How Your Family Can Survive On A Single Income

My wife and I, by the grace of God, have gotten by for the last two years on only my income. This hasn't been easy and my wife has been tempted several times to look for a job but so far things have worked out. Many families today either can't or aren't willing to get by without both parents working, but it is possible by making some sacrifices and planning. There are of course many situations where a family cannot or does not want to get by on a single income, and I'm obviously not writing to those situations. I'm actually going to keep this brief and focused on one thing that we do to keep an affordable lifestyle on a single income: free furniture. I'll probably follow up with other posts as we go along.

Now, don't get me wrong. Not all furniture comes cheap. We bought a Sleep Number bed last year on a 16 month no interest plan on the hopes that our tax refund this year would pay for the bed. Our gamble paid off. We've also bought most of the kids' furniture from Ikea for a good price. When it comes to living room furniture, however, we seem to go through that very fast. Diapers leak, sippy cups spill, and of course the kids want to jump on the couch as much as they can. Our last couch and chair had those buttons that held the upholstery in place, and the kids pulled most of those buttons off. Needless to say, after about six months, our last couch wasn't doing very well.

Our last couch came from Craig's List. My wife scans through there at least once a week to see what interesting things she can find. I got my now non-functional iBook from Craig's List for $100. I think the hard drive is dead, but I don't have time right now to check it. Since Apple doesn't ship their operating systems with a decent disk utility, I'm going to have to put that hard drive in another laptop and use Windows XP to examine the disk.

One day last week, my wife's sister was driving and called to say that she saw a couch on the side of the road. My wife sent me back with her sister to pick the couch up in our Windstar. You can fit a lot in a Windstar. I took the couch and went back later for the chair. The couch is in really good shape and is much more comfortable than our last couch.

When children are young and budgets are short, consider getting your furniture cheap or free. You'd be amazed at how much money you can save that way.