Dave Ramsey video about buying cars (Carole)

So, after a long winter's nap, here I am with a great video from Dave Ramsey on buying cars.  Hope you enjoy it and get a little bit of inspiration!

What Would You Do With a Windfall? (Carole)

Many years ago I had a good friend.  She and I lived in the same small town and had children who were just the same ages.  We became exercise partners and often spent entire days at each other's apartments while our children played.  After a year or so, we were both on the verge of buying our first homes.  I was aware that before she was married she had been involved in two accidents and had received two different insurance settlements adding up to a whopping $50,000!  In my mind, they had it made, since we were scrimping and saving to get our own down payment together.

But one day she mentioned that they were going to have to borrow most of their down payment from her parents.  She was unbelievably embarrassed to do so, because now her parents would know that she and her husband had blown the entire amount!   I don't know how they spent all that money.  I do recall they had a ski boat and an old truck to pull it with and their kids had a lot of cool toys, but beyond that I couldn't see where it had all gone.

I've often thought of my friend during these past 25 years.  What COULD they have done with that much money that would have been smart?  In reality, the possibilities were endless, but here are three super frugal choices.

1.  Bury it in their backyard or put it in a safety deposit box.  In 5 years they would still have had their $50,000.

2.  Put it in the bank.  In the mid 1980's an average money market account earned 7.71% (these were the high interest Jimmy Carter years -- great if you had money to invest, horrible if you needed to borrow it) and at the end of five years they would have had over $73,000.

3.  Buy a house.  In the 1980's, $50,000 would have been a hefty down payment on a starter home.

What would you do if you suddenly found yourself with a large amount of money right now?

Time Well Spent (Carole)

We've all heard the saying, "Time is Money."  When it comes to saving money, nothing could be more true.  This is just a short little post to remind you that -

the faster you're living your life, the more money you're probably spending

Because it takes some time to:
 *  Write up a budget
 *  Plan a menu
 *  Cook your own  meals
 *  Look for and use coupons
 *  Become familiar with the usual prices of things
*   Comparison shop
*   Do your homework on the best brands
*   Shop at more than one grocery store
*   Try a DIY project
*   Home repairs

Are you living your life too fast to be frugal??

It's difficult to remove yourself from the frenzied pace of modern life.  But try to slow it down, think things through, consider your options before you buy something, take a few deep breaths and spend your hard-earned money wisely.  Your savings can be enormous.


Photo courtesy of FreeFoto.com  

Returns (Janssen)

Yesterday, my husband and I went grocery shopping. Because of a mix-up on cereals that were included in a certain promotion and a mis-scanned item, I realized after we got home that I'd paid $6.69 more for the four boxes of cereal than I should have.

After mentioning it approximately 100 times to my husband over the course of the afternoon, he offered to go back to the store, explain the mix up and ask for a refund. He had me tell him exactly what we'd paid for what products and then wrote a side-by-side list of what we should have paid, then clipped the receipt, the weekly ad, and the coupons to it.

Ten minutes later, he was home, with $6.69 in his wallet. How can I not love that man?

I know that some people absolutely HATE to return things or ever venture near the "Customer Service" desk. Not me. I am an avid reader of return policies, and my combined hatred of clutter and spending unnecessary money means that I am more than willing to return almost anything.

At the grocery store, I watch them ring up every item and I hold them to the posted store policy of giving you free any item that rings up differently than advertised or marked on the shelf.

If I buy a box of crackers that I open and discover it is stale, you better believe I'll drag it back to the store on my next trip and ask for a refund.

If I buy a shirt that I discover doesn't fit or I suddenly realize I will never ever wear since taking it off in the dressing room, I'll return it.

I'm nice about it, but if the store policy is to correct mistakes, take back inferior or unwanted products, or comp mispriced items, you better believe I'm going to take them up on it.

Is that too much for you or am I in good company?

June Savings Kickoff

May is almost over, and in June we'd like to do so something new, something a little more interactive.

Each Friday in June, we'll post a list of what each of the three of us has done to save money or live more frugally during the week (increasing 401(k) contributions, using coupons, refraining from buying an item, etc). Some items may have a dollar amount attached, while some may not.

