Involving Living Series Part 5: Financial Independence – Why DIY is the Key

This is Part 5 of my Involved Living Series where I am talking about our journey to financial independence. You can see all posts in the series here. I recommend starting at the beginning if you are stopping by for the first time to give you all of the background on why I’m sharing this and how we plan to achieve this goal.

First up, I want to thank everyone for your kind wishes on our big announcement! We have factored this into our financial independence goals, and it’s actually a big reason we started on this path in the first place. We liked the idea of having flexibility in the future for us as a family. Only time will tell exactly what that means for us, but once we get into this whole parenting thing, I’ll incorporate kid spending into these discussions.

This last post in the series isn’t strictly about finance. It’s more of a mindset, but it has improved our savings picture tremendously. It been both a money saver and a money maker. If you follow my blog, you already know we do this a lot.

DIY.

When we bought our home in 2009, it was a short sale and below market value at the time, and it was in need of a lot of work. We took that into account when we bought the home that we would need to put some money into fixing it up, but that we could also save a lot by doing much of it ourselves. Neither of us had ever picked up more than a drill to hang something on a wall, but we were confident we could do it. I mean, I watched HGTV all the time and it looked easy enough.

Ha.

We of course realized quickly that home projects pretty much never go so easy in real life, but we were still determined to fix up this house. It was a constant balancing act to decide on how much we wanted to upgrade something, since we still don’t know if we will stay at this house forever, and so we always consider resale and return on these projects. I mentioned in my last post that I don’t know if we’ll ever move, and that I do really view our little fixer upper as a major luxury. Still, if we do move, I strongly believe we would come out ahead.

By our estimation, we figure we could sell our home for quite a bit more than what we have put into it. I don’t think this would be the case if we had hired out all of the work. We might have broken even…might.

We have hired out parts of the work we have done, such as our patio and part of our hallway bathroom, but for the most part we have DIYed everything else. We did benefit from the market timing, since we bought at the near bottom, but I don’t think that’s all of it. We watch our local real estate very closely, and while there aren’t nearly as many good deals now, they still pop up from time to time.

Since we are always casually looking at homes around us to buy, we do consider the increase in value of our home as money we have earned. There are differing opinions on if homes are investments, and my opinion is that it is just a very unique type of investment. It isn’t an investment in the way that stocks are, but it isn’t just a regular purchase either. Regardless of what you call it, a home can make money and be a good financial move. Of course, it can also be a bad one, so research research research.

Our home is just one example of DIY that has saved and earned us money. We DIY in the kitchen every day too, e.g. cooking. Many of our favorite recipes are all ones we experimented with to try and replicate our favorite restaurant meals. In most cases, I like our home version better than what we get at restaurants now. The reason is I know it is healthier, I can make a bigger pile of healthy veggies on the side, no tempting bread basket, and we can season it exactly to our tastes.

We do all of our own landscaping, yard maintenance, and most of the home maintenance. Occasionally we’ll hire out plumbing or things that require climbing up on the roof. In general, though, we tend to not want to hire people for stuff we can do.

I’ve always had a “if they can do it, I can do it” attitude, so it’s kind of one of those blessing/curse things. A blessing, because it’s made me realize that I can do a lot more than I ever thought, but a curse because once in awhile hiring out things is not the end of the world. In any case, it has saved us a lot.

We also DIY all of our financial management. I think this is huge. Nobody will care about your finances as much as you do, and if you do hire somebody, they’ll charge you a lot for it. There are so many great resources out there to learn about finance and investing that I urge everybody to learn more about it. Marty has a real passion for this, so he does the lion’s share of the day-to-day research, and then we discuss things jointly.

We DIY lots of little things that add up, too. Marty does our (kind of complicated) taxes. I’ve done all of the work on my blogs which has included many, many (many) hours of playing around with programs and code I knew nothing about. I find it oddly fun, though, so it didn’t feel like work. I’m a lot more efficient now with the blog maintenance stuff. While it was time consuming in the beginning to learn, now it’s paying off because I don’t have to continue paying someone for years to come to do things for me that I would have never learned if I paid someone from the get go.

That’s really a key benefit of learning to DIY. It might be hard at first, and it might not seem worth the time it takes to learn, but as time goes on, we get better and better at all of the things we do, making it worth our time. In the long run, the savings can be enormous, with the added benefit of feeling good about the work we accomplished.

This sums up my Involved Living Series, but it’s not the end of the discussion for me. It’s a big part of our lives, so I’m still going to talk about these goals in addition to my regular home posts. I’d love to know if you have any questions, comments, or things you’d like to know more about!

Linking up to: Living Well Spending Less

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