Being in debt sucks. I don’t know about you, but I hate it more than any human should hate anything!

The purpose of living in a tiny house is to put ourselves in a position where we have as little money going out each month as possible. We are currently doing this by relentlessly attacking our debt, paying off our credit cards and student loans.

With less money going out each month, we are able to spend more time doing the things we enjoy most. As corny as it may sound, that involves spending more time together as a family!

Living in our tiny house is helping us regain control over our lives, enabling us to live the way we want, on our own terms.

Stephanie and I have become pretty savvy at saving money over the years, pretty much out of necessity, due to the fact that we’ve never had much money or jobs that made much money and have always had to find ways to do our best with the little we had. It’s become part of our identity now as tiny house dwellers, still proudly pinching pennies to this day.

These days, even as full-time tiny house dwellers, we’re attempting to save as much money as we can to do more of the things we enjoy. To make things as simple as possible, we compiled a list with the ten simplest things we’ve done to get ourselves out of debt:

1. We had a cheap wedding!

Weddings don’t have to break the bank! Did you know the average wedding costs over $33,000?! Our penny-pinching days began with our wedding, which we managed to have in an incredibly cost-effective manner.

We chose a small bed and breakfast that only allowed us to host about 40 people. We had a large bridal party of bridesmaids and groomsmen that basically comprised half our wedding party and stood beside us during the ceremony, and the rest of the room was filled with seats for our remaining family in attendance. We booked the entire place and saved money by having our friends book rooms to spend the night partying with us!

Photographers can also be expensive for your wedding. We took a chance here by emailing college professors and asking if they had any promising photography students that would be interested in photographing our wedding. We got connected with one of their students and agreed on a price of $500, much cheaper than the $2600 average photographers typically cost for weddings, according a study by theknot.com in 2018.

We truly found a diamond in the rough as our wedding photographer. He did an amazing job and a few of the photos he took on our wedding day we still find ourselves staring at every day, in awe of his perfection in capturing those moments.

For our entertainment, I hired my sister and her talented friend to sing and perform a few songs throughout the night. I believe I paid them $100 each, which doesn’t sound like much, but I’m pretty sure it meant a lot to two high school students! These days my sister is off crushing it on a full scholarship at NYU in their music program (proud big brother brag!) and I think it’s fair to say we got our money’s worth considering how talented she is! They did an incredible job, especially when they performed an original song I wrote to surprise Stephanie for our first dance!

We designed centerpieces for all the table settings that were adorable and basically free, besides the twine and glue from a hot glue gun. They were wood slab cookies that were gifted from family and the wine bottles were recycled!

 

My mother in law cooked all of the food for the evening, as well as the desserts, and it was incredible.

I believe we spent around $1500 and had the night of our lives. We are still quite proud of that! The majority of the monetary gifts we received at our wedding would eventually help to fund our tiny house!

2. We stopped using credit cards.

By not using our credit cards, we can’t accrue any more charges and further escalate our balances! Credit cards should really only be used for emergencies. In fact, we’ve had to use them for an emergency when we first turned our water service on and learned we had a pipe leaking underground. That was an expensive fix.

Credit cards seem to be used most often to buy things we want, but don’t actually need. I’ve found one of the best perks of living in a tiny space to be how it discourages us from this kind of mindless spending. You can badly want something but easily stop yourself knowing you don’t even have space for it!

Sometimes credit cards can be okay, if you’re using them for rewards programs and paying off the balance at the end of each month. But even then, when you’re using them in this manner, I’ve realized that just having that credit card available makes it too easy to make mindless purchases when you have a moment of weakness. It’s too easy to buy items knowing you can just pay it back later. Then it becomes a bad habit and before you know it you have a large bill that can be a struggle to pay off. When you stop spending on things you want, you can start focusing only on the important things that truly enrich your life. It requires a great deal of discipline!

3. Eliminating unnecessary bills.

We do this by making our cell phone bill as cheap as possible. We also refuse to pay for the ridiculously overpriced cable tv packages. It’s important that we have a quality internet connection, and other than that, we don’t need anything extra, and neither do you! There are so many different streaming services out there with all different monthly prices, so you have to figure out what you like and pick one, or pick nothing! It is pretty nice to have the ability to pay only for the things you want rather than one large package of channels, most of them you’ll never watch, for one exorbitant price.

It’s estimated that cord-cutters save up to $1200 per year!

You can do this simply by searching around for the best price you can find for things like car insurance, home insurance, health insurance, etc.

For instance, this year we switched our cell phone provider from AT&T to Mint Mobile and went from paying $100 monthly to a mere $30 a month for both of us! Mint makes you pay for the year in advance, so we ended up paying $360 for the entire year instead of paying $1200 per year with AT&T! Those are huge savings we’ve been enjoying by making just one switch in coverage. Every little bit adds up, so do your research and find out what services will be most cost effective for you.

A few bills I wish we could eliminate is our water, sewer, and electric. I badly wish we had the ability to go off-grid with rainwater catchment, solar panels for energy, and a composting toilet. We simply didn’t have the necessary funds to set this up for ourselves and also were unsure if we would even be allowed to do so within the county/borough limits. I do find myself occasionally dreaming of this beautiful utopia in my mind where we are completely self-sufficient and without those additional monthly expenses, but of course, the initial set-up cost for all of these systems would be very expensive! Maybe one day we’ll get there!

4. Not buying every new piece of technology.

The latest reveal of the new iPhones during Apple’s yearly keynote was truly a love letter to consumerism. They make great products, and they also do a great job at promoting their products. They make it seem as though you need these items, regardless of the price. The ads make it seem as though you’re missing out on something special by not buying one.

