One such person, Matt Heusser, had been writing articles about “The Jimmy Buffet lifestyle” and asked to interview me on the topic. here is the result, an interview about going independent, not just from your job, but from working altogether.

• Keeping your job costs you money and time.
• You probably don’t consider these costs when you think about how much money you earn.
• Most people’s “true” hourly rate is half what they think it is.
• Your “true” hourly rate also represents how long you have to work to earn $1.
• Expressing the cost of something you might purchase in terms of the energy you must exchange for it could really change the way you feel about spending that money.
• Coffee can be more expensive than a computer.
• Understanding the value of our life energy was an instrumental part in our journey towards financial independence.

The Details

I have referred to life energy value of money before, most recently in an article about an LCD projector we bought to use as a mobile TV. In it, I said:

A portable TV capable of 1080P for less than CAD 600. Not bad, and an easy value to compute. Even at 8 minutes of life energy per dollar (approximately $30k/year salary), the entire setup costs you 80 hours of pre-tax energy, and I’ll bet you’ll enjoy the projector for more than two weeks.

How did I compute this number? What does it mean? Let me tell you.

I learned in Your Money or Your Life how to express an amount of money, say the cost of something I’d like to buy, in units of life energy. As they put it, I can compute how much of my energy I must trade to pay for this thing I want to buy. When I worked at IBM, I made the calculation roughly like this.

Here I’ve started with my overall salary after taxes in the left-hand column and the amount of time I spend in the office working in the right-hand column. I show you the calculation at the scale of a year, but I’ve done it at the scale of a week and a month, too. If you try this, then choose whichever scale that you find easiest to think at, and pro-rate everything else at that scale. I have found that scaling this to year helps me remember once-per-year expenses like vacations.

Although I had a salary of $82k, I had net pay of $56k per year, so I calculated based on that. Nowadays, my personal tax rate stands much, much lower.

I counted all the costs in time and money associated with having a job. I kept asking myself, “If I didn’t have to keep my job, would I spend this money?” Every time I answered “no”, I added it to the list. All costs mattered. I had a long list. At the end, I subtracted all the money costs from my salary and added all the time costs to my time working, which led me to the figures at the bottom of the table.

At the top of the table I computed my hourly pay rate on paper. In this case, $56k / 2250 hours = $24.89/hour. At the bottom of the table I computed a much more accurate hourly pay rate, taking into account the cost of keeping my job. In this case, $39.9k / 3585 hours = $11.13/hour. I had had no idea.

Most people learn that they earn a true hourly rate about half as high as their pay stub leads them to believe.

The next step involves taking the reciprocal, whose unit is “hours/dollar”, which I usually express in minutes per dollar by multiplying by 60. In my case, 60 / $11.13/hour = 5.39 minutes per dollar. What did that mean?

I chose to exchange 5.39 minutes of my life energy to earn $1 by working where I worked and how I worked.

Now I could quantify purchases big and small in much more concrete units, and we humans tend to judge things more accurately when we have more concrete information. The morning coffee at Second Cup? (Forgive me; I knew not what I drank.) cost $1.50 or 8 minutes. Every day. It took 8 minutes to stand in line to get the coffee. Not worth it. A new MacBook Air? $2,000 or 10,780 minutes or almost 180 hours. Given how much time I spend online, I could easily justify one of those per year as long as I have the discretionary funds to spend on it. A new first-baseman’s glove? $200 or 1,078 minutes, almost 18 hours. Back then I played softball every week all summer and really enjoyed it, so 18 hours seemed a small price to pay.

Now I had a less abstract, less intuitive, and perhaps more meaningful way to evaluate the utility of a purchase. This helped me decide which expenditures I valued (the computer) and didn’t value (Second Cup’s crappy coffee). This played a central role in our personal financial strategy: we expressed our expenditures in life energy units, which helped us identify the expenditures we didn’t value, then we stopped buying those things. We must have saved 40% on our discretionary spending.

Awareness of the money we spent is just one of the ways we have learned to free our minds to do great work.

