This post is sort of the flip side of the one I posted yesterday, titled Todd’s December doldrums. That article was about my sadness thinking maybe we’ve come full circle, and now are right back where we started before we started the “12 Cities, 1 Year” project. But the fact is that we aren’t the same people we were when we left Broomfield to travel the country. In 2011, we irreversibly changed our lifestyle in a way we’ve wanted to for a while. Sure we’re not finished yet. In fact, I sometimes feel like a caterpillar that is stuck half-changed into a butterfly. But we started.
I realized at the start of December just how important it will be to keep from sliding back into old habits and patterns, and so I wrote up these rules. Here is my quick manifesto to myself. And Beth agrees.
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IMPORTANT!!!: Don’t fall back into old patterns. Just because we’re living in Denver again for the moment, take care to not “settle” in to the area. Once Beth is back to good health, we want to resume our location independent lifestyle.
Here are some specifics:
- Keep our possessions light. Don’t re-accumulate stuff that we’ll have to get rid of or store. Use the “only get something if you give away something in its place” rule if necessary.¹
- Related to that, only own small important things that do multiple functions. Be prepared to move out and travel given only a week’s notice.²
- Live in a decent and comfortable place that we won’t grow too attached to. Rent.
- Take a contract job instead of a regular employment position.
- Live outside the home a lot. Don’t start hobbies or pastimes that keep us indoors. Instead, do things that get us outside, interacting with people, or exploring.
- Each month, schedule time to go through stuff, looking for things to pare down.
- Borrow or rent, rather than buy.
- Financial goal: Don’t dip into our savings any more, and add at least $1000 a month into it.³
That’s it! If you’re a real friend, please help us do these things any way you can.
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And now, a few geeky notes. I mean, seriously, who puts footnotes in a blog post?
¹ I’ve been calling this “Todd’s Law” since late July, though Beth thinks it’s a little too hard-lined. If you’re an avid reader, you may remember that I mentioned “I decided that we wouldn’t take on anything new unless we got rid of something else of the same size or smaller” back in this post.
² When Beth read this, she said, “Wait, there’s no way we could just give a week notice to a landlord and then leave.” She’s right, of course. But the point is that we could leave within a week. For example, don’t sign a lease on a car, don’t tie ourselves to some project we can’t back out of for months, etc.
³ This one is going to be really tricky. If you took the pay I was getting as a senior QA engineer at Polycom plus Beth’s freelance editing income before we left town, and compare it to our expenses now, we would have way more than a grand each month in extra cash. But taking short term jobs is likely to mean making less money each month. And Beth won’t be able to work as much as she used to. And I really want to do a lot more videography jobs, which don’t pay as well or as steady. So can we really save an extra $1000 each month? I hope so. We’re gonna try, but it’s gonna be tough.
“Living outside the home” is definitely something I need to work on. I can hole up inside, especially when it’s cold out.
We’re leaving Denver again in less than a week. I thought it would be informative to look back and see how we did on the goals I wrote down in this blog post.
Goal: Keep our possessions light. Don’t re-accumulate stuff that we’ll have to get rid of or store. Use the “only get something if you give away something in its place” rule if necessary.
Grade: B+. We’ve kept our possessions pretty light. We did buy some things from Goodwill that we’ll now give back to Goodwill – a humidifier and a couple shirts.
Goal: Related to that, only own small important things that do multiple functions. Be prepared to move out and travel given only a week’s notice.
Grade: A. I did buy some audio/video gear that’s not multi-function, but they’re things I needed for projects and will continue to use. I also bought an iPad, which replaced my Kindle, keeps me from needing a new phone in the near future, and is useful in 2 or 3 ways to my video business. We probably could have moved out on a week’s notice.
Goal: Live in a decent and comfortable place that we won’t grow too attached to. Rent.
Grade: A+. We found an apartment in the Baker neighborhood. We’re not too attached to the apartment, but Baker has been awesome. We’ve been able to walk to restaurants, the rec center, the library, coffee shops, and other stores.
Goal: Take a contract job instead of a regular employment position.
Grade: A. I took a contract job with my former employer Polycom. I really lucked out, because I told them I’d just work part time, and from home most of the time. That gave me flexibility to take care of Beth a lot, and also to work on several video projects – some for pay, and some not.
Goal: Live outside the home a lot. Don’t start hobbies or pastimes that keep us indoors. Instead, do things that get us outside, interacting with people, or exploring.
Grade: B. I didn’t start any new pastimes, indoors or outdoors. But I did a lot of video editing, much of it at home. However, I also did some of it at coffee shops and a coworking office that I joined. Most weeks, I spent Wednesday night filming scrimmage for the Denver Roller Dolls, which they appreciated and it got me out of the house.
Goal: Each month, schedule time to go through stuff, looking for things to pare down.
Grade: D. We never scheduled this. We did get rid of things that we’d acquired and didn’t need – a Mr. Coffee, clothes, etc. But it wasn’t intentional. In fact, I think I’m gonna go put something on my calendar right now to remind me to do a monthly “downsizing” exercise for at least 2 hours.
Goal: Borrow or rent, rather than buy.
Grade: A-. We borrowed a composter (actually just donated our compostables to a nearby friend). I tried borrowing a mic stand, but it didn’t work out so I bought one. I can’t think of anything else we could have borrowed or rented, so I think we did well here.
Goal: Financial goal: Don’t dip into our savings any more, and add at least $1000 a month into it.
Grade: F. Well, this was a bit naive. In reality, over the 8 months we lived in Denver, we dipped into our savings by nearly $18,000. Thank goodness we have really good insurance. Though we pay about $1400 in insurance each month, it paid for Beth’s cancer treatments this year which probably cost somewhere in the $200,000 range.