I’ve been participating here for some time but thought it was time to provide an introduction complete with with backstory. It isn’t as extreme as many of the other stories, but nonetheless…
I grew up in a financially sensible family – my folks worked middle class jobs but other than staples saved voraciously making retirement quite comfortable for both of them. I’d like to think I’ve carried on some of these sensibilities but for the majority of my life I’ve worked in low paying but fulfilling jobs.
As I finished college with a degree in Communications, I decided to live abroad, and moved to Venezuela. I taught English there and, after living there and “sucking the marrow” for a while moved back stateside. This is when our consumptive lifestyle in the U.S. became quite obvious to me. I worked in shelters and treatment centers for at risk youth, making few dollars but reaping emotional reward from doing something with purpose. Eventually, I burned out on it – as most do – and my then girlfriend (now wife) and I sold all of our stuff and moved to Central America with a scant savings we scraped together over a year. We spent a year there living on beans and rice, walking beaches and watching sunsets. A brief retirement in my mid-twenties. :) Although I had walked and biked through most of college, and in my working life, it was here that I distinctly remember ditching the idea that everyone needed a car, and a TV set, for that matter.
When we moved back I stumbled into a job in bicycle and pedestrian advocacy and education that, over time, has flourished into a full-fledged career. During this time we lived with one car, in an apartment and I bicycled pretty much everywhere for transportation while putting my wife through her master’s in nursing. Looking back, it was pretty impressive that we pulled it off, only using loans to pay for tuition. As a part of that journey I found companionship, much like here, on simple living forums. The approach there felt less like aggressively saving to retire and more focused on leading a simple life for the purpose of a simple life.
In the past six years we moved from that apartment to a small house we bought early in our marriage and then to a larger, but still economical, house that has more space for the two children we've had and moved my wife closer to work so we walk and bicycle quite a bit more. In some sense, we lost track of spending during and after her second pregnancy as we felt like we were just trying to stay afloat with two kids. Now, after spending time on the these forums, which for whatever reason appeal to me more so than the simple living forums, we've dialed things back quite a bit in pursuit of a simpler life but also in pursuit of a longer term goal of wealth in retirement.
Even moving from what I would consider an already simple life we've applied many of the ideas here resulting in the following:
- Moved all accounts to Mint and created clear budgets so we don't "accidentally" eat out, or overspend in any category etc.. without seeing direct notifications that we have violated our budget.
- Saved $100 a month by switching both of our phones to prepaid and using google voice.
- Called cable company and canceled the tiny package we had that made internet/cable cheaper a year ago but just started costing an additional $20 a month to have.
- Changed our health insurance to a higher deductible and are saving $200 a month slashing those costs in half.
- Paid off my wife's high interest $8,000 educational loan leaving only 4% and less loans that we will continue to aggressively pay off.
- Crushed our grocery bill by applying the tips from the MMM site knocking what was a regular $900 bill down to about $600 for a family of four.
- Have left the second car sitting idle in the driveway for the past few months, only using for work trips to airport every few months. (cost comparison provided in another thread I started on whether to sell – we will either hold onto this until it needs a major repair need or, potentially, now that my youngest is old enough to ride on the bicycle more frequently, get rid of it all together)
- Been more watchful of eating out (this could reach several hundred a month since the second babe came, mostly because of laziness but also out of wanting to "treat" ourselves on hard days) - We no longer have any eating out on our expenses outside of a small "slush fund" we use for in cash spending that has no accountability attached. (This was one of our agreements many years ago so we didn't have to defend purchases to each other, the provision of a certain amount of cash each month to use as each individual saw fit)
- Killed our alcohol spending by moving to boxed wine and less time socializing in bars. This has cost about $50 a month since we've made this change but we've budgeted up to $100 because we enjoy the booze and could have spent up to 3-400 eating/drinking out in the past. :)
- Continue to not buy into a perceived need for a huge pile of toys for our children and relying on a few, tried and true toys and the availability of time to spend with them as a tour guide to our world.
- Ride bikes. Ride them always and often. Not just because they save money but because they are awesome, make me smile and keep my kids from experiencing the world from the backseat of a car.
- Begun considering how to leverage the income from one rental property to fund another rental property and build up a small business investment of rental properties to serve as a major investment in our retirement.
- Meeting monthly to review our budgets, goals and thinking of our “needs” very differently.
- Our next step is writing up a five year plan for our family, outlining goals and milestones for how we want to spend our time so that when confronted with the choice to buy this or that we have our goals to look to and see how wasting that money may affect our progress toward our goal.
We are not perfect, but we are doing very well with a combination of previous life experience and recent lessons learned with much credit for money saving, life maximizing ideas put forth by Mister Money Mustache and contributors to this here forum.
Thanks for checking out our road to badassity, we hope it gets even badasser, but would be interested to hear any comments and reflections on our path.
-onemorebike
