About me

About five years ago, I became a single mother of two teenage girls.  Luckily, I was already established in a wonderful job, but I also had a mortgage, a car payment and monthly expenses that are usually absorbed by two wage earners.

I won’t lie, I was really nervous about how I would make ends meet financially.  We lived in a tiny bungalow, and with two wage earners things seemed to be tight every month.  Most months we tapped into the line of credit.  If two people couldn’t manage, how in the world could I do it on my own? 

That first year as a single mom is a bit of a blur to me.  I managed to put one foot in front of the other, but I spent a lot of time feeling rather sorry for myself.  The second year, I started a new life.  I sold the house I had been living in for 22 years and I bought what has turned out to be my absolute dream home.  I found I could manage on my own. There is nothing more empowering than learning self-reliance.  

One of the biggest lessons to self-reliance is learning how to save money on the little things. I get tremendous satisfaction saving money by making the things I need.  This is a truth that is clear across the board, from making my own laundry soap, to canning my own spaghetti sauce to making my own bread and knitting our hats and mittens. Making my own cleaners, using simple household ingredients has not added thousands of dollars to my bottom line, but it definitely helped me save hundreds over the course of a year.   This practice, in conjunction with others, like menu planning, taking advantage of sales to store food through canning and freezing, and cooking from scratch has helped move me toward the road to financial freedom.