FULL HOUSE

It’s diapers to degrees for Scott and Jeannine, raising five kids from ten months to twenty-two years

THE ROAR OF GIRLS is overpowering at the Leopold home in Dayton, Ohio.

There’s a Hannah Montana video on YouTube, and Cecilia, eleven, Myrna, nine, and Rhiannon, two, are singing along at the top of their lungs and dancing to the music. Meanwhile, forty-year-old Scott and his thirty-eight-year-old wife, Jeannine, are walking ten-month-old Bernadette around on wobbly legs like she’s Bambi. But wait, what’s that? Their son Vincent, twenty-two, is halfway out the door and it’s slamming behind him. He’s Jeannine’s from a prior relationship and he’s running off to catch the bus to class at a local community college.

Scott and Jeannine first met in 1991, just six weeks after Vincent was born. His buddy’s girlfriend invited her out for the night, and Scott vividly recalls picking her up at her parents’ home in his blue 1980 Chevette during a night out with friends.

“When Jeannine opened the car door, it was like a light went on—figuratively and literally, thanks to the dome light,” Scott says. “I knew instantly that I’d be asking her to marry me at some point. To put this in a bit of context . . . being a teenage mother was much more scandalous then than it is now, and the thought of a young Catholic guy bringing a girl like that home to meet his family was unheard of.”

The couple married in 1996, and had their first child together in 2001.

Today there are a total of seven people living in the Leopold household at a time when the average population per U.S. household is 2.55 persons, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Scott works as a situation manager for Hewlett-Packard, overseeing resolution efforts for any major issues that arise with clients. And Jeannine works part-time two nights a week providing in-home care for older women with disabilities.

Together they meet all the financial challenges of family life on a combined household income that ranges from $60,000 to $70,000 annually.

How do the Leopolds do it? How do they handle the expense of a baby in diapers while another pursues a degree—not to mention the costs associated with every age in between?

With a lot of thrift, a lot of planning, and, unfortunately, a good amount of debt.

“Diapers are probably the biggest expense,” Scott tells me. “As a result we tend to only buy store-brand diapers. Our son works for Kroger so we get a discount on those, which helps immensely.”

Over the past few years, the Leopolds experimented with old-fashioned cloth diapers, but they simply couldn’t stay on top of all the additional laundry that was created every day.

“With seven people in the house, an extra load each day adds up, especially when you can’t include anything else in that extra load and have to run them on a long cycle.”

The family’s formula bills are very low because Jeannine breastfeeds. When they do use formula, it’s a brand name. That’s in violation of one of my rules for young parents, though they break that rule for a very good reason, it turns out.

“We had some bad experiences in the past with generics and other brands so we stick with Similac, although we do use coupons for that.”

When it comes to clothing and toys, thrift stores are a given for the family.

“We once bought two large bags of clothes, equaling nearly twenty complete outfits, for under $20. Thrift stores and consignment shops are also excellent for books and toys. Hand-me-downs are a way of life for our kids. We’ve been lucky enough that some articles of clothing have held up well enough to last through all four girls.”

Vincent is the only one of their kids old enough to drive. But like many people his age, he’s not getting a license.

He needs to be driven to work and community college, or else he bums rides with friends. And as he pursues a degree in law enforcement, he pays for tuition and books himself—though his parents have covered some of his school bills the last couple of semesters when he came up short. But no student loans, thankfully!

A recent study out of the University of Michigan found that only two-thirds of teens now have a license at nineteen. Perhaps the high cost of auto insurance, maintenance, and gasoline has something to do with it.

This whole mind-set is alien to me and probably to many older Americans as well. When I was a teen, I counted the days until I turned sixteen and could get a license! But the benefit to kids like Vincent and so many others who are choosing not to drive is that the longer young motorists wait to get behind the wheel, the safer they tend to be.

“We gave him our old Buick for when he finally does decide to start driving,” Scott says. “Up until early last year I continued to pay all insurance and maintenance costs on it, but we transferred those costs to him, partly in the hope that it would motivate him to drive, and partly because I was frustrated covering the costs for a vehicle he refused to touch.”

The Leopolds work hard to stick to a budget. They plan meals at home, use coupons, and check the circulars to see which stores have the best deals that week. Product substitution is a biggie for them to maximize their savings.

“One thing we’ve also done recently is to quit buying lunch meat. Just before Christmas I was excited to find roast beef on sale. After a coupon, it was $5.99 per pound. I then walked past the meat department and saw that Angus roasts were on sale for $3.49 per pound, while pork, turkey, and ham ranged from 99 cents to $1.49 per pound. It put the $5.99 for the roast beef in a different perspective.”

