Homemade Laundry Detergent

I've been making homemade laundry detergent for roughly three years now using the Duggar family recipe, which can be found here.  This detergent has worked great for our family, and at less than $10 per year, it is a no-brainer for us.

Like many homemade detergents, it uses these ingredients:

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Homemade Liquid Laundry Detergent



4 Cups - hot tap water

1 Fels-Naptha soap bar*

1 Cup - Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda*

½ Cup Borax**

1.  Grate bar of soap and add to saucepan with water. Stir continually over medium-low heat until soap dissolves and is melted.

2.  Fill a 5 gallon bucket half full of hot tap water. Add melted soap, washing soda and Borax. Stir well until all powder is dissolved. Fill bucket to top with more hot water. Stir, cover and let sit overnight to thicken. (When it is thickened, it may look sort of "chunky" like egg drop soup. :-)  That is normal - it will not look that way once you follow the next step.)

3.  Stir and fill a used, clean, laundry soap dispenser half full with soap and then fill rest of way with water. Shake before each use. (will gel)

4.  Optional: You can add 10-15 drops of essential oil per 2 gallons. Add once soap has cooled. Ideas: lavender, rosemary, tea tree oil.  (You cannot smell essential oils on your clean clothes so I skip this step.)

Yield: Liquid soap recipe makes 10 gallons.

-Top Load Machine- 5/8 Cup per load (Approx. 180 loads)...I just fill up my laundry soap dispenser cap, which might be slightly less but works great for me.  

-Front Load Machines- ¼ Cup per load (Approx. 640 loads)

*Arm & Hammer "Super Washing Soda" and Fels Naptha soap bar can both be found at Smith’s (Kroger grocery stores), sometimes Walmart, and a variety of other grocery stores in the laundry/cleaning aisle. It is important not to substitute baking soda for the washing soda because it will not work as well - It must be sodium carbonate!!

**Borax (20 Mule Team Borax) can also be found in the laundry/cleaning aisle at Smith’s, or at Walmart and other local grocery stores.


The entire batch lasts me for about 6 months w/ two adults, two kids, and using cloth diapers, and it costs me less than $5 for the whole batch.

Meal Plans & Grocery Shopping

In this post I'd like to share a little bit about how I do our meal planning and grocery shopping.  Then I will share this week's meal plan (of dinners) with you.

This week I spent $78 for our groceries, which was $1 less than what I estimated on my grocery list.  I only "meal plan" for dinners, as we eat a lot of leftovers for lunches as well as the the occasional pb&j, fruit, and oatmeal or eggs for breakfasts.  So other than making sure those staples are stocked up, my grocery lists mostly contain dinner items as well as the regular household items such as toilet paper, etc.  This week I was lucky and didn't need buy any household items.

I also buy my milk (1 1/2 gallons) and eggs (2 dozen) from a friend I met in MOPS who has chickens and a jersey cow.  So that's actually another $10 each week.  It is also notable that we (for the most part) only buy high-quality, grass-fed (where applicable), free-range (etc. etc.) meat.  This week, we made an exception and bought conventional roast.  This information is just to give you a more accurate idea of our habits for budget purposes.

On Saturday, as part of our date night, My Stud and I went grocery shopping together, which was by the far the fastest grocery shopping trip ever. (I know, we are wild.) This time, I did something a little different with my grocery list than I usually do.  You see, I usually plan meals, write out my shopping list and go.  And I usually end up spending more than our Food and Household budget allows for the week.  This means I am often taking a loan from another category and starting out next week's grocery funds by having to pay back money owed.  (For more on the cash envelope system I use, refer back to this post.)  Something needed to change in my planning.

This week, when I wrote out my list, I listed estimated the price to the left of each grocery item, added it all up, and made adjustments to my list where necessary.  Part of my motivation for doing this was that I had forgotten to plan for Easter dinner, and I wanted to buy a large roast and the fixings, I was already working with $20 less because of paybacks from the previous week, and I was determined to break the cycle of overspending/borrowing grocery money.

