or two about trends and strategies, you may find a place in the world of social media management.

3. Customer Service Representative

This is another great opportunity for parents who want to work while taking care of their children. It entails handling a business’s customers and responding to their complaints or guiding them to a solution in a way that maintains a good reputation for the business in question. To serve in this capacity, therefore, you must have great communication and be willing to learn about the business you will be assisting. This could entail, for example, having information about a dedicated server if you will work for a company in the computer and IT industry.

4. Online Tutor

For parents who have extensive knowledge in a particular field and a willingness to help others learn, becoming an online tutor is a potential job. Simply organize lessons into tangible parts and come up with an outline for coursework. You can then sell this material as a tutorial or offer online classes in real time that cater to people from anywhere in the world. This is especially important to think about when you consider the pandemic that rocked the world in 2020 and whose effects are still being felt. At the end of it all, you will have helped people improve and enjoy the gratification of getting paid for a job well done.

5. Writer

Finally, if you have a way with words and would like to get paid for them, think about becoming a writer. There are different ways in which you can make a living writing. These include looking for clients who want content for their online spaces, working for pay from companies that offer writing gigs, and creating a blog to offer information to the public. For the last, you could pair the blog with a service or product for sale and also sell advertising space to businesses and individuals willing to buy it.

Consider these five remote job opportunities that you could look into and keep in mind that while you may have to start at the bottom, growth is possible. Soon enough, you could make your remote job a full-time opportunity and never have to work a job to which you have to commute to again.

We’ve made some awesome progress financially in the past few weeks, despite some hefty bills being thrown our way. We had an unexpected $630 insurance payment due. In the midst of everything, we’d missed a payment and the insurer demanded we pay the remainder of the policy to stay covered (ugh). However, having to attack that emergency got us thinking more about saving.

So, we’ve got a solid plan to get our finances back on track within the next month or so and then (finally) be able to start really attacking our debt. Here’s an update…

1. Saving $1,000 in a Month

Between October 15 and November 15 we have set a goal of saving a $1,000 emergency fund. This will make things like the emergency car insurance issue no big deal if they come up again in the future. It will also provide us with a bit of peace-of-mind and motivate us to get the rest of our finances in order.

2. Paying Off One of Our Debt Items in October

In October we will have the first of our debts completely paid off! When we moved out of the motel about a year and a half ago, we had nothing (like literally only the clothes on our backs). We opened up an account at Rent-a-Center to have a TV stand, TV, bed, and bed frame. Everything else we were able to be gifted or thrifted ourselves.

Small rant: Do NOT go to Rent-a-Center for anything. You’ll wind up paying at least 2x the amount your items are actually worth. You can just save for what you need or want.

However, we will have the last payment of $203 made on October 15! That will be about $200 in savings each month by simply having that paid off.

3. Snowballing Debt

After we’ve gotten our $1,000 in the bank and the last payment made to Rent-a-Center, we have a plan to snowball our debt (hard). Both of us have been looking for additional sources of income to help pay down our debt as well as pad our savings. We will be making large payments on debt starting in mid-November after we’ve met our savings goal. We anticipate being able to pay off our credit cards before the new year.

Right now, we are focused on looking forward. Both of us are excited about getting money saved, snowballing our debt, and climbing out from underneath our current financial situation. I can’t wait to keep you all updated here.

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Our daughter is turning one next week and it has had me in a reflective mood. I’ve been thinking about how much has changed over the past year. We became parents and, every day since then, we’ve gotten to watch our little one grow. A lot has changed financially as well.

Last year, I wrote a blog post delving into the true cost of having a baby. IVF and fertility treatments set aside, it costs tens of thousands of dollars to deliver a baby. Then, you have to consider the costs of the first year. So, does my post from last year still hold true?

Labor & Delivery Cost

I updated the blog when we received the bill from labor and delivery. When all was said and done, my out-of-pocket cost wasn’t that much. My insurance covered most of the medications and procedures leading up to and during delivery. For many people, this is not the case and they wind up having a bill in their mailbox for $30K two months after giving birth.

Our Monthly Budget Changes

The biggest change for our family has been the increased monthly spending. Specifically, our food and home costs have increased. There is a monthly clothing budget that wasn’t there before because kids grow so fast. Other additions to the budget have included formula ($300/month), diapers ($70/month), wipes ($15/month), plus all the extra food that seems to be consumed in the house these days.

Not to mention, all three of us are home every day. So, the electric and gas bills are higher than they used to be. In truth, this has been the true cost of adding a child to our family. We’ve seen more monthly budget changes than anything else.

Thankfully, my husband and I are both working full-time and can meet the changes to our finances as they come. We’ve even had the cash to cover several emergencies more recently. Our dryer quit and we had to pay $390 for a new one to be installed. We had to pay landscapers to take care of a bush on our property ($250). No worries, our EF saved us! (Focusing on saving during pregnancy and since the birth of our daughter was definitely the right move for us.)

Being ‘Prepared’ For Children

My mom always told me that if I waited “until I was ready” to have children that I’d never have any. That’s the truth! If you want to have children, it is a good idea to make sure you have a relatively stable financial life. However, don’t think you have to have surpluses and everything perfectly in place before starting your family. Because, in all honesty, things will never be 100% perfect. You’ll have to adjust to your new baby’s needs and your own needs as well.

You can prepare and never actually be prepared for having kids.

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It is super easy to look at your financial situation and feel a bit down, especially when you’ve been in a situation like we have been. There’s no doubt that most of our finances haven’t been easy in the past two years or so. However, we’ve finally gotten a bit of a break and I’m feeling extremely optimistic. So, here’s the latest on how we’re one account down, employed, and feeling awesome!

Paid Off: One Account Down

The first piece of awesome news is that we have paid Rent-A-Center off completely! If you’ve ever bought anything from them, you know what a terrible mistake it is (stay tuned for a Rent-A-Center hate letter). Obviously, we won’t be buying anything from them again, ever.

We made our last payment of $205 on Monday and were ecstatic. That will save us nearly $300 per month that we can now put towards our heftier debts.

New Job!

Another way we’ll be able to save more next month and in the months to come is that we no longer have to pay storage on my other half’s tools and toolbox ($50 per month).

He starts his new job on Monday! It is a substantial pay raise from his previous position and, of course, after being out of work since June, it will be a huge help financially. More importantly, he will be doing what he loves again. So, things will be getting back to normal around here pretty soon.

Making Plans

Almost immediately after getting the great news and the progress of being one account down, we started excitedly talking about being able to pay off other items at a quicker pace. Our current credit card debt is sitting at about $2,000 collectively, which we aim to have paid off by the end of the year.

Not to mention, I’ll begin making payments on my student loans again in December and, once those credit cards are paid off, I’ll be able to through more money on my car loan each month as well. On top of all of that, we also will have Drew’s car paid off pretty soon ($650 left on the loan).

However, we both realized that maintaining focus at this time will be important. Although we are both ecstatic with the new job and being able to get back on top of things financially, we are still focusing on small goals to make sure we stay on track. As you may have read, our first goal is to get $1K saved. We should have that done by mid-November. Then we will really be able to start making serious progress on our debt free journey.

Do you have any advice for us? If so, I’d love to hear about your progress on your personal financial journey!

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