That being said, if you are reading this from somalia and thinking sign me up! I've got to give you some warnings, even a very successful life here can be painful in ways that would be impossible to describe if you weren't living in it.
We rent our house, we've been here for 6 years now, it will be 7 by the time we can leave. We have a stunning view of a bay and huge snow capped mountains, a fenced poo yard for the dogs, fruit trees and flowers. The house is 2200sq ft 4 bedrooms and then some, even a garage for my motorcycle.
Sounds perfect but try paying for it and still having any time or energy to enjoy it. When I'm enjoying home I'm usually taking pictures, a birthday party a sunset but day to day I am sand bagged to the floor with stress trying to find a way to pay for it all.
So for me, free from that is a biggie. But you can imagine how many more things come with that, those birthdays were always very poorly funded, Christmas dinner? hell no, not for us, all the success I can muster stays in my hands for less than 24 hours.
I devote a decent percentage of my abilities (spreadsheets, databases, maths) robbing peter to pay paul, aka, paying a credit card with overdraft to have enough to live on and kick the problem ball down the road. Periodically cashing out of vacation time (no longer available) or a disbursement from school, yes, doubling the student loans to push further, I catch up a little and then something needs too much of it and back to the dance I go.
I spend most of my time trying to make our lives feel like the same level of my work success but in truth its completely un-affordable.
It's very hard to quantify how many parts of life are harmed by this reality, just by high rent alone ($2,000/mo which is really cheap around here) Dental work isn't happening, most medical decisions are impacted by money, critical treatment isn't just delayed its just not attainable. We can't really afford to go grocery shopping, fill up a basket kind of thing is a very distant memory.
This glorious life leaves everyone suffering every single day.
so why not throw it all away? why not just let it go. why not look at what hits my bank twice a month as a blank slate, how much joy could we buy with that money if we weren't wasting it on this?
so why not start immediately? well, we are but its going to take a year to launch for a few reasons, and I hope that seeing that gives some dreamers some hope(that it does not have to be now or never, it can be 'soon')
I've done this before, burn the bridge cut the cord and leap but its well worth noting that it was rarely in one moment, the decision? sure every time, there was a moment just like this one where I was locked on, but then when the amygdala was done screaming FUCK YEA!!! LETS DO THIS!!! the cerebral cortex and frontal lobe take over and start throwing doubt after doubt, anxiety, worry, fret.
Somewhere between the 2 there's a part of me that says, hold on a second you 2, right this second and never are both hopelessly wrong, adjust the parameters until the path comes into focus. In the past that meant adding a week or a few months or a year, it just depended on the limiting factors which turned out to never be insurmountable.
Out middle son has just completed his first year of nursing school with flying colors putting in a level of effort I still can't wrap my head around. he needs a free, stable place to live and study until June 2020 when he finishes classes and starts studying for his RN exam. Additionally we got trapped in a lease, as we came to the end of the last one we asked for month to month, just one more might have been enough for us to pull together buying a house but with the information we had available we just were not going to be able to pull it off in time. we were offered an extra $500/mo to go month to month and had no way to even come up with that in time. (so what the hell were you doing trying to buy a place?) yeah i get that but it was going to be possible and would have saved once complete.
so that lease ends 5/31/20 that leaves the middle kid with 3 weeks of school and no place to live, something we hope to overcome with a travel trailer we pick up over the winter.
Our youngest has been having some incredible challenges, most of his life one or another but this last year finally resulted in dropping him out of school. He can work himself into a nervous breakdown over tasks that you would think your cat could do but inside his mind he's being chased through a maze with a flame thrower. This large home is a massive responsibility keeping it clean and organized is a full time job and we have no one who can do that full time, on top of that, for him, all things and all space are usable and changeable, this leaves nearly every one of those 2200 sq ft a mess, mixtures of trash and clothing and experiments and broken glass, just pure chaos.
its too much for him to handle. The hope is that in a tiny environment, not unlike a thunder jacket, the small space and very limited 'stuff' will mean that very little can be so disrupted, he will just have 'his cup' to be responsible for instead of a growing mound of 16 parts of different dinner sets in the kitchen sink. If we end up where I think we will, he will have a small pod over the cab, a neat little capsule of a space to decorate and configure sound and so on.