At the store, I was able to glance at my estimated prices and know how I was doing along the way.  Having to stick to my numbers also helped me stick to my list like never before.  I am always finding something on sale to stock up on or something I "forgot" to put on the list.  I actually did buy yogurt and a coconut, both on excellent sale, both not on my list.  However, I knew that I had a little room to flex since almost everything I bought was a little under my estimated prices, so it still worked out great.

I thought I would share this week's (dinner) meal plan.  At one point I used E-mealz to help with meal planning because I was in such a rut as far as simple, creative ideas go.  Now that I'm out of that rut, I am back to doing my own planning.  You will notice that we're not big on a bunch of side dishes at our house. I went through a phase where I tried very hard to improve in this area, and my family - well mostly my husband - let me know that he was just as happy with a one-dish meal and maybe one side, so I gave myself a break.  One thing is for sure, meal planning is the best way to get the most bang for your buck at the grocery store.  If you don't have a plan, you'll probably buy a bunch of random stuff that sounds good, and then end up having to make multiple trips to the store in order to turn those things into meals.  With good planning, I limit my grocery shopping trips to once a week.  Some people shop once per month, but I am  not that awesome.

Here is what we're eating for dinners this week:

Monday: Taco salad

Tuesday: Stir fry and wild rice

Wednesday: Crock pot chicken/green chili burritos

Thursday: Lentil soup and homemade whole wheat rolls

Friday: Spaghetti squash with sausage sauce and salad (regular spaghetti for kids)

Saturday:  Potato and ham bake w/ veggies

Sunday:  Easter - Pot roast w/ potatoes, carrots, onions, salad.

And now you know what we eat around here. ;-) 

What is your grocery shopping and meal planning strategy to keep groceries from being a budget-buster?

Miserly Things I Do

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Last week I had a big job to do: peel, core and slice 125 apples.  So naturally I called in the reinforcements and two of my mommy friends came over to to help.  As my friend J went to wash her hands at the kitchen sink, said something along the lines of "What's wrong with your hand soap?"  (Okay, she didn't say it like that at all, but that was sort of my interpretation. ;-)  I think it was more like, "Is this really your hand soap?" unsure if she was using the right thing.)

"I'm cheap, so I water down my hand soap."  I said, "about 1/4 hand soap and 3/4 water."  I especially like to do this in our bathroom where a certain 3-year-old soap waster often goes for independent hand (doll, dish, etc.) washing exercises.  (I used to do this with the foaming soap dispensers, but those break after awhile and don't like to buy them over and over.)

Okay.  I admit that was a little bit embarrassed.

This is not the first moment that I realized that I do a lot of miserly things that make most people scratch their heads, especially considering that I'm a mom of two children (not six) with a husband who has a well-paying job.  Let's blame it on the way I was raised, shall we?  I am the second of twelve children (yes, 12 - 6 girls, 6 boys - since you were going to ask ;-)), the daughter of a stay-at-home mom who was a stay-at-home mom when that meant we lived in a trailer.  Yes, it was that important to her.  And, yes, your children pick up on things like that and it shapes their own choices later in life.  As a mother of many, and a wife of one of the hardest working men I know to this day, my mom made it her personal mantra to stretch every dollar as far as possible.  She is still doing it to this day.  (My youngest sister is 7.)

I would say that I learned to water down my soap from my mom; however, I seem to recall that we always used bar soap in our house, so who knows.  I'm sure she must have done it at least once, because it just seems familiar.

At any rate, I have learned a bunch of "miserly" tricks from my mother and others over the years, and the soap thing has inspired me to compile a list of some of the money-saving things I do.  People who come into our house will note that we use a lot of natural/organic/etc products in our home, and one of the ways we have been able to pull this off through the years is that I employ these "stretch the dollar" tricks.  That is also how we paid for our trip to Disneyland last September.  (Just kidding.)  Okay, so the savings for each of these items will be very small, but when you add them up, it does make a significant difference over the course of a year.  Some of these items may be familiar to you if you have read my previous post that mentions some of the ways that you can cut the costs to make staying home to raise the kids work. 

