OH THAT'S CHELSEY

Cutting Family Living Expenses Before Farm Business Costs

Why would I try to cut our family living expenses before I cut our farm expenses? Seems like chasing pennies when we could grab dollars, right?

I’m Thinking of it Differently
First, I don’t believe we can save our way to prosperity.

Sure, saving helps and makes a difference. It helps me feel like I’m in control. And yes, $10 + $10 x 50 days = $1000. A thousand dollars still matters. I don’t want it to seem like it doesn’t, because it does. Being less wasteful and more intentional with our family spending means that we are putting our money where it really matters to us, long term.

Second, it’s not the John Deere dealer sucking me into an impulse buy as I’m strolling the aisles and it’s not the auction sites, I’m browsing in the middle of the night that are adding to our expenses. Well for me, I won’t speak for Kyle. 😉 My point being – for us, it’s easier to be disciplined with business spending and easier to let personal spending add up.

Third, instead of focusing on saving on business expenses, I’ve found finding a way to make more money moves the needle more for us.

Making versus Saving
This is a philosophy, style, temperament, preference and we’ve found, for us, that saving isn’t going to make as much of a difference as earning more. Rather than pouring all of my energy into saving our family $1000 a month, I can put that energy into getting an additional .20 cents on one soybean contract.

Rather than focusing on saving thousands on our next big purchase, I think through how I can add additional thousands with that purchase.

We use such big numbers in agriculture that I’m able to move the needle significantly when I can earn more. Much more than when I save.

Earning More
How do I actually go earn more on the farm? For me, adding cents to every bushel of grain seems to provide the highest ROI and the lowest risk.

My next strategy is maximizing our yield, but this is harder to depend on steadily climbing with the weather.

Cutting Fertilizer
When we went through the drought, we talked about lowering our input costs. We went around and around on how we could find opportunity in such a tight spot. Our farm philosophy has always been to maximize rather than minimize and even through the drought that played out to be the right decision.

It’s a conversation we continue to have and recently our agronomist posed a question back to us, “how many guys say spending money on fertilizer is what broke them?”

I’ve never heard of any.

Which keeps bringing us back to focusing on maximizing our output rather than minimizing our input.

Family Expense vs Business Expense
All that to say, we’re still frugal with our business expenses. With our personal expenses we know they aren’t revenue drivers which leaves us with only saving money in that category to make a difference. Knowing we can save money and make money on our business expenditures gives us a different mindset on how we approach those dollars.

Would love to hear what you think! Let’s chat in the comments below.

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