I put clear contact paper over soft cover books to make them last longer and that way they fetch a higher price upon resale (it repells p&j really well). When a binding breaks on a book, Staples will cut the binding off and comb bind it for a small fee. This has really extended the life of books many times. These tricks have allowed us to pass the books down in the family, so it is actually getting cheaper as far as book expenses every year. Which is really interesting since our income now is really comfortable and in the early years we really had to be frugal.

Another idea, many wonderful old books and even old textbooks are free online and can be downloaded, printed out, and comb bound for just a little bit of money. Of course the net is a wealth of sites that have interactive lessons for free. Just keep in mind that too much school on the computer can be tedious and hard on the eyes.

Take inventory of your skills. You may have a hobby or educational background that you can creatively work into a source of income from home. Some things I have done for income are; free lance art work, baby sitting, cleaning service, seasonal retail work, and pet sitting. Friends of mine have used their educational backgrounds or areas of expertise to teach classes to other homeschoolers (in our state, tutors need only have a high school diploma). I even had a friend who found things in the trash, fixed and cleaned them up, and sold them at a twice yearly yard sale. This quite nicely funded her homeschooling. Some other jobs women I know do from home are; transcribe medical files, transcribe for the court system, make appointments for insurance adjusters, catering, cake decorating, and some are nurses on the weekends.

When I am involved in a money making project I make every effort to make homeschooling my top priority, so that the kids are not shortchanged. Of course a balance must be achieved, so that family time is allotted for (and the needs of the marriage are met).
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Both our parents run businesses from home so neither are denied the right to work simply because we’re home-educated. However, like most pastoralists these days, we’re a long way from (cash) rich! Additionally, we’re unschoolers; our parents don’t actually teach us preferring instead that our education should be auto-didactic in origin, with them acting as our mentors rather than teachers.

Yes, we do get various allowances and benefits but nothing like as much (in terms of dollar amounts) as we would get if we were to go to school; it’s probably about 2% of the amount we’d receive if we were to go away to school. We’re outwith the US though.
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15yr old unschooling auto-didact

I do feel that we wasted money on an online (Canada) cyber school that wasn’t any good. It was our first year homeschooling and we didn’t know that we could have simpified things. So, just get cheap workbooks (grammar…) and borrow books from the library. How old are your kids? There are a lot of free websites that give you worksheets to print out http://www.tlsbooks.com/ http://www.321know.com/grade3.htm http://www.kidzone.ws/math/grade3.htm http://families.owc.edu/children/social_studies.htm#elementary

I ended up buying some cheap books from Amazon.com… I bought a Pre-Algebra book for $1.50 + S&H $3.99… and a Reading/Language Arts book that was originally $84 for only $2 +S&H (I had to turn off the computers, because my kids were getting addicted to some online games). Also, I went on our local school’s website and just followed what they were doing and I snooped on other school website. I got ideas on different field trips to nature areas that I wouldn’t have known about…ect.

I’d just like you to know that some people "unschool", especially the first year. And the kids are learning by asking questions on what interests them, while they are de-stressing from the public schools. And I think most parents that decide to homeschool are probably smarter than the teachers. You’ll do fine homescholing, I read your profile that you write books.

Good luck with your homeschool plan, it’s not as hard as you think, to do it on little money.
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Our big expenditures are extra curricular activities, which we’d pay to do whether kids were in school or not, scouts, instrument lessons, sports, etc.

People always talk about how expensive everything is, but we are raising seven kids on a modest income without any debt outside of a mortgage. And I know people who buy their houses with cash so they have no mortgage. It’s all about choices, as I say.
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They were talking about tax credits in La for home school and private school families. There are no stipends that we are given. The laws vary from state to state on all of this so you really have to look at the laws in your state.

For a list of laws in your state you can go to http://www/hslda.org
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As others have said, there are no financial breaks for HS’ing. However, in Illinois (my state) and Minnesota, there are *state* tax credits available for HS’ing expenses. We usually receive $400+ back in tax credit on $3000-4000/year of expenses.

Here’s the link for info in MN:

http://www.taxes.state.mn.us/individ/other_supporting_content/inctaxfs8a.shtml

As to how we can afford it, we have always budgeted every cent of our income, and know where every cent goes. We are upper-middle class on one income and have no debt – including a mortgage. So we plan for HS’ing expenses just like any other expense.

We are very frugal. We have two cars we purchased new, w/o loans in 1991 and 1996. We’ll drive them until they die, and buy replacements with cash. We’ll pay cash for our next home. We do other very frugal things to get by on one income and extremely high medical bills.

You can HS for little to no money, or you can spend thousands – it all just depends.

In MN, you also have a virtual *public* school option with MNVA:

http://mnva.k12.mn.us/se3bin/clientschool.cgi?schoolname=school189

It’s a way to be educated at home with tax dollar support. It’s still a public school, not a homeschool, but very, very similar. We use the same curriculum they do, and have for over five years. However, we have to purchase it ourselves, which is about $1500 of our HS’ing budget.
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HS mom 5.5 yrs

http://www.successful-homeschooling.com/affordable-homeschooling.html

Good luck!
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