This will help keep us accountable and see what we're doing in our daily lives to save money (and also how it can add up over the course of a month)

And we'd love you to participate too. Each Friday, you can leave a comment informing us of the things you've done to save money or live frugally during the week. At the end, we'll give away a prize to one of the people who participates all four weeks. It will be fun!

Get ready! See you next Friday . . .

How Much Does Your Lunch Cost? (Janssen)

The other night at dinner, I was telling Bart about the teacher lunches that are provided at the two elementary schools I work at. This is a new program this year, so many of the teachers were really excited because you could buy a non-chicken nugget lunch for only $3. I commented to Bart that $15 a week for lunches still seemed quite expensive to me, since if we both spent that, it would be 60% of our weekly budget.

Last year, in an effort to be healthy, Bart and I gave up fast food. The on-campus Wendy's had been an easy option if we were too tired or too rushed or simply didn't feel like making lunches on a school day. With the dollar menu, it felt like a pretty cheap way to go ($3 or $4 for a full lunch). When Wendy's was no longer an option for us, we were extremely committed to making sure we had a lunch every single day.

As we discussed this, we wondered how much we actually were spending every day on lunch now. Our main priorities when it comes to lunch are as follows: easy (no way are we assembling 7 part sandwiches in the morning when we're rushing to catch the T and beat traffic), cheap, and nutritious.

Here's what lunch looks like for us at the moment:

• Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches on homemade wheat bread ($0.30 - ten cents for two slices of bread, ten cents of peanut butter and ten cents of jelly)
• One yogurt ($0.25 cents each since I have become a rabid yogurt coupon collector and I wait for them to go on sale and buy many at once because in my experience it takes yogurt AGES to go bad). 
• One apple ($0.38)
• One banana ($0.27)

This puts the total for one lunch at $1.20, for a grand total of $12 a week for the two of us. Not bad - here in Massachusetts where Wendy's doesn't have a dollar menu, but instead a VALUE menu where everything runs about $1.29, you couldn't even get one carton of chicken nuggets for that cost.

We have experimented with a ton of different lunch options - string cheese, granola bars (both store bought and homemade), cookies, muffins, vegetables, pretzels, etc - over the last 18 months since we devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to homemade lunches. Some are too expensive, some are too unhealthy, some are too much effort to make in advance.

Our current combination though appears to be just the right amount of food for us - we eat it all, rather than leaving the apples uneaten while devouring the chocolate chip granola bars moments after arriving in the office.

What do you eat for lunch? Any idea how much it costs?

DIY (Carole)

DIY stands for Do It Yourself (not to be mistaken with DUI -- a very different thing).

I grew up in a home where it seemed like my dad could make or fix anything.  Now that I'm an adult, I'm pretty sure that was not really true, but it seemed that way to me when I was a kid.  For instance, my mother wanted a 2nd linen closet in the upstairs hallway.  Dad sketched some plans, cut a large hole in the wall and within a couple of weeks there it was -- looking just as permanent and finished as the original one on the other side of the bathroom door.  He also painted every room in the house,  refinished our kitchen cupboards, upholstered several pieces of furniture (with the help of my mother), painted the outside of the house and dozens of routine plumbing  and electrical jobs during my 18 years at home.  I remember many interesting trips to the hardware store to pick up some part or other to repair an appliance that had gone AWOL.  I often had the fun job, as a little girl, of handing him tools while he tore something apart before putting it all back together again.

Naturally, when David and I got married I assumed he would be right on the same page with this whole DIY lifestyle.  Don't all men have these skills?  Aren't they hardwired into the male DNA??  Uh, no.  And even though I'd made a hundred trips to Ace Hardware with my dad, I didn't have a clue either.  Watching was not the same as learning, it turned out.

But David (mostly) and me are living proof that these skills can be learned.  We started small with a couple of low-risk painting projects.  Painting  has much to recommend itself as a beginning place.  Not only is it pretty inexpensive, but it is easily painted again if things go bad.  My children can attest to the dozens of rooms we have painted over the years.  We've saved ourselves thousands of dollars in labor costs and it gave me a much-needed creative decorating outlet when our budget was tight, tight, tight.  David used to joke that I was losing square footage on the house by repainting some of the kids' bedrooms so often!