And just for the record, you should know that while I am cunning at saving money in some areas, I know that I'm wasteful in other areas where others save (new gas guzzler vehicle, to be obvious).  I think it's safe to say we can all learn from each other and pick and choose what works for each of us. 

With no further ado, here are some miserly things I do around our house:

1.  Water down hand soap, especially if the kids have access to it. 

2.  Use as little shampoo as possible, and do not let small children pour their own.  For the record, I am still using the same little bottle of baby shampoo for our girls that we got back in December of 2009!  I bet I get a few more months out of it too - and, no, I did not water it down. ;-)

3.  Go grocery shopping once a week. When you run out of bread, cereal, milk, etc. earlier than planned, don't buy any more until next weeks' grocery trip.  If I ran to the store every time we ran out of something, I would nickel and dime our grocery budget to devastation.  Yes, at the end of your grocery shopping week, it is okay to run out of things and thus have to eat something else.  Limiting grocery shopping trips to once a week, also saves on gas.

4. If running low on gas and gas money, don't go anywhere unnecessary for a couple days.  In fact, if money is truly tight, you might consider cutting down on your daytime out-of-the-house activities as a general rule.  Many stay-at-home-moms get involved in so many play dates, church and social activities during the day, that they end up spending a good deal of money, unplanned, not to mention they are too tired to throw together a decent dinner at the end of such a day and thus are more likely to eat out regularly.  I'm not saying that in order to save money, stay-at-home moms should all be hermits.  But I am saying that they should act as smart, savvy, and resourceful as I know all moms are.  If you really want to meet up with a friend for lunch, consider taking turns having each other over for lunch instead. 

5. Learn to make things that your family loves to eat a lot of from scratch. Bread is one that I have been working on. Yogurt is next on my list of homemade ventures. (I'm scared but excited!)

6.  Consider cloth diapering your baby or toddler.  This is one in particular that quite honestly intimidates people.  Our story is that when our oldest child was about 6 months old, I got really sick and tired of trying to figure out how we were going to cough up diaper money time after time.  So I researched and learned everything I could about different cloth diapering systems (pros and cons of each), laundering considerations, the gross-ness factor, and cost.  Needless to say I was sold, and since then we have lined our pockets with $2100 (conservatively) that we would have otherwise, in a very literal sense, thrown away.  That's about $14 per week or about $60 per month.  Yikes.  I do respect that some people just aren't willing to deal with cloth diapers, and that is completely fine, but I sure don't want to hear those people complain to me about the cost as if there isn't anything that can be done about it.  So if you have determined that cloth is not for you, no complaining. ;-)  I digress...

7.  Don't go the doctor for a head cold.  Just saying...

8.  Don't use disposable things such as paper towels. Use dish towels and wash cloths for all your cleaning needs in the kitchen.  Right now I happen to have a roll of paper towels in my pantry b/c it was given to me in a road trip care package (:-)), but paper towels are one of the things that I don't normally buy.  Again, to me it is throwing away money slowly but surely.

9.  If you only wear something for two hours, and you didn't get any food, baby messes, etc. on it, hang it back up in your closet to wear again later.   I do this a lot if I change clothes for an evening activity or something.  Fewer loads of laundry.

10.  Use less meat than the recipe calls for.  For casseroles and stews, sometimes I use as little as 1/2 of the meat, and it's just as tasty to us - my husband doesn't even comment on it. (Shhh.)

There are also many things that I'm aware of that I don't do.  For example, a friend growing up had a rule in their house that you could only use two toilet paper squares.  We don't do that, but I see the value in such a rule when you have kids using wads and wads of the stuff many times a day. 