Sure, it would be great to have the newest iPhone, but do I really need it? My iPhone SE has served me very well and I plan to hold on to it until it no longer works. I honestly believe the SE is the perfect phone for a minimalist, with its small size and quality features. It’s also one of the few phones that still comfortably fit in your pocket!

Sure, it would be nice to have a brand new 4k smart tv, but our current Roku works just fine in 1080p. It would be nice to have the newest iMac as well, but my refurbished iMac from 2008 actually performs pretty well and allows me to do everything I need to do when working on our blog, except for video editing.

5. We became DIYers.

How do you do this? By building a deck yourself for $200 instead of paying someone $2000. You can learn how to repair pipes that leak under your sink instead of paying an exorbitant amount of money to a plumber. When we first moved in, we realized there was a small leak coming from our water heater. Instead of panicking and complaining, I simply tightened the bolts and stopped the leak. It may be a small feat, but you can’t deny how empowering it can be to realize how capable you truly are.

This also means cutting our own hair! I haven’t paid for a haircut in over three years. How is that possible? Stephanie cuts it for me! For the one-time cost of a set of clippers, I have endless free haircuts. It doesn’t sound like a big saving, but small savings definitely add up. If you pay $25 for a haircut once a month, that will amount to $300 per year!

Another easy way to save money is by making your own coffee at home. I used to stop at McDonald’s on my way to work each morning for a coffee. Those $1 coffees seem harmless, but they add up. I’ve enjoyed making my own coffee at home. I use a pour over cup from Melitta, compostable filters, and manually grind whole beans for each cup. This way I’m getting the freshest possible cup of coffee. It’s also a fun part of my morning routine now. I also re use my Yeti stainless steel mug so I’m not using any plastics or harmful pollutants as a cup.

6. Driving less.

This is a new benefit for us and one that never would have been possible had we not taken the tiny house route. I recently quit my job in order to stay at home with our daughter. Now, we’ll be saving extra money in gas that I won’t have to put into my car twice a week!

I’ve also learned that buying a new car is the worst investment you can make. In the future, I plan to buy only used vehicles and hope to pay in cash to avoid a lengthy monthly payment with horrible interest rates.

Mark Cuban has talked about driving an old clunker in his early days to save money when he was starting out. Ideally, driving as little as possible would be best for us all. It always felt so unnatural to me being couped up in a car, day in, day out, stuck in this constant state of anxiety, not only because of the inept driving of others, but also the unpredictability of mother nature. Could you imagine living so close to work that you could walk or ride a bike every day? If you have the ability to work from home, you could eliminate the need to drive entirely.  Sounds like a dream to me.

7. Not paying for childcare.

This is not a criticism of others who do pay for childcare. In our case, we simply don’t have the money to afford to do so. It can be the equivalent of an extra rent payment each month! And in the spirit of everything else we’ve talked about on this blog, I don’t like the idea of paying someone else to do something I can and should be doing myself! After all, who knows better how to care for your child than you?!  We’re planning to enjoy this time with her now before one day we wake up and realize she’s a teenager!

8. Growing our own food.

This is something we’re learning as we go. This is the first year we created a nice garden space to grow our vegetables and herbs. We plan to expand this garden space in the future, but the seeds are in place (literally) to create our own grocery store in our backyard. We have plans to add a greenhouse at some point to extend the growing season hopefully into winter! We also hope to turn the far side of our property into an orchard, with as many fruit trees as we can fit! It’s fun to get your hands dirty and be directly involved with the food you’re putting into your body.

Within the past few months we’ve added a small flock of chickens to help not only lessen our grocery bill by providing eggs, but to also fertilize our garden beds and help create our own compost in the future!

9. Not buying new clothes.

This is an easy one for us. We don’t care too much about wearing new clothes or anything fancy. We don’t have anyone to impress! In fact, we’ve downsized quite a bit of our clothing inventory since we’ve moved into the tiny house. It seems like every few months, we find ourselves purging more and more of our clothes we never seem to wear. We realize we end up wearing basically the same few sets of clothing over and over, while loads of other clothes just sit and take up space. We’ve also been lucky not to have to buy many new clothes for our daughter, as we’ve been getting free hand me downs from her cousin who is a bit older as she outgrows them.

10. We’re mortgage free!

Did I forget to mention this? Maybe I should have listed this one first since it’s one we’re most proud of. We saved enough money to purchase our tiny home with cash in order to be mortgage-free! Of course, we aren’t entirely mortgage-free since we had to take out a loan to purchase our property, but in less than two years time when it is finally paid off, we will be down to the bare minimum of monthly expenses. That’s the end goal! Freedom awaits!

Now living in a tiny house isn’t always easily, especially over the past year it has been very difficult with all of us stuck at home all the time. But I’d argue that being a little uncomfortable at times is worth it for the end goal of being debt free. I consider debt to be nothing more than modern day slavery, so I’d rather be a free man at the end of the day.

Now for you, tiny house living might seem kind of crazy, but simply downsizing your home could be beneficial in the long run. Saving hundreds of dollars on rent or mortgages adds up. So explore every available option to put yourself in a good position.

I realize this post might make us seem like a bunch of struggling kids in desperate need of help, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re doing just fine! We actually enjoy the struggle and the constant search for new ways to save. It’s become engrained in our DNA–it’s part of who we are and we embrace it.

Life doesn’t have to be about wishing you were rich or bemoaning the position you’re currently in–it’s about making the most of what you have, right where you are.

How about you? Do you find any other ways to save money each month other than the ways listed above? What would you do with your money if you didn’t have a mortgage/rent to pay each month? Comment below!