Tag Archives: freedom

Another Digital Fasting Update

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Simpler Living Tagged , ,

So it’s been nearly three months since I began my digital fast. While I’m no longer avoiding web surfing, I’m trying to keep it on a short chain. I take a quick look at the news, and move on. No more hours of surfing or following rabbit trails.

I’m also reading more actual, physical books. I’ve been working my way through several entertaining series written by Rhys Bowen. All of the books have come from my public library. I like being able to give back each volume when I’m through with it instead of trying to find a place for it in my home. Libraries are simply wonderful, aren’t they?

I’m still spending more time working with my hands, although I burned out on making dishcloths and have gone back to playing Candy Crush at night while we watch a movie. Once I get some quilt tops quilted, I’ll need to hand-stitch the bindings, and that will take the place of Candy Crush.

Ultimately, I do feel that I’ve reduced the digital clutter in my life. This recently carried forward into another area of technology when I learned that my beloved ancient cell phone with the slide-out keyboard would soon stop working because it’s 2G, which is being phased out.

After much research, I chose a smartphone that cost me $80 (including a year’s worth of use). I have chosen not to use it to access the Internet except for a map app that will help me when faced with the need to find alternate routes while traveling. Otherwise, I’m only using it for calls, texting and the occasional photo. This should help keep my Internet usage down, instead of increasing it.

Whenever I’ve decluttered my home or decluttered my digital life, I am continually reminded that less clutter equals more freedom.

Is Downsizing the American Dream a Bad Thing?

By Claire Posted in downsizing, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , ,

An article posted at TheAtlantic.com laments the findings of interviews and surveys that show that an increasing number of Americans, particularly young Americans, are more concerned with hanging on to what they have than moving up in the world, and are also more interested in becoming debt-free.

Clearly this is a reflection of the stagnating economy that we’ve been dealing with for many years now. Young people in particular are overloaded with debt, especially student loan debt, which keeps them tethered to whatever job they might have and limits their ability to buy a car or house.

One thing missing from the article, however, is that many of these young people saw their parents overloaded with stuff, and the debt that comes from buying more stuff than you can afford. They grew up watching their parents buy houses with three-car garages when they only had two cars, just so there was more room to store their stuff. They watched them clean around all their stuff and lose spare rooms to all their stuff. And of course in extreme cases they saw them hoarding stuff.

The real theme I see in this article is that people want freedom. They want to be free of debt, and they don’t want to become loaded down with stuff they have to pay for, for years to come.

They also want affordable housing, but not necessarily impressive housing. Note the survey reference to owning a nice home. In recent years, “nice” meant “bigger and more impressive than your friends’ homes.” Given the survey and interview responses, perhaps “nice” can go back to meaning “affordable and comfortable.”

The sad tone of the article could use a little optimism. The fact is that downsizing your lifestyle can be freeing. Moving to a smaller place means you spend less time caring for your home and more time doing things you’d rather be doing. Moving to a more affordable place means improving your financial bottom line, and maybe even helping you become debt-free.

Yes, it can be painful to go through a downsizing of the American Dream. It sure hurt when my family was forced to go through it. But it only hurts for a little while because the freedom you gain is so worth it. Eleven years on from our involuntary downsizing, we are thriving, and enjoying debt-free life in a small, nice home.

The Questionable Value of a Top-of-the-Line Kitchen

By Claire Posted in Debt-Free, Simpler Living Tagged , , , , , , ,

I think it’s interesting that so many people will plunk down tens of thousands of dollars to create a top-of-the-line kitchen in their homes, complete with the latest design in cabinets and hip counter surfaces, even though they rarely cook. It’s all about having a kitchen that looks like it belongs in a magazine or on a cooking show, I guess.

Personally, I adore my hip cabinets. Check this out:

Those are genuine 1980s vintage cabinet fronts. Inside you’ll find sturdy plain old wood cabinets and shelves from the 1950s, when the house was built. I suspect that’s also when they installed my very cool counter tops:

That’s right, speckled Formica. We’re talking the height of luxury!

OK, so I’m being sarcastic. The fact is that I love my kitchen. It’s made of very sturdy materials that have lasted for years and still have a lot of life left in them. Since I cook from scratch every day, and we do a lot of dishes because we don’t have a dishwasher, we spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Yet it doesn’t bother me at all that I don’t have the latest cabinets or countertops.

You see, I’m a firm believer that there’s a trade-off between time and money. You have to give up one to get the other. Personally, I value time more than money, and the older I get, the more valuable time is to me. I can live without a $20,000 upgrade to my kitchen, because I don’t want to spend the time it takes to earn that 20 grand just to have a fancier kitchen. The one I have works just fine.

Some of my attitude stems from the fact that we’re debt-free. Most people will put a kitchen upgrade on their credit cards and think nothing of it. But we worked very hard to get debt-free, so we aren’t part of the how-much-a-month crowd. We also like to keep our expenses down so we can work part-time, which gives us more time to pursue other interests. Being able to live this way is much more important to us than having the latest kitchen upgrades in our home.

Besides, five years from now, today’s cabinets and counters are going to look outdated anyways.

Most People Don’t Need a Big House

By Claire Posted in downsizing, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , ,

Over at getrichslowly.org, they’re discussing how people who live in big houses only use a small percentage of their total square footage when it comes to daily living. That wasn’t true of us.

Our big house had five bedrooms and an office. We ran two businesses from home, and I homeschooled our children. For many years, every single room of our house was used every day. I used to say that we got more mileage out of our mortgage payment than anyone else we knew.

But that was then. The kids are in their 20s and 30s now and on their own; we downsized to a smaller house several years ago. There are three of us living in 1000 square feet, and we’re quite comfortable. However, had we stayed in our old house, we’d be rattling around with more space than we’d know what to do with. I can easily imagine that, like the people mentioned in the link above, we’d be spending most of our time in just a few rooms of the house.

Thinking about how you use the rooms in your house is a really valuable exercise. Unless you have more money than you know what to do with, you might want to consider whether your current house is really larger than you need it to be. A smaller house means lower costs; lower costs equals more freedom because you don’t have to earn so much money to support yourself, leaving you more time to do the things you really want to do.

I suspect that for many people, the big house ties them to their jobs. If they love their jobs, that’s fine. But many people don’t love their jobs. Living in a smaller house might free them to work somewhere that pays less but offers work that they love.

Some people love the status that a big house confers on them. If status is your goal, then you probably don’t care whether you use many rooms in your house or not. You’re more concerned about what other people think.

I certainly enjoyed having all the space we had in our big house (the master bath was bigger than the master bedroom in our current small house). But that house took a long time to clean, cost us a fortune in property taxes, and maintaining it would probably wear us out now, since we’re a little older (ahem) than we were when we built it 30 years ago.

I loved that big house, and I miss it. But I love this little house, too. Ultimately, some people actually need and use a big house, as we did, but only for a certain stage of their lives. After that, I think most people will find that living efficiently gives them more freedom.