Our Application for "Extreme Cheapskates"

I was wondering if we were cheap enough to be considered for the show...so I wrote out our application and it was 1.5 pages long, single spaced. I figured we have a good chance of being considered.

Here it is!

How we save money with children:

I have a two-year-old son and a nine-month-old daughter. I use cloth diapers and cloth wipes. I also had a home birth with my second child because it’s so much cheaper than a hospital birth. (I also tried a home birth with my first but ended up going to the hospital.) I breastfeed. I buy their clothes from the thrift store, but sometimes I find clothes cheap enough on clearance racks in real stores to buy. I also buy all of their books and most of their toys from thrift stores. I bought my son $15 worth of toys from Craigslist for his first birthday and that’s all he got from us. I found a name train toy that spelled “Alan” for $3 and I bought it for my son, even though his name is Jackson. He’s two, he doesn’t know! We potty trained our son by bribing him with mints. Any time we ate out and there was a bowl of mints at the restaurant, my husband and I would each take huge handfuls of mints and put them in our pockets so we didn’t have to buy them at the store.

How we save money around the house:

I hate spending money on paper products so I use cloth wipes instead of paper towels. I make my own cleaning solutions. I wash and reuse Ziploc bags. We try to make all of our food from scratch, even salad dressings. If there is leftover food we save it for our next pot roast. Even the juices at the bottom of the crock pot get frozen and saved for next time! We only drink water from the tap and our son gets milk. If we have any other drink in our house it’s because someone gave it to us. If we need furniture we look for used first before we go to Ikea or Walmart. I have dumpster dived for furniture before. My husband vomited on our mattress and we didn’t replace it because we didn’t want to spend the money. I haven’t been to a hair salon in three years, I just have my husband cut my hair. I always get so many compliments on my long hair. It's only long because I'm too cheap to cut it! I didn’t even get my hair done for my wedding, I just tied it up in a ponytail and put the veil over it.

How we save money on entertainment:

We like to do free things, like go on walks (with our kids in the jogging stroller we bought on Craigslist) or go to the library. We do go out to eat once in a while, but we stick to our budget. Once we walked out of a restaurant after we had been seated and served drinks (water, of course) because the prices were too high. If people want us to eat out with them, we make them wait while we scrounge around in our coupon book for a good enough deal. Once we wanted bagels from Einstein’s but had already spent all of our food money. So we searched all around the house until we found enough change to go buy the bagels. If we go to a restaurant and my son is given crayons and paper, we will take the crayons home so we don’t have to pay for more. We took our son to Disneyland. And by “took our son to Disneyland,” I mean we took him to Downtown Disney and not into the actual park because we didn’t want to pay admission. We also parked two miles away so we wouldn’t have to pay for parking. And, needless to say, we didn’t spend a dime in Downtown Disney. I don’t go out to bars or clubs as often as I used to before kids, but when I do, I fill up a water bottle with vodka and put it in my purse. I order regular sodas at the bar and then go to the bathroom to mix in my alcohol.

Transportation:

We have a 15-year-old Toyota Corolla with a big rusty dent in the side worth less than $2000 and a 13-year-old Toyota Sequoia that is worth about $5000. We love these cars and have no plans on replacing them until they totally die. Which isn’t unusual for some people, but my husband is an engineer with a great salary and could go buy a car in cash if he wanted to. The Corolla has some kind of issue where if it sits too long in cold weather without running, the battery will completely drain. My husband wants to get it fixed. I said no, and I make him take the battery to Auto Zone to get charged every time the car dies. Our son also scribbled all over the back bumper of the Sequoia with a Sharpie and we are not buying anything to fix it because we don’t care enough to spend money on a cleaner to scrub it with. We lived in LA for six months, and we used the third row seats of our Sequoia as a couch for the first few months until we caved and bought a $189 futon from Walmart. The futon has since broken twice, and each time my husband has found a way to screw the parts back together. If it breaks for good, we are going to use our Sequoia seats as a couch again.

Mika at 9 Months

• She weighs 18 pounds and measures 27.5 inches.
• I was giving her purees, and she loved them at first. After a few weeks she started hating being spoon fed, so now I just put her food on her tray. She loves food and yells at me if I'm eating and she doesn't have food. She takes for.ev.er to eat. She spends about an hour eating teeny tiny bits at a time. She loves to throw food over the edge of the tray and watch it fall on the floor. She also can eat out of those puree pouches. She can do the pincer grasp well enough to pick up Cheerios.

• She can smoothly go from sitting to crawling to sitting. She used to just flop onto her stomach. She also does this sort of plank thing where she holds her weight on her hands and feet. She does "real" crawling now. She also started pulling up.

First day pulling up!

• She is a little troublemaker, always crawling where she's not supposed to (bathrooms) and taking wipes out of the case. She follows me around the house now, and sometimes she will follow Jackson around.
• We don't tie her hair up in the "waterspout" anymore, we just clip it to the side. Jackson likes to pick out her bows.

Every eight-month-old girl needs bows and furs...right?

(Not showing off, the fur vest was $7 from Babies R Us on clearance.)

• She loves playing games. She made one up where she pushes my face to the side and then I turn back and look at her. She does it over and over and thinks it's hilarious. And she thinks it's funny to crawl around the bed when she's supposed to be sleeping.
• She still loves to blow raspberries. She also loves to make zombie noises.
• She is a lot more interactive with Jackson and can sort of play with him. 

  Mika pooping by an open fire...Jack Frost nipping at your nose...