Ever have one of those moments where your perception of your life changes and you finally see things clearly? It's that moment when you realize that you have been swimming against the current to get to a destination that has been within your reach the entire time.
My life's desire is to be financially secure. To have the ability to have all my needs met with little or no effort on my part. This does not mean that I want to lead a life of leisure or extravagance, it simply means I want my "needs" met. As an example, I want to buy groceries without a calculator, buy tires before they are completely worn and support worthy charities when called upon.
In the past I was focused on "getting ahead". I tried to accomplish this by putting in the extra effort at work, starting multiple businesses and participating in various multi-level marketing ventures. While there was nothing wrong with any of these avenues, nothing seemed to gel. The promotions at work never seemed to produce the added financial stability, the businesses helped but failed due to my administrative shortcomings. Multi-level marketing is a great opportunity for the average person with above average inter-personal skills and indeterminate will, in which I fell short on the latter. So what is the solution?
The simple life.....
I know, corny and idealistic right? My perception of the simple life extends past the common definition of the phrase. I am way too addicted to electronics and technology to give it all up in one fail swoop in trade for chickens and a straw hat. I cannot imagine being cut of from the information that I find instantly at my fingertips that pertains to every aspect of my life. I "pre-shop" items on my blackberry before I arrive at the store, I check my weather app almost daily and my banking can be done on the fly no matter where I am. It doesn't make sense to go back to writing checks, filling out envelopes, adding postage, mailing and then waiting a week to ten days for a check to clear when it can be done it 90 seconds electronically. Our time has to assigned a monetary value as well, so many meaningful things can be accomplished in the time we are gifted with by modern conveniences.
So how do we accomplish our goals? Simply, we will reduce, reuse and limit ourselves to primarily "needs" instead of "wants". This does not mean we will practice an unrealistic self-deprecating lifestyle which leads to binging on things that satisfy our feelings of depravity. It means that we will be smarter about how we structure our life.
For example, the community we live in has an average single family home cost of around $300,000. The mortgage payment would be around $1800 per month plus taxes and utilities. If we were to move today, 8 hours to the south, we can purchase a comparable home for $40,000 with a mortgage payment of $425 per month. This is a monthly saving of $1375 or $16500 per year. This means that instead of needing a job that pays $60,000 per year, a job paying $43, 500 would do. We will be moving in 2012 to accomplish this. We decided on a less conventional solution to this part of our life though. We bought 21 acres of bare land and plan to live in a converted school bus while we build our house.
Another area of our life that we intend on changing is our dependency on traditional energy. We plan on building a self-contained, or close to, solar energy system to power our home and provide hot water. The technology exists at a reasonable price so it makes sense to take advantage of it.
Fact: Residential hot water accounts for 30% of home energy usage!
Food production will also play a part in our path to self-sufficiency. We plan on using a variety of growing techniques and animal sources to provide wholesome foods at realistic prices.
We will be posting information on our life as it progresses in the hope that it may encourage others to gain a new perspective as well.
Thanks for visiting,
Chris
No comments:
Post a Comment