Live Simple, Live Free… I was watching a YouTube video of an older couple talking about what this phrase means to them. They made a point of saying that when they say “Live Free”, they don’t mean that they live without expenses (i.e., “free of expenses”); rather, they mean free from the stress of financial burden. Their goal is to live significantly below their means. They learned this lesson the hard way. They used to have a mortgage and limited debt prior to the crash of 2008; nothing overly excessive or out of the ordinary. The crash of 2008 and a medical issue significantly reduced their income and caused their finances to spiral out of control when they could no longer make the payments they otherwise had no problem making; and, they didn’t have enough of a savings cushion to buffer the “storm”. They have since stripped away much of what most of us take for granted and are happier than ever.
As far as I can remember, I have found happiness and peace with the concept of living simple and small (and way below my / our means) even though I have had my share of “slips” and have strayed from the concept from time to time. Ed (and even our son, Henry) have had to rein me in on certain things (weak spots) when they see my frivolous spending / accumulations (ex: too many annual flowers in the summer; too much costume jewelry, too many scarves, dishes, etc.).
There are definitely dollars I’d like to get back – but alas, I cannot. And it’s funny how the things that I purchased for good, hard-earned money now have no value (ex: if I were to try to sell them); things seem to lose their value almost instantaneously once purchased (this holds true for the little things as well as the depreciable big things like cars). Meals and experiences that cost more than I would have liked (when caution was thrown to the wind with the idea that “you only live once” or “you can’t take it with you”) don’t live on in my memory any more than family meals around the supper table and those activities and outings that didn’t cost us anything other than the gas to get there.
Beyond being debt free, it is important to me that our daily living “footprint” be small. And while “small” can mean different things to different people, it means “simply” and “self-sufficiently” to me.
Simply in that I want few things; self-sufficiently in that I always want to eat simple (but tasty) home-cooked meals with food that we grow ourselves (once we have a garden and some chickens, etc.), versus what we’re doing now on the weekends: eating out on Saturdays and grabbing prepared fast-food on Friday evenings. Self-sufficiently in that I want us to either do without or to cobble together a DIY solution when there’s something / some convenience we want and would otherwise make a purchase as a solution. In my mind, my live simply goal will be realized when we cease to generate “garbage” or waste. Ultimately (and we’re a long way from this), I’d like to even go so far as to do without public utilities.
But it’s a process and life’s a journey; we allow ourselves the luxury of eating out on Friday nights and Saturdays right now given all of the work we’re doing on our property and given that we don’t have a stove there (yet); we have also chosen to only use electricity to power a very small refrigerator (dorm size) while at the property, which limits what we could prepare for ourselves at the property. But at the end of the day, the reasons for eating out on the weekends are just “excuses” and I need to accept the frivolity/luxury for what it is; because, where there’s a will, there’s a way. If we really did want to eat a home-cooked meal instead of eating out, we could find a way (ex: we do cook over a campfire from time to time which means that we could cook over a campfire every weekend). I want to call out our spending for what it is and to be truthful about it (at least to ourselves).
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