At any rate, you can see how these things can slowly and surely add up to a trip to Disneyland bit more money in your pocket, making it well worth a little extra effort.

Do you have any silly or embarrassing miserly habits that help you tighten up the reins at your house?  I'd love to hear them.

Buying a Car with Cash: the "How To"

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As you can see from my previous cash post, I have become a huge fan of cash purchases for a multitude of reasons, which you can read about right here.  After posting this morning about buying a car last weekend with cash, I thought I would share a little bit more about how we did that.

I mistakenly said that we saved for a year for this vehicle, but when I stopped to really think back, I realized that it was actually about two years.  We were not always awesome about saving, so we had to make up for slacking off by saving even harder toward the end.  At any rate, here is a summary of our car story.

In 2005, less than a month before we tied the knot, My Stud and I bought a 2002 Hyundai Elantra with 19k miles on it.  Only concerned about whether or not we could afford the monthly payments, we later realized we paid way too much for it.  However, we worked diligently to pay it off in about 2 years.  Time passed, and we enjoyed the life of driving a dependable car without a payment.  Then we began to realize that as our family grew, we would want a larger vehicle with more seating.  Otherwise, we'd drive that little car to the ground. (I can't say enough about what a wonderful, dependable car it has been.)  The wheels began to turn in our minds.

Largely following the inspiration from this Dave Ramsey video (yes, we loved Dave Ramsey long before we ever took the Financial Peace University class), we began to "pay ourselves" a car payment each month as a way to save up for a vehicle.  Unlike the video, we used an old fashioned savings account rather than a mutual fund since our savings would be relatively short-term.

A quick note on the video:  if you love the idea of this strategy but saving over $400/month is completely out of the question, then I would encourage you to save what is reasonable for you.  $150 or $200 per month.  It will take longer, but that will add up too!

We plan to drive our Expedition for about 5 years.   Built into our budget is a savings plan for car repairs.  Our main focus at this time is paying off the rest of our student loans, which should take another year or two.  We can't decide if we should start saving for our next vehicle now (something small-ish like $150/month  $50/month) or wait until our loans are paid off first and then dedicate a larger amount to car savings at that time.  I'm leaning toward starting now just so we stay in the habit of setting *something* aside for it, but we shall see what my  husband thinks.  I try to defer to him on these matters.  Anyway, for those who were interested, that is the basic concept of how we did and how we will continue to buy vehicles with good old fashioned cashola.

I hope this inspires you to always be planning ahead for your transportation as well.  Happy saving!

I Love Cash

I love cash, and what I mean by that is that cash keeps me out of trouble.  Thanks to Dave Ramsey and his wonderful class that we took through our church this Fall, we are true believers in using an envelope system and using cash for virtually every purchase.  As Dave will tell you, people who swipe a debit card tend to spend more per purchase than cash-spenders.  It's like you start to get this mentality that a debit card is not real money or something.  It's just to easy, and too "out of sight out of mind" for me. 

We have pretty much always lived on a budget all our married lives, but we used to organize our money into various checking accounts - one for bills, one for food and household expenses (grocery), auto and gas, and entertainment (which we like to call "fun money" in our family).  This worked okay for us, but we still notoriously busted our budget regularly so it wasn't quite as successful as we had hoped.

Thompsons meet Dave Ramsey via video at our class and we are changed people...in more ways than one, but we'll just focus on the concept of purchasing with cash for this post.

These are the things we have cash envelopes for, in no particular order:

Food & Household (grocery)
Family Fun (entertainment)
Princess& Smooch Fun (this covers any expense for the girls that may not otherwise be accounted for in our budget.  Dave Ramsey calls this "blow" money)
Amelia Fun* (this is my "blow" money.  I use this for coffee with a friend, clothes since our clothing budget is slim, or I save it up for something bigger.)
Gas & Oil
Clothing (for the whole family)

*My Stud gets his own "blow" money too just for the record. :-)  He just keeps it in his wallet. The one who does the household shopping carries the envelopes.  If you both do the shopping, you might want two sets of envelopes to sort of slip up the cash between.


