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Greetings!

Deborah Wuehler and family

I have known moms who have spent thousands on their homeschool curriculum, and I have met those that have spent next to nothing. Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), surveyed more than 1500 homeschooling families and found that the average expenditure was about $450 per child per year (http://www.nheri.org/).  Maybe you don't know how much to spend or even how much you do spend. If that is the case, a budget would be beneficial. Here are some factors to consider:

Your actual education budget: What have you and your husband decided will be your education budget? If you haven't talked about this area of spending, this is the first place to start. Once you know your spending limit, you can start deciding what is really necessary to purchase and what can wait.

Decide what is necessary and what is extra: Make a list of the core subjects you have decided for this year for each child and start with that. Don't purchase anything extra until you've gotten the core.  Start going on treasure hunts for the best prices, or have your older children do the research.

Make good choices for the extras: If you have money left over, decide what extras you will really put to use this year. Or if money is tight, put the extra aside for next year's core subjects or for field trips or extracurricular activities.

Unlike the public school system, you don't need to pour more money into education to achieve a better outcome. In fact, it matters little how much money was spent on a homeschooler's education. From the very least amount of money spent, homeschoolers succeed academically because it's not the amount of money spent, it's the environment of home education that makes it successful: parents teaching their own children in their own home.

If you are truly in need, pray and ask God to provide what you need. He is a good provider; I have heard countless stories of God's provision for the homeschool journey.

If you are still deciding what to do with your children this next year, don't worry about the expense, worry about your children, and bring them home where they belong. Homeschooling has been, and is still, the wisest choice. No matter what the cost, it will be the best investment you've ever made.

"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding." Proverbs 4:7

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.  And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates." Deuteronomy 6:4-9

~Deborah

TOS Senior Editor

SeniorEditor@TheHomeschoolMagazine.com

Click here to find out how.

Diana Waring

Dear Friends,

Believe me, I was ALWAYS homeschooling on a budget!  When we first began our adventure, my husband was a public school teacher--which meant his salary was very low . . . and I was at home with our kids.

But, where there's a will, there's a way.

We saved up for curriculum (which often turned out to be a great disappointment because it did not fit our family), we bartered for product at conventions (it is helpful if you have a product of your own to barter with!), and we purchased things that turned out to be treasures.  We have sort of run the gamut from best to worst and back again!

So, my first bit of advice is to try to actually hold in your hands the books and curriculum you are considering using.  Despite the incredible advertising done on products these days, you may find that the can't-live-without book recommended on the internet is as unappetizing as yesterday's oatmeal.  Or, on the other hand, you may discover that is a pearl without price, worth every cent!  The only way to really know is to look it over yourself, if at all possible.

Secondly, ask yourself whether it is good value.  I have a very frugal homeschooling friend in Australia who decided to pay an enormous amount of money for a particular book, because it was exactly what she needed.  And, do you know, a year later she still feels that it was worth the price!  However, I have other friends who have purchased cheap curriculum that turned out to be extremely costly, because it was difficult to use, frustrating to their kids, and a waste of their time.  When making purchasing decisions, make sure you are comparing apples to apples, rather than apples to cardboard!!

Next, check out your options.  Does your library have the book, or can it be ordered through interlibrary loan?  Does your church or support group or co-op or university have books or curriculum that you can check out?  Are there online samples where you can try before you buy?  (Here are my free samples online, in case you are interested in history!)  Ask around and see if, perhaps, someone knows someone who just might have a copy!

Finally, and most importantly, I encourage you to pray.  When we began to pray for how to survive homeschooling (back in the early days of my huge failures, as I tried to recreate school at home), the Lord led us to a number of people and resources that absolutely transformed our lives.  The One who has called you on your journey knows exactly what you need.  And He is such a good Father, who genuinely answers His children's cries for help.  What an adventure to take your needs in prayer to Him, and then watch and see His answers!  That can be the very best part of homeschooling, in my opinion.

Be relational,

Diana

Hal & Melanie Young

Hal & Melanie Young are authors of Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching, and Appreciating Boys, the 2011 Christian Small Publishers Book of the Year and the parents of six real sons and two real daughters, who've been homeschooled from the beginning. When they aren't traveling the country speaking about raising boys, Biblical family life, and homeschooling, they live in noisy familial bliss in North Carolina. Follow them at www.Facebook.com/raisingrealmen and www.Twitter.com/raisingrealmen. 

~~~

Boy, do we ever understand homeschooling on a budget. For the last six years, as we've fought cancer, coped with a baby with a heart condition and more, all of our budgets have been of the shoestring variety. We've found limited finances can be a blessing in disguise, deep disguise maybe, but a blessing anyway!  It's made us more creative, and given us opportunities we might have forgotten to seek out.

For example, as we've struggled with finances, we've had to do things ourselves we might otherwise  have hired out. What an opportunity to teach your boys life skills they'll need when they're starting out! Once our kitchen cabinets were getting very grubby-looking and Melanie was getting more and more sick of them. One of our sons, who was 12 or 13 stepped up and said, "I'd like to paint them for you!" Uh oh! What if he messed them up? Well, he'd be hard put to make them look actually worse than they already did and after all, paint can be, well, painted over. So, we said, "Sure, go ahead!" He took them off the hinges, sanded them down and did a quite respectable job painting them with a little direction. Any mistakes were easily fixed and the lessons of initiative and diligence were a lot longer lasting than paint!

To save money last year, Melanie pulled out a history curriculum she'd used many years ago with the older boys. We had all the books handy, so there would be nothing to buy, even if it wasn't as jazzy as something new. What a blessing it turned out to be. Reading those same stories again brought back so many happy memories that sometimes the high schoolers would drop in just to hear them again. We all enjoyed it so much, and so much more than we would have with something new and unfamiliar. It became a shared experience for the little children and the grown ones that we didn't expect.

Those unexpected blessings have taught us to welcome our limitations. They humble us and they teach our children and prepare them for life. One of ours said, "I'm thankful we've had hard times. It's taken away my fear of not being able to support a family. I know the Lord will provide in whatever circumstance I'm in." Now that's a lesson worth learning!

Hal & Melanie Young

For more help on this topic, get our workshop CD on Just As I Am: Homeschooling in Hard Times. Link: http://www.raisingrealmen.com/ourstore/workshop-cds/on-family-life/

 

(6 p.m. CDT, 5 p.m. MDT, 4 p.m. PDT)  

with Malia Russell and Molly Green. 

Check out all the details at www.SchoolhouseExpo.com.