While in dental school, we lived with an elderly woman in a beautiful home by Lake Michigan.  Amazingly she had NEVER owned a dryer.  I know, it's hard to even imagine that.  But there you are.  We were unwilling to live without a dryer, being the young, modern twenty-somethings we were.  Happily, we had friends with real jobs who were looking to get rid of their old dryer.  They just gave it to us because it was very, very noisy.  They'd had this dryer for a few years while in college (having purchased it used from other college students) and the cause of this loud racket had never been discovered by the several repairmen they'd brought out to their house.  David hauled our "new" dryer into the basement and hooked it  up.  Sure enough, a very very loud and annoying scraping sound emanated from deep inside the drum.  I was willing to live with this, but David was sure that the cure couldn't really be that tough to find.  His fix-it rule is that you keep removing screws and taking off parts until you find something broken -- then you replace that.  I'm here to tell you this simple method works the majority of the time.  You just have to keep close track of all those screws you took off!  He used this technique on the dryer, eventually found the broken piece, took that broken piece down to the Sears Parts store and we ended up with a super-quiet dryer that we used for the next 10 years.  I think his total cost was under $10.  When we finally bought a nice matched washer and dryer, we sold this dryer for $120!

In our first house we had beautiful wood floors in the upstairs.  Unfortunately that half held all the bedrooms.  This made for some very chilly feet in the frigid mornings in Wisconsin.  The living spaces downstairs, however, had ugly linoleum and wall to wall carpet.  So, one crisp fall morning, I bought a specialized crowbar and began ripping out the wood floor in our bedroom.  By the time David got home from work the deed was done.  There was no turning back.  He spent the next 2 months laying that wood down in the kitchen (I took the girls on an extended vacation . . .).  And we had the bedroom carpeted.  We both thought it made more sense.  Had he ever laid wood before?  Absolutely not.  Had he seen it done?  Nope.  But we talked to a few knowledgeable friends who worked in construction and gave it a shot.  That beautiful wood floor was a big plus when we sold the house a year later.  

Over the years we've laid a lot of tile, replaced light fixtures, sink faucets, toilets, installed a sprinkler system, laid sod, made curtains, and generally made our houses into the homes we want to live in.  I'll do a future post on the amazing custom woodwork David built in our dining room and entry way.  (Am I proud of my husband?  Yes, I am.)

Maybe my children think their dad can make or fix anything -- and he just about can -- but his many impressive skills were learned one at a time over many years of necessity and a willingness to give it a shot.  Not only have we saved ourselves thousands of dollars, but we've had a lot of adventures and fun along the way!

I Have Enough (Carole)

Is is possible to feel like you have ENOUGH??  One of David's cousins used to be the CFO for an uber-wealthy Saudi prince.  I believe he saw and heard things the rest of us mere-mortals can't even imagine.  A few years ago, we had dinner at this cousin's house and he mentioned that even on this mega level of income, people do not feel like they have enough.  The prince who has $50 billion is always on the look-out for things to buy that SHOW that he has $10 billion more than the prince who has "only" $40 billion.  What exactly would you buy that would clearly make that point??  I have no idea.

On the other extreme, I  know a gracious woman from Georgia who has chosen to be content.  She is in her early 70's and always looks very put-together.  I commented on one of her outfits one day while walking through an airport with her and she said that she had decided that even though she had always loved buying clothes, she had come to the realization that she had ENOUGH clothes.  She determined she was not going to buy any new clothes for the next few years. Instead, she was going to enjoy what she already owned and re-discover items she'd completely forgotten about.  Here she was a couple of years into this plan, and looking very, very lovely indeed. 

I've thought of my friend often over the past couple of years and wondered if I have areas of my life where I have ENOUGH.  Can I cross those kinds of purchases off my list for a few years??  Maybe forever?  What about you?  Do you finally have enough shoes, sweaters, blouses, scarves, earrings, skirts, jeans, dishes, cars, houses, boats, tools, TVs, CDs, purses, sunglasses, pillows, fabric, whatever??

Saving for Both Short and Long Term Goals (Carole)

Melanie, a faithful FWWL reader, asked about saving for both Long Term and Short Term goals at the same time.  Haven't we all been there?  If you sit down and think of all the things you really should/want to save money for, it will probably be a mighty long list.  Where do you start?   Most people don't have the personal discipline to prioritize their wants and needs, so they just buy everything on credit the moment they want it and soon find themselves in deep financial trouble.

There is a better way and it works every time.