Babysitting
Car Repairs
Doctor & Medications
Dentist
Optical
Gifts - Incl. Christmas
Vacation
Misc (I currently have an envelope going in which I am saving up for a new camera - I sometimes add some of my "blow" money to this.  Sometimes, like almost never.)

The first group is kept in envelopes that I carry on me at all times.  The second group is kept at home in a coupon file thingy (technical term, I know).  When I know I'm going to the doctor, I will grab just that one envelope and go on my merry way. 

This is how it works:

Our budget is a zero-based budget which means that we tell every single dollar where to go before we get it.  For things like vacations, gifts/Christmas and doctor & meds, we calculate how much we need for each of those categories annually, then we divide by 52 (weeks) since my husband gets paid weekly.  That tells us how much money we need to put into an envelope each week.  Of course we can't "put into" each category each week, so one week we'll put money into our doctor & med envelope (once a month actually) and another week, we'll put into our gifts/Christmas envelope.  This way we are saving up all year for expenses that have historically "blindsided" us as if they were emergencies that we didn't know would come up.  Ha!   This is the kicker for us:  by putting the money aside in envelopes, we are ensuring that we do not "accidentally" spend it on something else.  Out of sight, out of mind, right?  That's how we work at our house.

Now when we first started to do the envelope thing, I thought that carrying envelopes around was a little old-fashioned and a lot tacky.   So I wracked my brain trying to think of something I could do to make my envelopes cute and fun.  And FINALLY, this brings us to the entire point of this post.   My friend "J" shared a great website with me that teaches you how to make your own envelopes and even allows you to download a free envelope template.  This awesome gal made her envelopes out of pretty scrap booking paper, but I found that my regular paper envelopes were ripping all too easily, so I decided to make mine out of card stock and embellish them a little with pretty paper.

Here is the link to the awesome template and tutorial.

And here are some photos of my lovely card stock envelopes.  (They are holding up GREAT - I made them over a month ago.)

You can see that I keep my envelopes (held together with ribbon - detailed in the tutorial I linked to) in my Target day planner that I bought four years ago.  The planner has a clear pouch for coins & coupons, as well as slots for my cards, license, etc.  And since it zips shut, I don't have to worry about anything falling out.  So this day planner is essentially my "purse" that I toss into the diaper bag (yes, that is the stage of life I will be in for awhile yet - no purse!). 

Here you can see how I added a piece of card stock (folded in half or extra strength) to tuck under the flap in my planner and keep my envelopes in place.  I usually pull the whole envelope system out when I need to get cash out.  (No, you cannot read the address or other important info on my license.  I made sure of it :-).)

For my labels, I just printed on return address labels and stuck them on scrap booking paper (I do not scrapbook btw but I have some of the supplies lying around - mostly given to me as gifts).

This ledger is a Dave Ramsey one that I just cut out and adhered to a piece of card stock.  I made it wider than a dollar bill so it would be easy to see and grab.  This is how I keep track of how I spend the cash with a running balance.  This prevents the question from being asked, "Didn't I just have a $20 bill!?"  You could easily make your own ledger paper in Excel.

See all the delightful colors?  They make me smile every time I see them because I find pleasure in the simplest things.  ;-)

Here you can see my ribbon binding.  I actually took a lighter and carefully (I would have been mad mad mad if I had burned my pretty paper) melted the knot at the ends so that it would sort of fuse together.   Otherwise, my knot kept slipping out and driving me crazy.  Problem solved!  It hasn't budged a millimeter since. :-)

There you have it!  Pretty envelopes that help keep me out of trouble because once the cash is gone, it is gone!  We literally have a "no debit swiping" rule in our house now, and after nipping a few bad habits in the bud, this system has been working wonders for our spending habits, keeping us true to the Thompson 2011 Budget.  (Thanks, Dave Ramsey and cool envelope lady!)

