I had an interesting conversation with my wife the other day, as we discussed the concepts of minimalism. My point was this – look at how much time we spend working to pay for things that we’ve already purchased.
House – a huge mortgage payment.
Cars – two car payments
Credit card bills ( we don’t have any, but most folks do )
Etcetera…..
Whatever your monthly expenses look like, chances are that a huge chunk of them is paying for things that you’ve already bought. What if you could remove all of those expenses?
Don’t chase a bigger house. Stick with a small apartment. Don’t upgrade to a bigger, more luxurious car. Stick with the Honda ( or Hyundai, even. ) Don’t upgrade to the latest giant screen TV that you can hang on your wall. Surround sound? Whatever you have is probably good enough, no reason to chase the newest one.
Don’t buy all that stuff, and don’t work so much. Work a simpler job that doesn’t require 50, 60, or 70 hour per week. Sure, it won’t pay nearly as much, but then again, you won’t be spending as much.
But your life won’t get any better
That’s the bombshell my wife dropped on me.
Why does your life need to get better?
Work a simple job, so you can put in 35-40 hours per week and be done with it. No nights or weekends spent working. No huge mortgage payment or car payments to concern yourself with. No credit card bills. Instead of spending your time working to pay for these things, you can spend your time doing other things.
Take more walks – around your neighborhood, or downtown in your nearest city. My city is beautiful, and I don’t get to explore it nearly often enough.
Have picnics with your family – out back, in the park, wherever.
Create – write, draw, paint, whatever you’re interested in.
Just talk – you have a family and great friends, right? Talk to them. They’re probably quite interesting.
Want to take 3 months off work and go to Europe? Do it. Store your minimal belongings in a small storage unit, get rid of your apartment, and go. All that money that you don’t spend on stuff can be spent on a nice vacation across Europe. Sure, you won’t stay in 5 star hotels – but you can see the same beautiful sites.
Your life can be amazing if you let it happen
Stop working your life away and learn to enjoy what you have. You won’t concern yourself with life “getting better”, because every day will be amazing.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds like a better life to me! I’d much rather have the time to enjoy the life I have than work long hours to make money to spend it on stuff I don’t even have time to enjoy.
And really, do all those expensive things make your life all that better? I’m not really sure I’d enjoy those things that much anyhow. A big house mean more cleaning. An expensive car means more worrying about it getting scratched. My husband and I enjoy our life just fine without a television or McMansion or luxury car. In fact, we’re enjoying life even more now that we’ve gotten rid of a lot of the crap we bought.
If only getting rid of the debt from buying those things was so easy! But, fortunately, that’s only a matter of time and patience at this point! My husband and I have even talked about what we’d do when we were debt free, but we’ve realized that we don’t really want to change much at all! It’ll be nice to have more financial security, but we have no plans to clutter our home up again.
Letting go of some material things can be really eye-opening, for sure. We bought a big house 2 years ago, in a bit of a rush. Bad move. Once our kiddo is grown a bit, we plan to sell and either go back to the wonderful apartment life, or buy a very small 1 story house. Less to clean sounds pretty amazing right now
The fact that you won’t change much once you’re debt free speaks volumes – it sounds like you guys are pretty happy with the changes you’ve made.