Inspired by GraphJam

Diaspar Software Services, Mexico office

We’ve written before about our impressions of Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Work Week. In this book, Ferriss extols the virtues of first eliminating as much administrative work as possible, then automating the rest. For example, I have eliminated a majority of email communication by training others not to expect quick responses from me. Only the most expensive-to-ignore emails get through, and this system has given me significant peace of mind. We have automated almost all our bill payments. We have outsourced managing our rental properties. I estimate that we spend less than two hours per month on recurring administrative issues, and we can do better. For example, we have too many bank accounts, including chequing, savings, and credit. This requires moving money around each month. This summer, we will eliminate as much of the confusion as we can. I bring up elimination and automation because these two activities make it easier for us to live away from home. We have outsourced much of our administrative work to housesitters, handymen, book-keepers and accountants, but we needed to know whether we’d outsourced and automated enough to move ourselves off all critical paths. What could possibly happen at home that would require our physical presence? It turns out that we managed to handle a number of things remotely, with a combination of the internet, a tablet PC, Skype, headphones, a scanner, and MXN 10 per page for printing costs at the nearby internet cafe.

• We filed an annual return of information for our company by fax.
• We filed both corporate and personal tax returns.
• We collected significant revenue from clients by wire transfer and direct deposit.
• We invoiced a client entirely electronically, including an expense report complete with receipts.
• We even sent a tax treaty document by post to the US!

Even when the outside world insisted on receiving physical paper, we managed to make that happen with little effort: a few minutes’ walk, a USB drive, a few pesos, and a stamp. I conclude from this experience that we have made our office paperless enough to travel anywhere with an internet cafe or a printing service. We have one major annoyance to eliminate this summer: TD Canada Trust’s Euro account requires the accountholder to sign a piece of paper in a branch in Canada to transfer funds out of the account. It also does not allow withdrawing cash in Euro. We intend to try out the Euro account with HSBC bank to see whether it indeed solves those problems. With this, we’ll have provided for the vast majority of our day-to-day needs, and for the rare item that requires an unusual amount of our attention, we will have saved up more than enough energy to deal with it.

Villa Serena, Mazatlán, México

On the advice of relatives, we chose to experiment with living at Villa Serena, located in Mazatlán’s old downtown. We found a one-bedroom apartment for USD 653 per month. This price included MXN 300 worth of electricity per month, and access to the amenities, although we did have to pay an additional MXN 150 per month to use the laundry facilities and MXN 25 per 19-litre bottle of water. We ended up spending a total of CAD 1129 + MXN 13942, or approximately CAD 2280 on housing costs for three months. That makes CAD 760 per month for rent, cooling, water, cable TV, and internet. The corresponding items cost us CAD 782 per month in Summerside. That makes it possible to live in Mazatlán quite inexpensively. We love that.

Cooking with my youngest sister-in-law, Mary

We ate quite well, mostly cooking, but occasionally eating out. We certainly enjoyed a lot of Hector’s bread at Molika Bakery, which we mentioned in a previous article. We spent about CAD 2280 on food for three months, or CAD 760 per month, which makes for a telling coincidence: we value food. We spent about CAD 183 on our Molika Bakery habit, CAD 32 on coffee beans, CAD 934 on shopping at the big grocery store, CAD 156 at the local market , CAD 216 on pizza, and the rest (about CAD 759) on eating out. After we returned home, we computed what we spent on food in June unrelated to travel, and it came to just under CAD 1000.

Traveling in style with our good friend, Jen

We love how little transportation costs at home, and in Mazatán, the taxis and pulmonías didn’t disappoint. We spent CAD 136 on transportation, excluding the trips to and from the airport, which totaled an additional CAD 53. Given the flat rate of CAD 6 or 7.50 per trip in Summerside, CAD 136 would buy about 17 trips, or 8 round trips, at home. We probably use about 4 rounds trips per month at home, which costs around CAD 180-200 over three months, depending on where we need to go. While we encountered some trouble flagging down a pulmonía in Mazatlán, we found the service overall both efficient and pleasant to use. I also owe the taxistas a debt of gratitude for letting me practise Spanish with them.

I think I can make a strong case that Mazatlán offers us an excellent place to live, with a cost of living very similar to Summerside. We consider our experiment a financial success, at least on the surface. We couldn’t resist looking at some real estate listings, and while houses cost considerably more there than at home, we had to double-take at the property taxes those listings quoted. As a single data point, a house listed at USD 250k carried property taxes of USD 200 per year. This compares favorably to the CAD 1250 per year we pay in Summerside. Although we would need a cash infusion to move there, it appears that we could live in Mazatlán spending under our arbitrary limit of CAD 2000 per month for basic living expenses.

It seems like 98% of personal-finance material (blogs, magazines, books) focus on spending LESS — keeping a budget, saying “no, no, no” to lattes, jeans, and vacations.

Why?

Why don’t they cover earning more, or negotiating, or increasing your responsibilities at work, or understanding the psychology of your own behavior, or all the other things besides cutting down on spending?

