Date : 4/20/10

Kevin wrote and asked if I do not use this blog anymore ?

No, not over my dead body. This blog will be running till I cannot write

In my nursing school, I learned about 101 events in one’s life that are consider as stresses and also the correlation between stresses and diseases.

Some of the stresses are getting married, having a baby, spouse going through divorce, losing a spouse and I believe on of them is buying a house !

Yes, buying a house.

I moved to the US in 2001. Even before I was into extreme coupon, I was long a frugal queen.

I learned about cheap living in mobile home from one of my husband friends. One month after we got married, we used the wedding gift that my father in law gave us and some of our money towards a used mobile home in an upscale mobile home park. We paid cash on the home. We lived the last 9 years on a mortgage free life style.

It was a bliss and a low stress life style. We will be moving to our new home after living in our mobile home for exactly 9years. We moved in on June 1st 2001 and a new owner will be moving in on June 1st 2010.

4 simple reasons that I choose to live this life style :

1. I believe homes price was way inflated in 2001.

2. I believe there were many better investment than Real Estate in 2001. One of them was gold and the other was silver. So I choose to invest in gold and silver investment than living in Mentone subdivision (which a lot of my friends live), I choose to live in Whitney park.

Needless to say, a picture worths a thousand words, look at the 10 year gold price. I started buying gold in 2002 with gold price @ $250 / oz.

3. When I first arrived in US, I found out that my Australian degrees were pretty much useless here ( I had a bachelor degree in computer science and a master degree in operation research).

Gainesville being a small town, and the two major employers are UF and Shands and if I do not get into these 2 companies , I pretty much doom…

I send out 100 application letters and only 2 companies wrote back to me. And the saddest part was they said I was over qualified for the positions I had applied. And with all the bad news from my job application, I was more convince that with only one income, we better keep our debts to the minimum. And that confirm our decision on living in a mobile home without any mortgage.

It is not the kind of trash mobile park that one would think.

It has a nice community pool , a club house , a nice roof over B.B.Q area, a tennis court and a very well maintained park. Nice neighbors and generally pretty nice maintained homes.

This is the community pool

Surrounded by lakes…

And it is a decent 1700 sq ft well maintained home.

A separate living room and

Family room…

and huge kitchen…

4. Since my husband and I were in our late 30’s and early 40’s when we got married, we felt that if we were to have any children, we would not wait too long and in our second year of marriage, the Lord bless us with an extremely gift child.

He is 6 going to 7 and he could recite 16 verses from James 3 (English Version).

With a little one and mama not working, living without a mortgage free life style seems to be a great idea. And it turned out to be one of the best decision we have made.

Nursing and home schooling

After doing a little research on local industries and understand a little of the jobs situation, I decided to go into nursing and it turned out to be another of a great decision we have made.

We have such a acute shortage in nurses and it was not even a laughing matter. Even before I graduated, I was offered 2 jobs with 2 local hospital. I took one which gave me 2 years bonus before I even walked into the hospital.

With the flexibility of my job, I am able to part home school. Again, I choose not to work any over time so I can spend my time nurturing my child. I work only 2 to 3 days a week and the rest of my time I do things which I like , home schooling, blogging and couponing.

We chose to send our son to a private Christian school which offer part time home school option and 3 days school. My son tuition fees is the biggest expense we have for the house hold. Imagine that, I spend about $400 for entire year house hold expense and that is about monthly tuition fees for my son. However, I think it is money worth spend. He goes to Corner Stone Academy.

One of the thing that I have done the last 2 months is that I have spend a fair bit of my time home schooling my boy than doing my blog.

Being a bright child, I find the work that I put in towards my boy double fold the result.

One of my very good friend inspire me a lot on home schooling her kids.
She has a very informative blog about books her kids read. I have taken some of the ideas from her and improvised some for my home schooling project for my child.

I decided that we should do a bit of home schooling everyday and that is what I have done with him the last 2 months.

We spend 45mins everyday on this (except Sunday) :
15mins power spelling
15mins solving Math problem
15mins practicing piano

I got the idea about the book “Power spelling” from my friend, Shelli, the blog I mentioned before.

Apparently, if you go through this book, your child will acquire 5000 commonly used English words one could ever need to learn to go to college. I love the book and the system how you should use the book.

Using the book placement test, my child was tested to have grade 6 spelling skill.

Have you ever thought of this :
If your child learn 10 new English words every day.
He would acquire 3650 words in a year ?

I will dedicated a section of my blog on our home schooling journey.

New Home Journey

With the bonus money and 1 1/2 years of salary, I am able to buy a home in a nice subdivision. We paid $43k less than the owner who sold us the house. They bought the house in 2006.

However, the path of buying our home is not without any trials.

I wrote an email to Tracey, Julie and a few of you in early March sharing with you we will be signing a contract on our new house.

It turned out that that house is in a flood zone. It has never occured to us to ask the realtor to find out if the house is in a flood zone before signing a contract on the house (that is another of my blog post in the future on how to choose a realtor ).

It was quite a disappointing experience to me because the house is a good deal to me , its sq footage and being in a nice area and the experience did throw me off the spin for a shot time. However, I think it is a worth while learn experience.

The canceling of contract was an experience and I would really not want anyone to have to go through such an experience. That throw us to square one of having to go through the whole process of looking for another house.

We did find one and hopefully there is no unforeseen circumstances taht would come up tojeopardize our closing on 4/28/10. ( I will post some pictures of the new home once we close).

I have not done coupon for a while but I did get the deals on Fast fixing chicken and Tomstone pizza.

As much I love my extreme coupon journey. I find that I need to come up with a more efficient system. I need to streamline my process a little bit better and that is my summer project.

I am very inspired by thepioneerwoman blog as well and I have decided to take up a photography class from a local photography studio.

My intention is to revamp my blog this summer and it will consist of a new strategy on my coupon habit, a home and garden section and a home schooling section.

So, if want to go through this journey with me, you will see some changes with my blog after I settle into my new place. Mean while I apology for my MIA.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 11:23 am and is filed under Coupon LifeStyle, ZMisc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.