About

Welcome to my blog!  My name is Jennifer Duenes, and I am a 35 year-old wife to my husband, Michael, and a mom to my 23 month-old son, Eli, and his soon-to-be-born brother Dylan Raphael (due September 2009).

Growing up in the Air Force, I have been accustomed to moving around quite a bit, but my biggest move was after college, when I moved to Uzbekistan to work as a teacher in 2000.  I worked with a faith-based non-governmental organization (NGO), and in order to learn the culture as well as the language, I lived with a non-English speaking Muslim Uzbek family in a village for 1 year.  It was one of the most challenging and yet rewarding experiences in my life.  It was tough for the obvious reasons – huge language and cultural barriers, a hole the size of a basketball dug in the ground for a toilet, pages torn out of old books for toilet paper, and the occasional stir-fried moldy bread or boiled sheeps lung for dinner.  But in living with this family and observing how they lived without so many of America’s conveniences and wealth with a monthly income of $50, I began to realize that I too probably didn’t need everything Madison Avenue had been recommending to me.

The story of how I got from there to the San Francisco Bay Area deserves a blog post or two itself, but suffice it to say that it involved a relationship that fortunately worked out, causing me to move here in October 2005, back when gas prices were $2.70 a gallon.  Ahhh, the good old days.  Initially, I rented out a room from a family for $600 a month (yes, for those of you who do not live in the Bay Area, this is how expensive it is here), and purchased a used 1992 Honda Accord to begin my part-time job as a personal assistant for a real-estate agent in Piedmont, CA.  I only earned between $800-1000 per month, so I had to live on a relatively budgeted life.

This life got even more budgeted once that aforementioned relationship turned into an engagement, and then a wedding.  My husband is a high school teacher at a private Christian school, and his salary is in the low $40,000 range.  I still had my part-time job, and worked as a Spanish sub at his high school for a few months, but eventually I realized we would need more than my current hours and income to pay off his remaining graduate school debt of $18,000.  We knew that if I did get pregnant, I would want to be a stay-at-home mom, which would render me less able to help pay off his debt.  I switched jobs in 2007 to become a part-time nanny for a wonderful family out in Lafayette.  Just as I received the job offer, however, I discovered I was pregnant.  The family was gracious enough to hire me for as long as I could work.  Now my husband and I were living in his 1 bedroom apartment in Berkeley at $1050/month, and with me bringing in maybe $1800/month, we were able to pay off his debt right before our son arrived in September 2007.

It wasn’t enough, however, to just have the extra job.  Once we knew a baby was on the way, our apartment didn’t seem to fit the space needs we would eventually have.  At this same time, we were also spending time with some Turkish refugees in Oakland who amazingly were from the same region of Uzbekistan I had been working in for 5 years.  They lived on High Street in Oakland, an area that isn’t the best of areas, but not necessarily the worst either.  We were able to negotiate a tiny deal with the manager and get a much more spacious and light filled 2 bedroom apartment for $895 a month, which is the current rent we are paying now (August 2009).

It hasn’t been easy living on one income, especially a smaller income in one of the most expensive areas to live in the United States.  But it hasn’t been bad either, and this realization prompted me to start this blog.  I have benefited greatly from a couple of money saving blogs out there, particularly Crystal Paine’s moneysavingmom.com. Crystal’s website is amazing – she is amazing, managing to spend only $40 a week for a family of four.  But she also lives in Topeka, Kansas, and no offense to Topeka, but things are a bit cheaper there.  According to a comparison of cost of living by Salary.com, the cost of living in the Bay Area is 40% higher than it is in Topeka.  This prompted me to wonder, then, how we’re managing to make it (even though we don’t have every convenience under the sun and can only dream of owning a house here one day).  What is it that prompts Californians to pay the exorbitant prices they do, and how do they make ends meet?

As an economics major, I am aware of the concept of utility, the payback consumers get from investing in a particular venture.  Yes, our food prices may be higher out here, but our weather is a lot nicer, and our utility bills lower.  Is there a way to live frugally and yet richly?  My thought is yes.

I chose “Life from the Roof” as a blog title because we live on the top floor of our apartment building and have access to the roof.  In between the gunshots we hear about twice a week or the fighting from neighbors or the roar of Harley Davidsons on Saturdays, we also get up on the roof occasionally to get a glance at an amazing sunset or a starry night sky.  It is this image in mind that has prompted me to remember that in the midst of our struggles, there are also unexpected moments of beauty and surprise.