In the past year my husband and I have halved our income and doubled our happiness.
Some background: a few years ago we were both late 20s, child-free, and earning respectable 6 figure engineering incomes. I was a software consultant, and I traveled for my job every week (can there be anything less mustachian than commuting *by plane*?). We made a lot of money, and we maxed out our 401ks, and we had a 6 month emergency fund, but other than that we mostly spent what we had.
We wanted a child, so we had a baby and decided that I would stop traveling. I never considered not working - we just assumed we would be perfectly happy putting our child in day care and both working (I have always enjoyed my job). I took 6 months off when our son was born, and then when my position was eliminated because I no longer wanted to travel I found a local job - that required a 30-45 minute commute each way. We live less than 2 miles from my husband's job - we bought our house to be close to his employer when I was traveling.
We spent a stress-filled unhappy year taking our son to daycare all day while I commuted downtown to work. Mornings were stressful getting both of us ready and getting our son ready, and we were so tired that our evening weren't much better. After a year I couldn't take it anymore, so I reached out to my network and ended up find an even better paying job that allowed me to work from home.
This totally removed my commute, but we still had our son in day care. This turned out to be stressful still - even without the commute, I regretted the time my son was away from me, and mornings were stressful because I was trying to get to work (for a company based 3 time zones earlier than me) while my husband was getting himself and my son ready.
We were still unhappy, so after a year of working from home I decided to step back from my job at work and take a lesser role, working part time (24 hours a week). This resulted in us having a 40% pay cut, but we only had to put our son in daycare for a few hours a day, and I had much less stress to deal with. Before we had a child we spent an embarrassingly large amount of money going out drinking, eating out, and traveling, so cutting that stuff out basically made the pay cut unnoticeable.
I started reading MMM around that time, and realized that we could have a totally different life. What if neither of us had to work at all? What if we could both spend our time doing whatever we wanted? We were so caught up in the lifestyle that we had, and that all of our friends had, that it was honestly a scenario that we never considered. My husband was pretty resistant to becoming more frugal, so I decided I had to model the choices I wanted him to make.
Now that I had more time, we cooked a lot more - which meant eating out a lot less. We spent far, far less money traveling, and far less money on clothes. I stopped going to the spa every month, and realized how insane my previous hair/skin/nails/etc routine used to be.
We decided that I would quit my job, and completely focus on spending time with our son. After some MMM inspiration, we sold our second car - we didn't need it. I didn't commute, and almost everything we needed (grocery store, community pool, library, hardware store) was within 2 miles of our house. I started using a bike trailer about a month ago, and it has been fantastic. We refinanced our mortgage and saved a bunch of money per month.
So in a nutshell, living more intentionally and less ridiculously, we have a happier life on half the money we used to have.
I still do about 10 hours of consulting a month, and we're able to just save this money. With our current earning and spending numbers, we estimate that we will be able to retire in 12 years when we're both 45. As our son gets older I will take on more work. But for now? We have an amazing life. We are ridiculously happy. And two years ago I would never have thought we could live on "so little".
