It all started with Mr. Money Mustache.
Last year around the time that Little H joined us, The Mister stumbled upon a website and immediately started obsessing over this very frugal living family. There was an unsettling spring in The Mister's step and gleam in his eye. I have tried, and failed, at many a budget, and the Mister and I come from very, very different families and backgrounds regarding money which means that he and I were constantly at odds because of our mismatched philosophies and upbringings and compensatory habits regarding emotions and pretty sparkly things. In fact, early in our marriage, when he even broached the subject innocuously by saying, "Hey let's talk about money stuff," I would immediately burst into tears.
He encouraged me to read some blog posts. So I read. And read. And read. And read until I was pretty sure my eyes were going to fall out of my head and then all of a sudden the realization of what I wanted our life together to be like (ADVENTURE! FUN! TRAVELING! FOOD! COMMUNITY!) was not achievable on our (my) current plan. And talking! Oh so much talking. My man is a bit of a strong silent type and I think this is the most constant talking over several weeks we have ever done, and most of the conversations started when he walked in the door with, "So I was reading on Mr. Money Mustache..."
I have spent years frustrated by my own duality - wanting to live simply and way beneath our means but having absolutely no skills nor really even a working understanding of what that meant. The Mister would say things to me like, “Well, just don’t spend money.” That just absolutely did not compute, and quite frankly still doesn't. People spend money every day, right? Moms toss around memes that go something like “Heading to Target! See you in $150! LOLZ!” I mean, having Amazon Prime means it’s Christmas EVERY TWO DAYS for goodness’ sake. And THINK OF THE CHILDREN. They need clothesdiaperswipesspecialHonestCo.windowcleanersandoxypodsandsandboxesandwatertablesandlighttablesandsocksandshoesandhairbowsandballetslippersandballettightsandleotardsandbooksandDVDsand...FOOD! Oh don’t even get me started on food. We have been on a lifetime food journey together and we started pretty much where everyone starts...things that are fast and convenient, restaurants that we think are awesome and delicious, eating out whenever we want instead of like when we were kids and only went out for birthdays…
The problem was (is?) that maybe because we live in a town of movers and shakers and people with serious scratch that we (I?) became numb to what constitutes as “normal” consumer habits. Or even what the rest of the world lives like. Americans are rich beyond measure pretty much at baseline and we don't see it. I even read Jen Hatmaker’s “7” a few years ago and even though I was horrified by so many truths about how the rest of the world lives, still would buy the odd bit of fast clothes, occasionally looked at my overfull fridge that I just filled from a ridiculously priced trip to the grocery store and then closed it and ordered pizza, and popped in to Starbucks for a chai latte on the regular.
But somehow, amidst the postpartum hormones and something I like to call “Hello Frontal Lobes!” I got it. I started to see what a regular Starbucks habit would cost me now if I wanted to maintain that habit when we retired. And then how long it would take us to retire if I kept up with that habit. And then how long we would have to put off all the TRAVEL! and ADVENTURE! if we constantly got takeout or even dropped cash on brunch instead of squirreling all that fundage away for amazing brunch in say...Paris.
I saw excess everywhere in my house that I just kept cleaning up over and over and over when my little preschool tornado tore through it. Toys and clothes and trinkety decorations and things I had kept that didn’t necessarily have pleasant memories associated with but felt like I had to because they had somehow melded with my identity. Books that were given to us that we would never read and just...stuff. Everywhere. The worst part of the whole thing is that I was all happy to have nested and gotten rid of -I’m serious- 10 trash bags of stuff and here I was staring at MORE STUFF and quite unsure as to how it all ended up in my house/garage/livingroom/CRAFTROOM/closet/BRAIN.
Y’all. The mental clutter that all of this brought was making my inner world hell. Well, that plus hormones plus then the holidays were looming....
Yuck.
Eventually, we saw a way through, and we are now on a path toward sweet simple living and despite my best efforts, are totally kicking ass some days and totally sucking the next and then getting back on track and then having wild adventures. In fact, the mister STILL says to me, "Hey just don't spend money," but now I hear it as, "Hey think really hard about how and why you want to spend this" or I hear myself telling my daughter, "Do you want to get hot chocolate here or do you want to get hot chocolate in Puerto Rico" (if that sounds harsh it's because she is 4 and would drink ONLY chocolate milk with whip cream on top if I let her. She even conned her babysitter into three chocolate milks while I was at work one day.)
There are a lot of parts to this story that we are still writing every day, so if life and love and adventure and creativity is something you're into, then wheeeee let's go!
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