One of the things this house provides is probably the one that most families think oh god without that idk; a place for everyone to disappear into their own space, that will be gone, well not entirely but it will be very, very different. like messes I can't help but think the limited space will force us to overcome those things that drive us apart, we will always have that pressure to make it work, we can still go for a walk or dive into our respective sleep caves but in our faces will be "work it out" which feels terrifying from here but then I think about what we are going to be free from.
not having enough money for an endless list of simple things causes stress for everyone and massive pressure on me to provide, if our new lifestyle lets us potentially put 20 to 40k a year in savings (not kidding) I have to think that the stress that powers so much conflict would be gone. On top of that anything we could spend money on has to be limited to stuff that really fits in our lives. From all of that i filter down to every item must be just right, that too, reduces conflict, the poor teenager has been begging for a real gaming video card for years now, that causes strife, he'll have what he needs, stuff will work well and his ability to keep himself happy and entertained will increase greatly.
that does create a small dilemma, aren't we supposed to be saving? sure, but first we all need a life that feels whole, we all simply need to feel 'good' for once. my favored plan of the many I've put together I've decided to call "Frugal Deluxe" but thinking bout changing it to luxefrugal but whatever its just a name, basically it comes down to buy really really nice things, from the RV to bluetooth headphones, don't fuck around, buy it for life clothing, really high quality shoes... all expensive but also things you don't have to buy again. thats the foundation,
The luxe part there to make us feel good not in that 'weeee spending money is fun!' kind of way but in a far deeper "I am worthy of these nice shoes" kind of way. but then the frugal part; we trade our car in for the RV, that saves so much that we could still get the nicest RV I want and make the payments on it while still paying rent here, camping fees? boondocking will be far more doable in a nice newer well working solar paneled gem, food? this is where we are going to have to get very real with ourselves, high quality healthy food that we prepare ourselves, the temptation to go to a drive through has to be resisted, a lot. My vision is a week of 'I ate a fresh avocado yesterday with a sip of wine from that place we camped Tuesday' followed by a hot shower at a nice campground with a pool and a dinner out at a really nice restaurant that is part of our exploration adventure.
so one by one we set our selves free from one burden then the next carefully crafting our new modular life and hunting joy. As we get those buy it for life things in place we do go back to saving as much as possible and focusing on the joy we can have with what we already own. Then we take that savings and build it into something that can buy us more freedom, pure energy that drives choices. With a big chunk of money in the bank we can go all the way from comfortably buying a really nice expensive house all the way to paying off the RV or paying cash for a cheaper one so that our minimum required income becomes so tiny that we really could just sell rainbow painted pine cones for gas money and food. The beauty of this is that we can pursue savings hard without having to decide what for right away :) we just know that we are buying freedom in one form or another.
The other freedom that might be one for some of you is the freedom to 'consult' or contract work. For most people that's not really a freedom, its just the nature of the work and longing for a steady salary is never far from the front of your mind, but in IT its a bigger catch-22 because the difference in rate for salary and contracting can literally be an order of magnitude, when I'm not an employee, people don't even blink at paying me $250/hr for my most valuable skills, its no sweat to them, I always just quote the whole job anyway so to a business its just $x for Y thing, no hassle no headache... but for me it represents very efficient use of my time, working like that I am able to focus on the problem and resolve it the most efficient way possible with no consideration for what I look like when I'm doing it, no concern over the clock, just the calendar. and most importantly I can make a comfortable living in far less hours worked per year than even a part time job. more time, more freedom.
The catch-22 of that is that I have a family, contracting is risk, great pay, unstable work. I cannot take that risk full time, there's another $5700 in expenses coming down the pike next month and no savings to pay for it. If those expenses are tiny because we own everything and we have many months of that in the bank I can afford the risk and as soon as I score a good gig a huge pile goes back on that savings stack, buying us that much more time to not even have to worry, more freedom.
My wife is trapped in a tiny corner of the house, her 7th different one since we've lived here I think, Agoraphobia, pain, money all drive her back into a tiny space huddled around her computer just existing through each painful day. I want to set her free, I want that tiny space to have a window to an ever changing and beautiful world, I want to give her the magic that only this solution can provide, family holidays no longer come down to live there or spend a lot of time and money getting to such events or just never go (which has been the case) to show up a few days early, help peel potatoes, talk shop over the sink with people, no fret over who's coming and where are they going to sleep just a gentle arrival, an easy, completely un-rushed visit that can last exactly as long as it needs to and then on to another beautiful adventure.
I want to give both my wife and youngest the freedom to make real friends. Neither of them really have access to that, loneliness is bigger than anything in this house, in the middle of a town full of people in a perfect neighborhood, we know, almost no one, we can't seem to find community anywhere and I think that has a lot to do with a world that is either like us, head down and struggling or like our neighbors 2 retired school teachers that live in a house an amazon exec could not buy today completely out of touch with the reality that their kids generation lives in, lovely people, to be sure but far too far from our reality and age to be part of any community for us.
We need real people in our lives, people who have questioned everything and redesigned their lives around joy. people who can teach us how to be free.