I’m trying to formulate 3 crisp answers.

So, what do you think? Why is the vast majority of personal-finance material focused on cutting down on spending?

I answered in his comments, but I wanted to repeat that answer here. I hope you find it useful.

I learned from Your Money or Your Life that for most people, most of the time, spending less is easier than earning more. I found that to work for us, and it was a key step in retiring at 34 instead of in our 50s. Unfortunately, most people conclude that they must limit spending to a predefined budget, and find that difficult to make work. I don’t set budgets.

Budgets don’t work because there’s no such thing as a typical month. I also learned that from Your Money or Your Life. For this reason, we never budgeted, but instead, tracked our expenses, looked for wasteful expenses, then eliminated them. We asked ourselves the question, “Do I value this expenditure?” When we answered “No”, we stopped spending that expenditure. We made a quantum leap when we decided that we didn’t value living in an expensive city like Toronto any more.

Now, fortunately for us, when we reduced our expenses, we had an active profit each month, which we turned into passive income generating assets, and the compounding effect took care of the rest. Some families can’t do this. Even after eliminating expenditures they don’t value, they still run on an active deficit each month. These families need help to start earning more money, which usually demands an investment they already can’t afford.

At the same time, Rich Dad, Poor Dad has pointed our attention to the tendency of families to spend more as they earn more. As a result, earning more does not translate to increased active monthly profit (nor reduced active monthly deficit), meaning that it does not lead to increased passive income and more financial freedom.

I would conclude from all this that first focusing on spending less leads to better results than first focusing on earning more.

Tim Ferriss' "Four-Hour Work Week"

I have started reading The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. When I’d read descriptions and reviews of the book, I formed the opinion that I already intuitively understood many of the principles at work, particularly as regards his steps of elimination and automation. Reading it confirmed what I’d suspected: I had already used these techniques and even counseled others to use them in my work as a classroom trainer and consultant. It sprang to mind a particular success story from my early software career.

I worked as a student-on-call at IBM in Toronto in 1997. I started on the Visual Age for RPG project, which entailed my comparing error messages between the older RPG compiler and the newer Visual Age RPG compiler. While they had automated the test that produced all the error messages they wanted to check, they hadn’t automated checking the messages from the two compilers to each other. Instead, I started doing that. I began with 50-page printouts: a master copy and printouts from each test run. I compared the two copies, then reported a defect when I found an unacceptable difference between the two. It took a few days to learn which differences they could tolerate and which ones they decided warranted a fix. It took me several hours to compare the printouts, and I resented the tedium. After a week, I had the thought that all successful people have: there has to be a better way.

First, I asked whether I could use e-copies of both the master copy and the test runs. They arranged for that with little effort. As I waited for that, I looked for patterns in the text I compared by hand, learning how to extract the messages from the surrounding text and how to describe meaningful and meaningless differences. Once I received e-copies of the master copy and a single test run, I started writing a computer program to load the two files, compare them, then summarize the differences, highlighting the meaningful ones as “almost certainly defects” and the meaningless ones as “probably not defects”. This gave me an opportunity to write my first truly useful programs in C, a language I hadn’t much used before, but one that I imagined would benefit me as a professional programmer. I don’t recall how long it took me, but I don’t remember anyone becoming impatient with me, so the time I spent must not have made me a bottleneck.

The first day, I used my new program to on the next test run, but verified the results by hand. I noticed that my program took about 30 minutes to run: I had an old computer, I didn’t know how to write particularly quick programs, and don’t forget the test runs amounted to 50 printed pages. At first, I looked around the office while my program ran for something to do, as I didn’t have access to the internet on my computer. I flipped through a few manuals, including a C manual that I thought might help me. That day I processed two test runs, the same as any other day, but noticed that my manual checking went quicker, because I could check the meaningful differences first, then the meaningless ones, then double-check the rest of the document to ensure that program didn’t miss any defects. To my delight, it performed more than well enough for me to start trusting it within a week.

Now the time had come to harvest my productivity crop. I collected that day’s test run and a new master copy, loaded them into my program, ran it, then wandered around the building, knowing I had about 30 minutes. I hadn’t realized the size and complexity of the old IBM building in Toronto. I began to understand the need for its intricate room addressing system, right down to numbering hallways, odd numbers running north-south and even numbers running east-west. I walked back to my office after about an hour of wandering to look at my program’s result. I reported two defects, then wondered what to do next. I had to wait for the next test run, and they wouldn’t run one for another couple of hours. I wandered the building some more and stumbled upon something of interest: a dart board in the cafeteria.