First -- Write your list.  Take a couple of days or weeks to work on it, as it often takes some time for all your past ideas to come to the surface.  Take this time to decide what you REALLY want and need.

Second -- Divide your list into both Long Term and Short Term financial goals.
Long Term Goals might include:
Emergency fund (3 - 6 months of take-home pay saved in cash -- this money is used to cover unexpected car repairs, household repairs, major medical expenses, and possible unemployment),
A down payment on a house,
A new car paid for with cash.
Some of these long term goals aren't that exciting, but they will bring stability and safety to your future financial life.  Definitely worth the effort.

Short Term Goals might include:
A new piece of furniture,
Re-carpeting a room,
A vacation.
Remember financial goals are about both wants AND needs.

Third -- Now comes the hard part.  Prioritize your Long Term Goals.  1, 2, 3. . .  Same with your Short Term Goals.

You will quickly see that you cannot possibly save toward all of these at the same time, unless you have a great deal of extra money sitting around.  My husband refers to this as trying to "ride your horse off in all directions at once."  (He's said this to me many times over the years).  If you try to spread your savings money too thinly, you will make very little progress on anything and will quickly get discouraged.

I suggest that you choose #1 from your Long Term list and #1 from your Short Term list and save for only those two.  Decide how much money each of these goals needs to bring them to fruition.  Then look to see how much money you can reasonably put toward each goal every month.  Make yourself a chart (I LOVE CHARTS!) with completion dates.  Tape the charts up somewhere you'll see them every day, so that you will keep these goals in the front of your mind.  Take it from someone who has saved for dozens and dozens of things over the years -- the first few months of saving pass very, very slowly.  But before you know it, it's been 6 months and your saved $ amounts begin to look pretty substantial.  Those big numbers are highly motivating to keep moving forward!  I've been saving up for a set of custom doors leading from my dining room to my kitchen for quite some time and just passed the $5,000 mark (these are expensive doors) and it feels GOOD.  I'm ordering them soon!

The Short Term Goal will probably max out within only a few months and you can go buy whatever fabulous thing it was you wanted to get -- with cash!  Celebrate not only by making your purchase, but also write across your chart in big red marker "SUCCESS!" and begin wallpapering your bathroom with these as you achieve each one OR fold up the chart and place it in your journal for future motivation.  Then move onto Short Term Goal #2.  You may find that some of your short term goals (possibly items #4 and below) begin to look a lot less interesting as time goes on.  You'll be glad you didn't impulsively buy these items on credit and now 18 months later you're still paying for things that aren't important to you anymore.  Delaying a purchase often causes your rational thinking to take control again or for you to  simply change your mind.  The VISA people hate that.

Your Long Term Goal may take you a few years to accomplish, but you'll get there too!  It may seem like a slow process at times, but there is absolutely no other way to achieve your long term financial goals.  This is where you see the value of keeping your monthly fixed expenses low.  The more expensive your daily life is, the harder it is to save for your future or any extra lovely things.

By following this technique you will join that rare breed of people who save money to protect their futures and pay cash when they buy something substantial!  Let me be the first to say it, "YOU are amazing!"

Teaching Your Children About Money #1 (Carole)

When I was in college, I took an education class from a professor who always had a hands-on method of getting his point across.  One of the many great lessons he shared with us was a powerful way to help your children understand the value of money and how it works within your own family.

He suggested that one month, instead of depositing your paycheck in your account, you cash the whole thing into $20 bills.  (You may need to hire yourself some security for the evening. . .)  Bring all that cash home and stack it on the living room floor.  Sit your kids down on the carpet (enjoy watching their eyes bug out) and explain that this is ALL the money your family has to buy things with during the coming month.  They will be very impressed with your piles of cash at this point!

Then bring out a poster with the monthly family expenses listed in a large font.  Have them count out the bills to "pay" the bills  -- mortgage, grocery bill, electricity, water, sewer, insurance, gasoline, car insurance, piano lessons, etc.  They will watch those stacks of green backs disappear just like you do every month.  When you've paid all the bills, let them count up how much money is left.  This just might be the most sobering moment of their young lives, and will help them understand why the $80 tennis shoes or $150 jeans they want might not be in the best interest of the entire family.

If you are uncomfortable using real money, try using Monopoly money or cutting up green paper and writing $20 on each one.  But, as you can imagine, it would be much more effective using the real thing.

