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In late June, my family went on a lengthy vacation through the south, including a long stop in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a large chunk of a day in Savannah, Georgia, a visit to a relative in rural northern Florida, and eventually a trip to Walt Disney World with our children.

Sarah went to Disney World three times during her childhood and it was an experience that she was excited to share with our children. I’m not particularly a big fan of roller coasters and most amusement park rides, but I had my own reasons for getting excited for the trip – namely, traveling with my parents to a part of the country they had never seen. Yep, my parents went along, too. They had never seen an ocean before and, since my dad was a lifelong fisherman, we actually got to go saltwater fishing together, which was another major highlight of the trip.

Home cycling is a pretty nifty financial strategy. At its core, the idea revolves around buying a low-end home, fixing and upgrading it, and then selling it for a profit off the back of your own time and energy investment in that home.

It bears some similarities with the idea of “home flipping” that was lauded in the mid-2000s, but it offers a great deal of appeal to people like myself who are fairly frugal and don’t want to take on a ton of real estate risk.

As many of you know, I had a bit of a financial epiphany in April 2006. I came home from work one day, picked up the mail, and sat down to pay our bills, only to realize that we didn’t have enough in our checking account to pay all of those bills. Because neither of us would get paid for at least a week, at least a few of those bills were going to be late, and it was going to be a tricky balancing act to get out of it.

For some reason, that moment just set me off. I felt really ashamed of myself. Sarah and I both made a good income – why couldn’t we make this work? We had an infant son who relied deeply on us – shouldn’t we be doing better for his sake?

It’s a worry that pops into the mind of most parents not too long after their child is born. College. How on earth are we going to pay for a great education for our child?

Prices at top-tier schools like MIT have seen annual tuition jump to over $50,000 a year, with no end in sight to the rapid climb. Even quality state universities have seen tuition rise to the $10,000 per year mark.

That’s an incredible expense facing students as they approach college age. Four years at a state university to earn a bachelor’s degree means a $40,000 expense just for tuition – that doesn’t include room and board or textbooks or other supplies. What if they want to go to a top-tier school? What about graduate school? The costs easily explode into the six figures and it’s just going to get more and more painful.