I started playing darts.

In less than two weeks, I’d gone from a terrifically tedious job checking two 50-page documents to one another by hand to IBM paying me roughly $150/hour (as a starving undergraduate student!) for about one hour per day, with seven hours of playing darts, reading, or generally relaxing. All this by finding an ineffective work process and streamlining it with a little elimination and a little automation. I had gained some relative mobility, as I only needed to spend about an hour a day in my office, reporting defects or fixing my test program.

Now I need to confess something: my program did not operate perfectly. Every two weeks or so, I’d notice something my program missed: a difference that my program interpreted as meaningless that I needed to report as a defect. This meant that, every so often, I reported a defect later than I could have. I was performing at far less than 100% efficiency. Funnily enough, it did not matter at all! I didn’t understand the theory at the time, but I experienced it then: the project had a bottleneck somewhere else in the system that moved more slowly than I reported defects, so I could generate no extra value by reporting those defects more efficiently!

Imagine that: producing better results wouldn’t have mattered at all, so it didn’t matter that I produced my results less than perfectly efficiently.

Since I didn’t understand bottlenecks at the time, I felt bad about “cheating” and added more rules to my program to handle these increasingly subtle distinctions between meaningful and meaningless differences. The resulting program did work better and did automate my work even more, allowing me to go from one hour of work per day to closer to 45 minutes; but if I hadn’t been refining a skill I would use later to make a lot of money, then I would have looked back on that as a waste of time. Had I known any better, I might not have bothered at all, and simply played more darts!

Long before I started reading The Four-Hour Work Week, I managed to use some of the principles he describes to turn an $18/hour job into a $150/hour, one-hour-per-day job where I got to play darts, read, and otherwise relax most of the day. I didn’t wait to perfect my time-saving system; I just started using it as soon as I reasonably could, even though it cost me extra time for the first week! Since then, I’ve managed to combine the goal of mobility with the principles of elimination to retire at 34 on passive income streams worth 1.5 times my family’s essential living expenses. You can do it, too, and I recommend The Four-Hour Work Week for beginners to read to help form their vision of a new life, and then to re-read a year or two later to refine your approach to freedom from the tyranny of tedium.

We came back from our very first market trip saying, “Well, I didn’t think we were going to need a cheese budget to live here!”  We probably spend between $15 – $25 on cheese alone each week.  If you think this is just another latte factor, then you’ve likely never had applewood smoked cheddar, Le Sieur de Duplessis, organic PEI Gouda from the Cheese Lady or truffle-infused brie.  These aren’t luxuries in our household; they’re essential staples.

Even produce can be more expensive at the farmer’s market: cucumbers are $1.50 and a bag of salad greens is between $2.00 and $3.00.  But, we’ve had greens last over two weeks in the fridge (undertaking no special freshness-extending methods) so not buying food to feed the compost bin is a definite financial win.  Not to mention that the delicious salad greens we’ve been able to get have caused us to swear off iceberg lettuce forever!

Every Saturday, during our walk back from the market, we tally up what we’ve spent.  This week, it was about $120.  (We have a house guest coming this week, so we were buying for an extra person, too.) $46 of that went to fish truck guy for salmon, smoked salmon, haddock (Heavenly Halibut was sold out by 9:20 a.m.!) and scallops.  About $35 went to cheese, shitake mushrooms ($11) and a package of German sausage.  $21 was spent on produce (greens of all kinds, onions, herbs, peas, cucumbers).  And rounding out the spoils, $5 for chorizo (our first purchase so far from Pleasant Pork, since we don’t eat a lot of pig) , $5 for eggs and beef from “eggs and beef guy” and $4 for PEI strawberries.

So far it doesn’t sound like we’re much of a financial role model, especially given that we still need to use ValueFoods to supplement with things like milk, cream, butter, flour, rice, snacking fruit (apples, oranges, pears, bananas), lemon and limes, tea and cat treats.  But in many ways, our farmer’s market shopping is completely in tune with our financial philosophy: spend your money on what you value.

