A couple days ago I noticed someone had found my blog by Googling the phrase “i would buy my kids clothes anywhere but the thrift store”. I’m sure they were sorely disappointed.
But my friend Kelley posted this video link of a TED talk and I thought it was pretty interesting.
I’m not sure I would be showing pictures of my underwear to the audience, and while her style is definitely different than mine I’m sure any one of us could accomplish the same thing.
I LOVE, love, love to read. I have for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories of going to the public library and coming home with stacks of books.
Like most of my life, I tend to do reading at double-speed. I can usually get through a 300 page novel in about 5-6 hours.
It’s a blessing and a curse.
It rocks because I can get a lot more reading in.
On the other hand there are certain authors that I know once I start one of their books, my head will not be hitting the pillow until it’s done. Karen Kingsbury is one. Francine Rivers would be another except for her books are sometimes 600 pages so I have to cry “uncle” and give them 2 days.
Like Monday, I downloaded Karen’s new book “Learning” on my Kindle app before I took the girls to music lessons. Got an hour of reading done then. Came home – work, dinner (during which I read since the kids were watching a movie), clean up, kids to bed and then read….until 2:15 a.m. It was 1 a.m. before I even realized the time and at that point I knew I was too close to the end to put it down.
If you’re like me, and you love to read, I thought I’d share some of my best money-saving tips for book-lovers.
1. The library – this should go without saying. These day,s if there’s a certain book I want I can get online, request it to be sent to the nearest branch and they notify me when it’s there waiting for me. The downside is you have to be organized and keep track of due dates. I try to enter them on my calendar as soon as I get home with an email reminder a couple days before.
2. Thrift stores – they are a treasure trove of used books and are usually a buck or two at the most. Some stores have “Buy 5, get 1 free” and a lot of thrift stores have one day a month where everything is 50% off. Garage sales are good too although the selection is usually much smaller. The catch is, don’t buy it unless you know you’re going to read it. Even at $1, it’s wasted money if you don’t read it.
3. Paperbackswap.com – Someone told me about this site a few years ago. Create a free account, then gather all your books you no longer need and post them. It’s super quick using the ISBN. When someone wants one of your books you get notified and have a link to print a mailing label for them. You pay the postage to send the book media mail (usually $2.40-$3.25). When they get online and mark it received, you get a credit. With your credits you can go and request books from other users. All the books are 1 credit so it’s simple. You can also buy credits but that’s not quite as cost-efficient. Honestly I prefer e-books now (less clutter) but I still use this site for the kids (especially as rewards) and the occasional book that I want to read and know I can pass on or repost.
4. Booksneeze.com – If you have a blog and like to write reviews of the books you read, check out Booksneeze. They have certain titles available that they will send you for free in exchange for an honest review on your blog. There is a limit to how many they will send you until you’ve reviewed the ones you have. There are quite a few Christian books and they now have some e-books.
5. Amazon free e-books – Amazon always has ebooks available for free (see the list in the right column). It’s an ever-changing list and I try to check it once a week. It’s hit or miss. There’s always a few classics on there, inevitably some sort of vampire book, and at least a couple smutty romance novels that I skip over. But I have also hit the jackpot with Christian chick lit and downloaded a dozen or more books in a week. I’ve gotten stuff from Gary Smalley, Francine Rivers, Karen Kingsbury, etc. If you have an RSS Reader add this feed to your list (www.amazon.com/gp/rss/top-free/digital-text/154606011) PLUS Amazon has now added a Kindle lending option (not on all books) so you can take advantage of this with sites like BookLending.com
6. Buy used online – Of course there’s site like half.com and Amazon’s used book listing as well.
Of course there is also the good old fashioned “pass it around” option – trade books with friends.
Do you have any great tips for not spending a lot of money on books?
I didn’t get time to talk about it on the radio yesterday, and I know people are wondering how we paid for OUR adoption.
As I said, it cost us about $28,000 to adopt both kids, including travel (2 tickets round trip + 2 tickets one-way home; this was before Ethiopia was a 2 trip country).
We didn’t start down this road without a plan. First, we had approximately $10,000 in savings. Then, as I mentioned, we had just finished paying off our house around the time we started the process.
For the last 2 1/2 years we had been throwing every extra penny we had at the mortgage – to the tune of about $2,200 a month. With it paid off, we could use that money for the adoption. We estimated that the process was going to take us 6-9 months (it was actually 12) so that would mean $13-19,000. Depending on the time frame we knew we might need to come up with a few extra thousand dollars but knew that we could do that pretty easily with some belt-tightening and fundraising.
That was the PLAN.
But, well, God had OTHER plans. About 2 months into the process Mark left his job. Probably seems like a totally crazy thing, but we knew it was what God wanted him to do. On the one hand I was working again and making enough money to support us (thankfully we didn’t have many bills now). On the other hand that extra $13-19k was not going to be there.
And I will admit, I fell off the bandwagon. I said “well, if we have to take out an interest-free adoption loan, we’ll just pay it off as soon as we can”. (Hangs head in shame.) But that didn’t sit right with us. And then God used Dave Ramsey to speak incredible truth into my life once again. (You can read about that here.) And so we renewed our commitment to do this adoption debt-free. It just meant God was going to have to show up.
And we were going to have to work hard.
We didn’t get any anonymous $5,000 checks in the mail and to be honest, this little list is an approximation of how we paid for it. All I know is that EVERY time we needed to write a check (because thankfully the costs are spread out), we had the money.
Savings $10,000
Budget tightening and savings during process $3k
Severance package (TOTALLY not expected since Mark resigned) $4k
Garage sale $2,300
Mark selling stuff on ebay $2k
Julie’s freelance income (God brought a ton of jobs) $6k
We were down to the wire with the last $3k we needed for travel. We had said early on that one thing we could do, was sell Mark’s car. He worked from home and we knew that we could get along with one car until we could save up cash to buy a replacement. His older Toyota Camry (because we only drive paid-for cars) was worth about $4-5k. But God pulled off a miracle at the last little bit and gave us exactly the $3k we needed from an unexpected source.
This is just OUR story. There are so many more stories of people who have done this all kinds of different ways. Some of them have started with NOTHING saved and God has still showed up big time.
It’s not easy. Debt is always going to SEEM like the easy way out. But if you are willing to work at it, and make some sacrifices, it can be done!