Monday Q&A-Menu Planning, Learning to Read, and Gobs of Money!

First, several people have recently emailed me to ask for advice on planning a menu. I wrote a post on this topic a while back and you can find that post right here.

Lauren sent this question.

How have you gone about teaching your children to read? Do you use any specific books or materials?

Here’s a post about the way that I do kindergarten for cheap (I’m doing K for the third time this fall), so look for more details on this subject then.

Basically, though, we use homemade flashcards to learn all the letter sounds, and then we use some very, very easy reading books to start putting the letter sounds together. After we’ve worked through the easy readers that I own, we get I Can Read type books from the library and practice with those.

An official learn-to-read program has not been necessary for my children, at least so far. My older two have picked up on it very quickly using this method, and I’m hoping for the same good results with Sonia this year.

WilliamB sent me this very interesting question.

If you suddenly had gobs of money (you inherited $5 million, or your husband’s salary increased 10x, or whatever formulation works for you), what would you do differently?

This was a really fun question to think about, and I’ve been pondering it over the last few days. My husband and I chatted about it over dinner the other night too, and we were pretty much entirely on the same page.

When I think about having a lot of money, the first thing that comes to mind is something like, “Oh, I could save so much money!”, not “Ooooh, think of all the things I could buy!”.

With some exceptions that I’ll list later, I think we’d mostly continue to maintain our current spending habits so that we could use all the excess money for other purposes.

Here are some of the things we’d do with the excess, in no particular order.

1) I would put a bunch of money into our retirement fund.

2) I’d generously pad our kids’ college savings funds.

3) I’d put away enough cash to replace my van when it dies. I have a Toyota van which should give us another 100K miles, but I would feel happy knowing the cash was there to replace it when necessary.

4) I’d buy a commuting car for my husband with cash. He currently drives a pickup truck that has a really bumpy ride, and I’d love to be able to buy him something more comfortable.

5) I’d pay off our house, and possibly consider buying one that I like better (I’m really not a fan of split-foyers!). I wouldn’t want something huge for several reasons, but I’d love to have a colonial style or really any style other than a split-foyer. 😉 I am thankful for our house, of course, but given my druthers, I would own a different type.

Here are a few lifestyle changes that I would make if our income went up.

1) I’d buy more organic and locally grown food. I think that this is something that’s very worth spending money on because it’s healthier for our bodies, healthier for our planet, and good for the local economy. I’d much rather have my dollars go towards local food than towards more consumer goods or more entertainment.

2) I would give more money away. Right now we give 10% of our income to our church and we give a small monthly donation to Living Water International, but we can’t afford much more than that. If we suddenly had more money, we would love to be able to support more worthy causes and to be able to help people in need.

3) I would spend more money on babysitting/date nights. My husband and I love to go out by ourselves, but date nights don’t happen as often as we’d like them to because of the cost. I know that if we had more money, we’d both feel like spending a little more in this area would be a good investment into our relationship. We’d still keep our dates simple and inexpensive, but we’d be able to afford them a little more often.

4) I might spend a bit more on heating our house. I wouldn’t go crazy and keep the house at 75 all winter, but I would certainly consider bumping it up to 68-70 degrees instead of 65.

I would still do most of the frugal things that I currently do, though. I’d continue to cook from scratch, bake my own bread, shop at Goodwill, give and receive things from Freecycle, keep an eye out for clearances, buy used schoolbooks, drink tap water instead of bottled water, and pack my husband’s lunch, among other things.

I’d do this partly just because I’d like to keep that extra money around and partly because for every frugal thing that I do, there are usually some other benefits attached.

For instance, baking my own bread saves us money, but it also gives us tastier bread.

Tap water is cheaper than bottled, but it also produces less trash.

Used purchases are generally cheaper than new ones, but buying used keeps goods out of the landfill and reduces the demand for new products.

Cooking from scratch reduces my grocery bill, but it also requires less packaging and generally provides us with healthier food than we’d get if I used more processed foods.

So, that’s what I’d do if I were rich.

What about you? Would you keep your spending habits the same? If not, where would you increase your spending?