If you like what you have heard about Dave Ramsey - and I barely scratched the surface - you would really love his class, reading materials, radio show, and forms.  His budget forms truly revolutionized our budget.  Gone is that nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach when I wonder how we're going to pay for _______.  Even a $40/month clothing budget for a family of four is loads better than no clothing budget at all.  Trust me on that one. ;-)

What keeps you out of trouble with the bank account?

Lies, Stuff, and Work (Post Edit)

Post edit:  Scroll to the bottom on this blog entry for some thoughts from a mom who recently decided to take the gutsy plunge to become a stay and home mom.  I think she is inspiring to say the least.

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In case you  haven't noticed, our culture is full of lies.  And most problems a person faces can be traced back to one root problem: their belief in a lie.  I'm sure that I believe in lies of which I am not even aware.  However, I have also been set free from certain prevalent lies by TRUTH, so now I can see those particular lies clearly.  And let me tell you, it breaks my heart to see other people flounder in their lie-bound state, confused, deceived. 

So  now I'm going to write about one of those lies, and I will probably offend people.  Ready?  I'm about to dispel a lie.... 

You don't need STUFF to make you happy.  In fact, you don't need STUFF period.

Earth shattering.

Do you realize that most people will claim to believe this, but their actions prove that they actually believe in the lie?  "Stuff makes you happy."  That's why we chase after it with such desperation as though our very lives are at stake.

Dave Ramsey calls this worship of stuff "stuff-itis".  Appropriate because it sounds like a disease, a deep-rooted, American disease.  The Bible calls it idolatry. 
"You will have no other gods before me." ~ God

But we have lots of gods that take up our time and money.  Flat screens, nice cars, the latest fashions, even little things like toys for our kids, and lofty things like good education.
And now to get to my point.  I have heard the laments of  literally dozens of mothers that tearfully but dutifully go to work full time in order to help their husband provide for the family.  Their hearts pull them homeward.  Their heads push them out the door.  They don't want to work.  They clearly state that they are working "against their will" or "because it is necessary to make ends meet."  Then they go about their American life, dropping off the kids to daycare, driving a car they owe money on, texting on their iphone, living in Suburbia, U.S.A., living the dream.  Right?

Doing what society and everyone tells them they're supposed to do.  Buying on credit what their grandparents worked a lifetime to obtain, and what some of their parents still don't have.  It's like a mad frenzy to acquire...stuff.

Stuff has become more important than people.

And we as mothers can get so wrapped up in it, that we lose sight of our priorities and we get so confused.  Not only do we believe in the lie, but sometimes we lie to ourselves and to others in order to rationalize our actions. 

I'm tired of it.  I'm tired of moms complaining about how they "have" to work when they could drastically cut the budget.  If you want more money, stop spending it all!  I'm tired of husbands who practically beg their wives to return to work because he just can't do it without her, and then as soon as she does, he starts eyeing a new truck.  I'm tired of wants being confused for needs.  I'm tired of people doing what's expected of them because it's the norm.  I'm tired of Christians being no different than anyone else on this matter, except that they use a lot of spiritual words when they discuss it. 

If you want to work, then work, and do it unto the Lord.  I'm not talking about you.  If you are married and your husband works, and you don't want to work, or if you feel a conviction against it while your kids are young, then don't work.  It really is that simple.  It will be uncomfortable because your life will have to look a little different than it might otherwise.  A lot different? But I think you will discover some of life's greatest treasures in those moments that you can't get back.

Step 1:  Stop comparing yourself to everyone.  And especially, in your comparisons, stop trying to be everyone else.

Step 2:  Change something.

