I’m so used to giving people the 10-second-elevator-talk answer to this question, I’ll see whether I can actually remember the details accurately!
It was winter, somewhere between 2003 - 2004. Mostly Math was off to a strong start, we were living in Bavyiew Mews (still one of my favourite places we’ve lived — probably the closest thing to a “home” we ever had) and Joe was caught in a mixture of out-of-town (often out-of-country) travel and telecommuting.
We had been reading some pretty interesting personal finance books (Free Parking, Your Money or Your Life) and we began to take some of their alternative definitions of “wealthy” to heart. Joe especially liked the concept of “infinite wealth.” (Well, who wouldn’t?) The beauty of this concept is that anyone can be financially wealthy; it simply requires a balancing of income and expenses. For most people, it is easier to spend less than to earn more. So, we decided to begin our quest for infinite wealth by reducing our expenses.
The one expense we had the least control over was rent. Since we had needed home office space for Joe and tutoring space for me, we found ourselves in a two-story, three bedroom rental unit with a full basement, which set us back just over $1700/month. Certainly, we knew we could cut back in this area. But even still, saving a few hundred bucks a month wasn’t going to make us infinitely wealthy, and we were pretty firmly entrenched in an affluent ‘hood in Toronto; rent wasn’t going to be substantially less in our neck of the woods. What if we didn’t have to pay rent at all? What if we found a house so cheap we could buy it in cash and save $20,000 annually?
OK, but where to look? Surely somewhere in this great country, there had to be cheap real estate. How do we narrow down the search? We needed some criteria (or as Joe would now call them, “acceptance tests”) to evaluate our options. So I asked Joe, “If you were semi-retired, what would you want to do?” Remember, the goal is to not have to work, so if not working, then what are we doing? Joe replied that he might like to be able to bowl. We both agreed that our high speed internet connection and digital cable were also necessities. And so, the search was on:
- 5-pin bowling alley
- high speed internet
- digital cable
- inexpensive real estate
With the help of Google (for a list of every 5 pin bowling alley in Canada) and MLS, I cross-listed locations that had both 5 pin alleys with those that had houses under $40,000 for sale. When I had a short list of cities, I checked for the availability of both high speed internet and digital cable. But, it didn’t stop there!
Once I had cities/towns that passed these acceptance tests, then they had to pass the “livability” test: could we live there without a car? This is where I needed maps of towns, locations of grocery stores, transit info etc. At this point, I was pretty sure we were destined for prairie living or something near the east coast. When it came time to investigate Dauphin, we liked what we saw. The presence of a Wal*Mart, while hardly inspiring, at least told us we could buy stuff. Pizza Hut meant we could still order in. And, a local airport? Well, the flights were expensive, but if Joe’s clients were paying for travel. . .
It was good enough to warrant taking our first ever vacation in the summer of 2004. (Photos) If nothing else, we’d be getting a 2 person jacuzzi tub suite at the Super 8 for $108/night and we’d explore a part of Canada we’d never seen. At worst, it would simply be a few days of quality time.
It turned out to be better than that. Good enough that we could see ourselves living there. Good enough that we bought our house before we left! On the way home, we “planned our escape” and came up with a reasonable moving date of June 2007, just under three years in the future. And six weeks ago, it became a reality! (Well, the moving OUT part. The moving IN part we’re still dealing with, but that’s another post.)
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