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A Peek at the Promised Land (Carole)

A few weeks ago, Tara commented that she didn't see the point in being frugal, frugal, frugal just so she could be a millionaire when she and her husband are 80!  What is the fun in that??  Maybe some of you have had the same thoughts as you've thought about coupon-ing, garage sale-ing, eating at home. . .   Hopefully, I can give you a glimpse at where this whole Frugal Life thing is really headed.

If you have credit card debt, car loans and/or student loans, most people (when you finally get very serious about it) can pay all of it off within 3 years.  We have never carried credit card debt, but we've had a few car loans and we had over $60,000 in student loans back in the 1980's -- so about $130,000 in today's money.   We paid minimum payments for a number of years, and then we got religion.  We paid off our car in about 8 months and our student loans in about 2 years.  So we paid off all our consumer debt in right around that 3 year mark.  We weren't making tons of money and we had 3 children.  We were extremely average.  You could probably pay things off faster than we did.

Our next step was paying off our house.  We knew a couple of families our own age (early 30's) who had paid off their houses.  We were AMAZED.  Could we do that too??  How long would something like that take?  We owed about $160,000 on our house at the time.  As a little family we confronted this monumental financial goal with everything we had.  We printed out an amortization schedule (numerous pages of small type -- very scary), and taped it ALL to the back of the door where the bills were paid in our house.  Every month when we paid our regular house payment, we also added as much extra $$ as we could scrape out of our home budget and sent that along to the mortgage company too -- that extra money goes straight to the principle.   We often gathered our 3 girls into the room while we marked off  the payment amount with a highlighter pen and circled all the skipped interest payments that NEVER HAS TO BE PAID-- EVER!!  Did we starve through this time?  Live on nothing?  Never leave the house?  No, we actually took a few pretty decent vacations along the way and fed and clothed everyone.  Probably saw a few movies too.  But we stuck to our house payback schedule.  We threw everything we could at this debt and in 3+ years we received our title, free and clear, in the mail.  That is a moment never to be forgotten.

We paid that house off in 1996.  In 2003 I wanted a bigger house (we had more children, the older ones were larger, and we wanted to live in a better school district).  We found the house we wanted and went back into a $100,000 mortgage (we were able to pay for MOST of the house with cold, hard cash from the sale of our first house -- that felt very, very nice).  We paid off this new mortgage in about 2 years.  I thought I would mention here that both times we got down to the last $30,000 on our mortgage, extra money just started appearing.  I can't even explain it.  It's like the Lord knows you are serious about taking care of your family and your finances, so He blesses you beyond anything you've ever seen.  The last $30,000 was paid off about 5 months earlier than scheduled -- both times.  When you get to that point, let me know if this happens to you too!

So, when you've paid off all of your debt -- in under 5 years probably -- how does life look?  It is an amazing place to be.  Think of the amount of money you bring home every month in your paycheck.  Now think of how much it would cost you to live with no major bills.  No credit card payments, no car loans, no student loans, no house payment.  Can you even wrap your mind around that?

You still have to buy food, electricity, gasoline, car insurance, clothes, property taxes.  That's about it.  Hmm.  How much would that add up to in a month?  Not very much.  All the rest of your take home pay is YOURS.  Wow.

What will you do with it?

Saving is a big thing.  Putting as much money as you can into tax-free or tax-deferred programs is very smart.

Beyond that, you can spend it on anything you want.  You could buy a new car with cash  -- every few months!  You could buy a brand new boat in cash, also in just a few months.  You could redecorate your entire house.  Put in a backyard pool.  You can be generous beyond anything you can imagine.  Travel to Europe, Asia, Africa -- every few months.  All for cash.

You will finally be free.  All the hard work you (or your spouse) puts in to bring home money, will finally benefit YOU.  All in about 5 years.

Enjoy.

Becoming Frugal Part III (Guest Post by Bart, Janssen's Husband)

In early 2007, Janssen and I both had full-time jobs. We had no kids and no car payments, and our only major monthly expense was our mortgage payment, which was a whopping $850.

So when we decided to start saving money, we saw instant rewards.

Every month, we'd sit down in front of the computer and decide how to allocate our extra income among our savings accounts.

That's when I discovered that saving money could be just as satisfying as spending it, if not more.