During the summer, the family supplements its weekly shopping with fresh fruit and vegetables from their garden. They harvest gallons of raspberries and plentiful bunches of tomatoes, in addition to strawberries and asparagus.

Yet no matter how many corners they cut, the Leopolds define themselves as struggling. They’re currently paying off $42,000 in credit card debt, which is down from $72,000 almost ten years ago. Their combined minimum payments to service that debt are around $1,100, which is a few hundred dollars less than it was a decade ago.

“Eliminating that is our primary focus, although we do put a small amount aside each month for both our retirement and the girls’ college,” Scott says.

A lot of their debt was charged up because of dying appliances, unexpected medical bills, and surprise car repairs. They take their tax return each year and sink it toward a bill, but often a major appliance will give up the ghost right around the time of their return . . . and there goes that money.

Just as a side note, I would prefer that you don’t get a big refund. If you are getting one, it means that you’ve made an interest-free loan to the government and your money has been working for them all year long, not you. Try slowly reducing your withholding at work instead. You want to ideally be even-steven—no refund and no money owed—when tax time comes.

Scott is well aware of the cultural backlash against larger families. He says he doesn’t see his lifestyle reflected positively in our nation’s current cultural dialogue.

“I think the general portrayal of large families is negative, and there’s a great deal of misinformation out there about the associated costs of raising children,” Scott says. “I believe that a big motivation for this is to discourage larger families.”

“You’ll regularly see reports talking about how much it costs to raise a child. If any of these were accurate, we wouldn’t have been able to afford our son, let alone the four girls.”

Still, he and Jeannine are happy to have been blessed with a larger family.

“It can be difficult at times, but the good always outweighs the bad.”

As for the thought of more children, Scott says, “I’m definitely open to the idea of another baby.”

We’ll have to see what Jeannine says about that!

If you have a larger family with kids of varying ages, what can you learn from the story of Scott and Jeannine?

Use generic brand diapers and formula.

• When you’re in the young baby years, I strongly recommend generic formula and diapers. Generic formula is about half the price of the national brands and the Food and Drug Administration requires that it be nutritionally equal to brand names like Similac, Enfamil, and Good Start.
• Generic diapers, meanwhile, are available from supermarkets, warehouse club chains, pharmacy chains, and so many more places. They’ll save you a ton over big brands like Pampers, Huggies, and Luvs.
• Scott and Jeannine tried everything from cloth diapers to mother’s milk, which incidentally is the best food for infants if that’s the choice for you. So above all else, be flexible. Some things will work and others won’t. Keep what works in your life and keep looking for ways to trim costs.

Get thrifty buying and selling kids’ clothes online.

• The Leopolds are thrift-store junkies and love their hand-me-downs. If that’s you, I want to tell you about thredUP.com. It’s a site that has given the idea of secondhand clothes and consignment shops an online makeover.
• As a seller, you order a bag online, stuff it full of your kids’ gently used clothes, and ship it postage paid to the company. thredUP.com pays 20 to 40 percent of the retail value of what you’ve sent. The New York Times reports the average bag earns $25.
• As a buyer, you can purchase a wide spectrum of clothing starting from size 12 months at discounts of up to 80 percent off retail—all without leaving your home to go to a thrift shop!

Don’t buy life insurance on kids to save for college.

• Beware of pitches from life insurance agents claiming that the absolute best way to save for your kid’s college is to buy life insurance.
• The idea is to buy a policy on your kid and then they will have life insurance down the road in the event of their premature death. When they make it to college age, there’s this wonderful tax loophole that allows you to borrow from the policy’s cash value to pay for college.
• But the embedded costs in life insurance policies can be massive because they’re padded with commissions for the salesperson. Plus, if you can’t pay the premiums on a life insurance policy, the policy lapses and you’re wiped out; there’s no money there to tap for college.
• My preferred alternative for college savings? A 529 plan. (See pages 85–86 in my last book, Living Large in Lean Times, for more on 529 plans.)

Decide what you’re going to do about allowances.

• I have a bias toward allowance as a paycheck that is earned for doing chores. The typical allowance for a kid is now $15 a week, though it’s nowhere near that in my house.
• I give my kids a dollar a week multiplied by their grade level as long as they complete their chores. So a first grader gets $1 a week, a second grader $2 a week, and so on. The chores are detailed for them on a chore wheel so everybody knows what they’ve got to take care of in the house.
• When it comes to younger children understanding money, I love the three jars concept that came out of the Christian fundamentalist movement. Each jar is marked with a red, green, or yellow heart. One jar can be used to hold money for charity; another jar holds money for current spending; and the third has money for longer-term savings. This provides a very simple, clear, and tangible lesson for children.