If you desire to stay home and raise the kids yourself, either change your situation or stop complaining.  If you complain about how badly you want to stay with your kids, but you're not even willing to give up the superficial, unimportant things like highlights in your hair, (sorry but) I would really question your priorities.  Your actions and your words need to line up, or else nobody wants to hear about it.  That is a harsh but true reality.
Some people might (rightly) say that I have it pretty good so I don't actually know what these sacrifices look like.  Yes, we have been blessed as my husband changed his major to a more one-income-friendly occupation back when we were dating.  However, most people don't realize that our student loan payments equal that of a mortgage payment.  We live very simply by the standards of our culture, and even when our student loans are paid off, I believe we will still choose the simple life.  Knowing that our family will be growing in the future, we have saved cash and are making plans to purchase a larger vehicle (with 75,000 + miles), but we currently drive a Hyundai Elantra with over 100,000 miles on it, so we don't have a car payment.   And don't forget, I was raised by a stay-at-home-mom (SAHM) who was a SAHM even when it meant we had to live in a trailer, and then later upgrade to two-bedroom apartment where four children resided with their two parents.  I remember well our apartment days, and I have news for you:  kids don't care about things like apartment vs. house, compact car vs. suv.  They don't want stuff; they want you.  (Just in case you worry about depriving your kids. ;-))

Here are some daring changes both big and small that I have seen women make in order to make being a SAHM more feasible:

Cut the cable ($30/mo.)
Cancel cell phone service ($50/mo.)
Dye your hair to it's natural color and stop highlighting, and cut it to a lower maintenance style. ($20/mo. when averaged)
Sell your car and be a one-vehicle family (Yes, wake up in the morning and take your husband to work) ($300/mo. conservative estimate for payment and gas alone, not incl. maintenance)
Stop eating out.  Completely. ($50/mo.)
Make food from scratch to cut the grocery budget (even bread if you get crazy!) ($20/mo.)
Drink water, not juice, not milk, not soda. ($20/mo.)
Don't buy yourself any clothes for awhile - unlike your kids, you're not growing and you won't wear them out. ($50/mo.)

Just on those few items I listed off the top of my head, with my very conservative #s, you could easily save $540 a month just like that! This does not include money saved in childcare, and this is just scratching the surface. I didn't even include some of the key things that I personally do such as use cloth diapers.


Stop shopping for anything but grocery items - maybe you have bad habits you need to break. Some of us have more diverse spending habits than others ;-)  If you rent, move into a smaller house in an older neighborhood...or *GASP*, move into an apartment.  (We saved over $600/mo. by moving from our condo across the street from a golf course, to a slightly run-down rental in an old neighborhood. $600 a month!!! When we move again, eventually, we'd like to shoot for saving an additional $200/mo. Though we won't compromise safety, we are pretty motivated to pay off our student loans during this time that my husband's job has us uprooted and moving around.)
Additionally, here are things I have seen moms do to help with the income while raising the children and keeping home in order:

Part-time work-from-home position for a company
Providing childcare for other working moms (I did this for over 2 years.)
Selling Mary Kay, Pampered Chef, etc.
Clean houses
My mom even had a paper route at one point and took us along. :-)

I swear if one more person tells me how envious they are of me because I get to spend my days pouring into the lives of my daughters, while they have always "had" to work to make ends meet, but then they continue to make expensive choices, I may start screaming.  For so many of them think they are helpless victims of life.  They have made themselves slaves to their stuff, and that is why they feel they have to work.  They don't own anything.  Their stuff owns them.  It is so frustrating to see this cycle and it makes me so profoundly sad for the deceived among us.  After all, for most of us, our children are our only truly lasting legacy.

God help us to see ourselves clearly.  We need your TRUTH - Jesus.  Help us to be good stewards of our children - like everything else, they are yours and not ours.  Help me to see the lies that I believe in other areas of my life and recognize them for what they are.  Make me like you, even when the process hurts.

With her permission, please go read this vulnerable post that my friend Emily wrote about her personal struggle with this very subject.  (Love ya, Emily!  And happy first day on the new job!)