In other circumstances, I may not have felt that way. Had I not been frustrated with our lack of savings after working hard for what felt like a long time to establish our financial security, it may not have felt so good to save.

But I HAD been frustrated, and I HAD felt the stress of living paycheck to paycheck. And saving money was a method by which Janssen and I could overcome those things.

For the past couple of years, I've been doing the opposite of saving money. First, I tried my hand at futures trading and LOST money instead of saving it (don't try this at home). Then I took out over $30k in student loans for my master's degree.

And now we're paying off student debt as quickly as possible. It's not as exciting or satisfying as saving money, but it's liberating, and it's setting the groundwork to begin saving again, which I'm definitely looking forward to doing.

Have you experienced the satisfaction of saving money, and was the satisfaction as surprising to you as it was to me?

Becoming Frugal - Part II (Guest Post by Janssen's Now Frugal Husband)

One of the first things I noticed when I moved away from Utah was how expensive real life can be.

• A new wardrobe of business casual shirts and slacks seemed to cost a fortune.
• The 1-bedroom apartment I moved into, which was neither the least nor the most expensive option, cost $740/month, not to mention the first and last month's rent and security deposit. That sounds great now, living in Boston as we do, but it was a lot to fork out with those first few pay checks.
• A full-time salary meant what felt like king-size tax withholdings and tithing.
• It cost a couple thousand dollars to move from Utah to Texas.
• Add the costs of food, utilities, auto insurance, gasoline, auto repair and maintenance, our first anniversary cruise, a house, and all the things you buy with a home (lawn mower, ladder, clippers, and picture frames, to name a few), and it's easy to understand why I thought life had gotten pretty expensive, pretty fast.

Around Christmas time, 8 months after we moved to Texas, I had had enough of spending money as fast as we could earn it.

I remember clearly the frustration I felt at how much money we had earned and subsequently spent over the last 8 months. Janssen and I were driving our car back from Bergstrom International Airport late at night, and I told her of my financial frustrations.

Her response was perfect. She agreed with me!

For those of you hoping to convert your spouse to frugality:
Step #2: Support any movement your spouse makes in the frugal direction.

Step #1 was to be an example. Don't stop this at the crucial moment, even if you want to go on that vacation or buy those new curtains. If your generally non-frugal spouse is feeling the urge to stop spending, throw yourself behind that initiative and lend a hand. He just might gain enough momentum for a jump start.

Also, refrain from saying things like, "Oh, so NOW you want to be frugal. I've been frugal for the last three years and all of the sudden YOU want to be frugal. What brought on this sudden change in attitude, hmm?"

That's not going to help your spouse. Rather, do as Janssen did (you can pay me later, J), by being agreeable and supportive. Your spouse just might have the same experience I had (to be continued in Part III).

Becoming Frugal - Part I (Guest Post by Janssen's Now Frugal Husband)

Janssen has always been frugal.

I was not always so. From when I was born until the tail-end of college, I followed a simple financial equation:

$ Earned = $ Spent

Saving the little money I made didn't make sense to me (pun not intended), since I'd soon be making the big bucks, at which point an extra five or ten thousand dollars in the bank would be small change. In other words, I didn't want to make a relatively big sacrifice when I was young only to reap a relatively small reward when I was older.

While I still think that philosophy is debatable, depending on what kinds of sacrifices are being made and what kinds of rewards are being reaped, something that is not debatable is the fact that Janssen had a profound effect on my frugality.

Reflecting back, I have identified 5 pivotal experiences that resulted in my full conversion to a life of frugal living.

The first was when Janssen and I were just days away from getting married, and Janssen paid off my car with a good chunk of her savings - savings she had been working on since she was a little girl.

Oh how I cringe at the thought. She had made the sacrifice I had been unwilling to make, and her hard-earned money represented years of work, from selling muffins with her sisters to people in local office buildings, to spending long hours at Cold Stone as a busy high schooler with plenty of other pastimes she might have enjoyed instead.

And there I was - a 25 year-old guy with no savings to show for years of working part-time through high school and college. No, I couldn't be bothered to save for the future. It was too much of a sacrifice.

All the sudden that philosophy sounded pretty lame. And the embarrassment and inspiration I felt as my amazing fiancée wrote that check marked the beginning of my conversion to frugality.

So, for the frugal wives out there hoping their husbands convert:

Step #1: Be an example.