Even when we don’t necessarily spend less in absolute dollars, shopping at the farmer’s market significantly ups our value per dollar spent.  Here are just a few of those values we get for our money at the farmer’s market:

1. Quality: How many times have you bought a cucumber or an onion from a store and, totally seduced by the aroma, had to try it right away and then make everyone around you try it.  An onion for crying out loud!  And how many times does the captive audience think, “Oh, I’ll try it to be polite and shut this guy up,” but then exclaim, “Hey, that is pretty awesome!”  When every meal or quick snack of apple and cheese turns out to be a local food love-fest, I’d say you’re doing pretty well.  We value knowing where our food comes from, who produces it and knowing that we never have to eat crap again. (Can you believe we’re worried about the quality of food we’re going to find in Toronto because we’ve been spoiled by PEI?)
2. Quantity, or lack thereof (ie. “enough”): Good food comes in smaller packages, or at least has a higher unit cost.  We naturally, therefore, think more carefully about exactly how much to purchase.  Will we eat this all before it goes bad?  Do I really need this much? Compare that to how many $0.59 heads of cabbage we’ve never fully used.  Waste is waste, and if we’re willing to waste pennies, we’re willing to waste dollars.  Cutting waste by buying products that are too dear to waste has made us carefully and consciously consider how much is enough.
3. Intention: Yes, there are jewelery and craft vendors at the farmer’s market, but honestly, the chances of us walking out with a wooden lighthouse as an impulse purchase are slim.  When we go to the market, we’re there to buy food (specifically the basics) and there are no new shiny kitchen gadgets or snack food sales to steer us off course.  Although $120 for our weekly basics may seem high (and this week we’re expecting company this week so we erred on the side of being over stocked), if we’ve ever walked out of the Superstore paying less than that, and with only food items in our cart, I’d be shocked.  Shopping at the farmer’s market is our equivalent of the “make a list and stick to it” tip.  If we are tempted by something we hadn’t intended to purchase, at least we know it will be quality local food and our money will go to someone in our . . .
4. Community: OK, I know some people are still “eggs and beef” guy or “fish truck guy” in my mind, but at least we recognize each other and enjoy our transactions.  I’ve always said that one of my reasons for eating local was to have a network so that if ever the *&?!%# hit the fan, we’d have a food source.  And in a strange turn of events, while buying the Succulent Shitake this week, Tina confided that she’d never tried them herself and she asked me how we prepared them.  I never thought we’d have the chance to give back to the community anything other than our cash.  But, since I take pictures of everything we make/eat anyway, it might be nice to give the vendors something (a scrapbook page, a recipe?  Sadly I’m not the crafty/creative type) showing how we used and enjoyed their food.  Since we travel too often (as it stands now, anyway) to actually grow anything ourselves, this interaction and participation with our food supply gives us a connection to our food that we enjoy.

So, just like we make a distinction between “retired” and “rich”, we also differentiate between “spending less” and “spending well.”  Our goal isn’t to reduce our spending to the bare minimum.  Reducing our spending at all costs would at times be at odds with our values of purchasing high quality, healthy local products and supporting our community. Our goal is to reduce our wasteful spending to the bare minimum, spending that doesn’t give good value in return.

We’re saving money by not wasting money, and thereby able to feel like we’re living rich even though we’re clearly not. When you can get so much value from purchasing the basic necessities, things you have to buy anyway**, then maybe you’ll be less likely to make impulse or excess purchases that don’t really make you happy.

Do you think it’s crazy to get excited over your particular choice of laundry detergent?  TP? Olive oil?  Toothpaste? Maybe if you allowed yourself to buy the stuff you really liked (or to spend the time on making your own) rather than picking up the cheapest no-name brand or whatever’s on sale this week, then you’d feel more satisfied and less deprived as you navigate the superstores.  Maybe you’d feel a greater connection to a community (“Hey, you use the soap in the bottle covered with crazy, religious rants, too!”) or maybe you’d just feel good every single time you washed the dishes that the suds going down the drain aren’t causing shrinking testicles in frogs.  Maybe you’d be more likely to tell yourself, “I can’t afford this Meatball Grill Basket (thanks, Unclutterer.com!) because I know I spend a little more than the average person on good cheese every week.”

Spending well can lead to spending less.  Take the time to think about what you truly value — and more importantly, what you spend money on that you don’t actually value.  Then, even if your absolute dollars spent figure doesn’t change significantly (though there’s a good chance it will), at least you’ll gradually reallocate your resources to align with your values.  That’s true “retail therapy.”

* It seems like it really should be farmers’ market or maybe even farmers market.  My last choice would be farmer’s market (there’s definitely more than one farmer), but that’s what’s on the sign outside the building, so that’s the phrase I’m using.

