Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

New Addition to the Beating Broke Family

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Things have been a bit hectic around here over the last week or two. We had a baby!  Surprise.  I seriously realized after she was born that I hadn’t even mentioned the fact that we were expecting on here.  I guess when it’s the third child, the excitement level and having to tell the whole world aren’t as high.  🙁  So, sorry about that.

We’re Pregnant!

Better late than never, right?  Never mind that it’s close to 11 months later.  Our little baby is now a little over a week old.  Insert cute picture of infant here:

LO

If there’s one thing that we’ve noticed with the third child is that it’s so much different than the first two.  With the first one, we did the typical new parent thing and bought every little gadget and gizmo that all the ads tell you that you need to have.  We had so many clothes, diapers, and formula that we could have opened up our own infant store.  With the second one, we already had a bunch of the gadgets and furniture, so it was cheaper.  Plus, we’d already done this once, and knew what we thought we needed.  We only bought the stuff that we thought we needed.

The third child is a totally different thing.  We’ve done this a couple times, but the last one was 5 years ago.  We’d thrown out most of the furniture, car seats, and most of the toys.  We’d also given away most of the other stuff we had.  But, instead of going out and immediately re-buying all that stuff again, we did it the cheap way.  Some friends of ours recently had a child, so we have borrowed a lot of the gadgets.  Car seats, swings, etc all are  from them.  Another friend of ours recently had a baby that had conveniently just grown out of her newborn clothes.  We had an instant closet full of clothes for our baby. There are some other things that we had to go out and buy, but our costs for new things has been pretty minimal.

Of course, there’s no level of borrowing or purchasing that will get us full nights sleep right now. 🙂

Thinking back, we were early to the baby-making game among our friends.  Borrowing stuff, and receiving hand-me-downs wasn’t really possible with the first two.  I’m glad it is possible here.  I highly encourage you to find as much stuff to borrow if you’ve got friends that have kids.  And it helps if you’ve got friends that have recently had babies too.  Especially when they’re ready to get rid of the boxes of clothes that they’ve gathered.

How do you help make baby cheaper?

 

 

I Quit My Job: Where I Went Wrong

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I tried, through my previous posts, to adequately cover the reasoning, and process, of quitting my job.  One thing that I didn’t cover, however, was the mistakes I made along the way.  I think that, partially, I couldn’t because I hadn’t had enough time to ruminate on them.  I also think that I couldn’t because I didn’t want to expose my weaknesses.  Now, I’ve had time to think about it, and I think I can easily identify the things that I would do differently should I have the opportunity to try again.  Maybe they aren’t all mistakes (I don’t count some of them that way).

Quitting Your Job The Right Way

One of the biggest changes I would likely have made would have been to quit the right way.  The decision I made, while necessary, was made quickly (over two days), and without much fore-planning.  Part of the motivation was that I had wanted out of the job for quite some time.  How much I wanted out wasn’t really clear until after I was out.  In hindsight, I should have started making moves well before I did.  Unfortunately, I was mired in the comfort of a position that I had held for over seven years.  Lesson learned: comfort is nice, but freedom is nicer.

Have a Full Plan B

Because of the hastiness of my departure from my position, I didn’t have a full plan B.  I had no idea where the money was coming from to even partially replace my income.  What income I had wasn’t dependable.  In a way, I was smart enough to at least get a part-time job.  But, without a full plan B, I think it was likely doomed to fail.

Wrong Way

Get After IT

This is probably the biggest mistake I made through the whole ordeal.  I quit my job, without a plan B, and then didn’t get after it nearly as much as I could have.  I wanted to focus entirely on my blogs and websites and grow them to at least a part-time income.  I severely underestimated the time it would take to do so, and should have spread my roots a bit and taken on other small projects to fill in dead time, and especially, fill in dead income spots.  Towards the end of this round of self-employment, I started to realize that I needed to pick up my game, but by then it was too little, too late.

Have an Exit Plan

Nobody likes to think that they are going to fail.  Just like nobody likes to think that they are going to get into a car accident or die, but we still buy car insurance and life insurance anyways.  While you can’t just go out and buy entrepreneurial failure insurance, you can have an exit plan so that you not only know when it’s time to move on to the next thing, but you also have a plan on how to get there.  I had none of that.  As a consequence, I probably waited several weeks too long to even begin looking for a new full-time job, and risked not getting something in time to fill in the income I needed when our savings was depleted.  I got lucky.  My first paycheck at my new position came only a few days after the last transfer from the savings account happened.  Even so, we’re still struggling to keep up without that cushion that we had grown accustomed to.

I Would Do It All Over Again

Despite all those mistakes I made, I would still do it all over again.  I know the mistakes I made, and am better able to prepare myself to not make them again.  I’m not afraid of failing.  At least not to such a degree that it prevents me from trying.  It’s a little bit like riding a bike.  You’re going to fall off.  It’s going to hurt.  But, you’re going to get back on the bike because you like riding your bike.  I like riding the entrepreneurial bike!

img credit : Crystl, on Flickr

I’m Fine, Thanks

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I’m Fine, Thanks, the documentary that Adam Baker has been traveling the country recording over the last several months is almost complete.  As part of the finishing up process, he, and his crew at Crank Tank have opened it up for funding on Kickstarter.

From the moment that Adam announced the project, I’ve thought it will be an excellent project.  There’s not much that Adam turns out that isn’t top notch, and the topic of I’m Fine, Thanks is one of my favorites.  It deals with complacency, in work, family, and in life and how the different people that he interviewed deal with breaking free of the complacency that they face, and looks to also include several people who have done it and share their story.

One of the biggest things, on my journey from work, to quitting my job, to going back to work, has been recognizing my own complacency with my life, and attempting to break free of it.  It doesn’t mean you have to quit work and walk off into the wilderness.  What it does mean is that you have to recognize the areas that you are being complacent, and make efforts to change them.  I’ve made great strides in the right direction (I think) and still have a long ways to go.

That’s why I think that I’m Fine, Thanks is such a great project.  I’ll be adding to the funding pool, I just haven’t decided how much yet.  Consider doing the same.