We’re actually debt free, except for our mortgage. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned that before, but even if so it’s worth repeating lest you think we are spending extravagantly to maintain and develop our dream.

Um, no. The truth is that I support nine people (and two dogs, two cats, nine ducks, six chickens, myriad arthropods, and hopefully no mice) on one income, which is not that much. I make a little more than the national median income, and we pay ten percent of our gross income in tithing.

How?

The biggest secret is to control our spending. Elder Robert D. Hales gave a terrific talk on this recently. It’s taken time to learn that we will probably never make enough money to buy everything we could want. Like the old saying goes, “You can never get enough of what you don’t need, because what you need cannot satisfy you.” So we have to stand back and say, what do we really need in order to live? And then, what would we like to buy, and how will we buy it? You end up saving for stuff and then paying cash for it. We’ve learned to resist the current of thinking that says we can buy anything we want right now, and somehow pay for it later.

A large family helps in that respect because we are forced to live within our means. If we put our kids in daycare, drove fashionable new cars, and bought mostly processed food, it would ruin us. We would live “sustainably” even if it were not au courant to do so, because we cannot live any other way. We have to raise everything we can for our own consumption. We can’t waste; it costs too much. We live by the adage, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

That said, we don’t live lives of wretched deprivation. We eat like kings, dress fairly well, live in our dream house, and drive three sort of late-model, paid-for cars. There are lots of things one can do to live well on a limited income. I’ll talk about some things we do in upcoming posts.