** Not everyone needs to buy food, but most of us aren’t farmers.  For us, food shopping is a necessity.  But, everyone has their own list of essential purchases; even our local farmers need to buy TP, I’m guessing!

When we envisioned the Dauphin experiment 5 years ago, we didn’t expect our money would come from real estate.  We just thought that the best way to reduce our living expenses was to own the cheapest house we could find.  Of course, that didn’t mean buy the $24,000 house with the sagging foundation – that ain’t cheap!  It turned out to be a $35,000 structurally sound 625 square foot house being sold by the bank as a foreclosure property.

We purchased that home a good 3 years before we were able to disentangle ourselves from Toronto. (Sidebar: last time it took 3 years to free ourselves up from our lifestyle, finances, commitments etc.  This time, it took about 6 weeks.  Life simplification, FTW!)  For the last 2 of those years, we rented out the house.  It didn’t always go super smoothly, but there was never a shortage of tennants.  So, about a year before moving, we purchased a second home that we believe was quite undervalued.  It, too, was instantly rented and has never been vacant a full month since we’ve owned it.

This demand for rental property combined with sub-$40K houses = great big win.  It was the rental income from these properties that allowed us to retire, even though we’re not rich.  We have no mortgages and a lifestyle that is completely subsidized.  We watch the news about the tanking economy, and know that it doesn’t affect us (until we can’t get the products or services we need).  We have it pretty darn good.  Garth Turner would be proud. So, why move, and especially, why now?

Sometimes I worry we’re being irresponsible, or that this move somehow goes counter to the philosophy that got us where we are today.  The new house costs *over $100,000* not to mention the work we’ll need to do with it and the costs of moving.  (People still laugh, but it’s over 3 times what we paid for the current house, and still causes a few heart palpitations!) When you pride yourself on your achievements in downsizing and minimizing, there’s a certain guilt that comes with moving back up the property ladder.

I think we were proud that we got by with the minimum requirements, moved to the middle of nowhere, lived in essentially a 3 room house (Joe’s office, bathroom, rest of house) and sacrificed the ability to “go out” anywhere, really.  (There was no where to go out.) It was sufficient, and it allowed us both to retire well before our 35th birthdays. We also created this blog about the process, so pushing the envelope with respect to our home life has become a part of our identity.

But, just like the $24K house with the unstable foundation isn’t really cheaper than the structurally-sound $35K house, the house in Dauphin costs us a LOT in travel time, money and energy that should be greatly reduced after the move.  The tiny commuter airline to and from Winnipeg only runs twice a day on weekdays (makes it difficult to arrive at a client site on Sunday or return home from a work week on Friday) and the train only runs 2 – 3 times per week.  Consequently, we end up spending more weekends in Winnipeg than anyone should have to, and we also end up bundling our travel together so that we minimize the Dauphin-Winnipeg legs taken.  This means leaving the cats alone for long stretches of time (don’t worry, friends check in daily on them!) and most recently left us the victims of a home robbery.  (We narrowed down the time frame, and the burglars came during the weekend we were stuck in Winnipeg waiting for us to get home, not while we were away on the trip itself!)

Without meaning to slag Dauphin, there’s another hidden cost we’ve incurred – people just didn’t want to come visit us.  All of the sudden, we tell people we’re moving to PEI and now *everyone* wants to come!  And, we’ve allowed ourselves to purchase a home with room for them to do so.  What’s the point of moving somewhere “different” (I wanted to say “exotic” but somehow it didn’t seem quite appropriate for Dauphin) if you can’t share it with people and use it to inspire them?  For the first year or so, I was really excited about Dauphin because of what it offered us.  But, we were always met with, “I could never move there,” or “You’re so brave/disciplined/resolved,” which I know was meant to be a compliment but just further emphasized that our choice wasn’t somehow “desirable” and that we needed to be commended for surviving/sticking it out.  And especially since finding willing house sitters is integral to our travel strategy, living in a desirable location goes a long way to allowing us to travel for extended periods of time.

So, we’ve decided that this move doesn’t run counter to our initial ideals.  Rather, we’re simply opting for the next version of the $35K house strategy.  The potential closure of the bowling alley in the next few years, the increased time and expense traveling, the unwillingness of friends and family to come visit (and no where for them to stay in the house, even if they did) is simply too shaky of a foundation on which to continue.  It’s a completely responsible choice to purchase the more expensive house (that is well within our cash budget to avoid a mortgage) in order to avoid dealing with these “structural” issues.

I’ll sure miss my cork floors, though!

Wonder whether he got his degree from this guy.