Belief + Work = Freedom

Tags

being nice, dreaming, giving kudos, Karma, Rat Race, Rule of 3

Please take a moment to do the Poll at the bottom of this post.           I would love your input. 🙂

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5. We believed. We worked toward our goals. We got me Retired at 45.

No matter what your dream, if you really want it, you can achieve it.  It might take longer than you thought it would… mine did.  It might be harder than you thought, but maybe not.  It might take more sacrifice than you think you can give.  But if this goal is truly important to you, believing and working can get you there.

When Dan and I first came up with this plan to get out of the Rat Race, I hoped to be retired by 2008.  That didn’t work out.  When I took my last job in the Rat Race in 2006, I figured I could make it out by 2011, when I’d be fully vested in my 401k plan at Steel Dynamics (SDI).  In the end, it took a bit longer than I had initially hoped.  But it was much quicker than if we’d not dreamed, not planned, and not worked at all!

People at SDI thought I was crazy, talking about retiring in a few years.  Going on about my “5-Year Plan”.  I’m pretty sure they all thought I was blowing smoke up their butts.  Just talking out of mine.  There were a few people who knew I was serious.  But I think everyone was still shocked when I finally gave them a date.  I think they expected I’d wait until my kid was out of college.  I had a few confidants at work who knew early.  I wanted this to be a smooth transition, not a leaving-them-in-the-lurch scenario, so I worked closely with one of my employees and encouraged another who seemed willing to fill my position to assure SDI would be able to have all the bases covered once I left.

Which brings me to Point #1 in leaving the Rat Race.  I recommend NOT going out in a blaze of glory.  You’ve all seen the YouTube video of the guy who brought the marching band to quit his job, or heard stories of people dropping the bomb and leaving in a big cloud of drama, mistletoe on the back of their pants, all that fun stuff.  But I believe in Karma and, as much as there are always a few people I would love to see get their comeuppance, I don’t really think I can play God and determine when and how they will.  And I believe in the Three-Fold Law:

Ever mind the rule of three,
What ye send out comes back to thee.

So I definitely wanted to do things right.  When I knew I was getting close, I so wanted to give more notice.  But with things not finalizing until the end of July with Dan getting health care benefits at his new job, and my plan for heading to Dancing Rabbit, I couldn’t give much more notice than I did.

Side Story: When I quit my penultimate job, I gave a full month’s notice.  Of course, at that time, I didn’t have another job lined up…  It was that bad.  I was DONE.  Maybe someday I’ll tell that story here.

But I did give SDI 2 weeks notice.  Actually, it turned out to be three weeks, but I took a week of vacation in that last three weeks as well.  And I recommend doing the same if you’re leaving any gig.  I mean the giving-2-weeks-notice thing.  It’s just common decency.  Though the vacation-before-you-head-to-the-next thing is great too, if you can swing it.   There is a chance they will walk you out immediately, and that was a factor in my decision for giving notice when I did.  Our family would be fine if SDI decided to do that, but my boss was super awesome in taking my notice.  He let me decide how the separation would work best for me and, in the end, it worked best for SDI too.  I think he’d learned to trust that I would make sure of that.  And I don’t think he was as surprised as most.  I’d been dropping stronger and stronger hints that they might want to prepare for my departure, without actually saying I was leaving or giving a time frame.  But he is a pretty sharp guy.

The employee I’d taken into my confidence has been able to fully transition them in the time since I left and I have always been willing to answer any calls or e-mails with questions on where things are, how to do tasks or what the heck we’d been thinking when we set up the system the way we did.  It took a bit of my time and, no, they were no longer paying me, but as you might have gathered, in my world, it’s not always about money.  It’s about doing the right thing.  Being happy and helping others to be happy means trying to help where I can.  This keeps other people from losing it when they are trying to figure out all the things you used to do when you were there.  There are so many little things we each do in our jobs that no one really sees until we’re gone.

When I knew it was getting close, I asked Danny, “What am I gonna tell them?”  I hadn’t really been looking for a new job in MN.  I was getting out.  So I wasn’t going to a new company.  I was just leaving my current company.  Danny said, “Tell them you’re retiring… again.”  Yes, actually, I was a retiree once before.  When I left my first job out of college at Inland Steel (at that point they had become ArcelorMittal Steel), they offered me a lump sum pension.  And then I got a letter from the Retirees Club welcoming me to Retirement.  I was 30 years old.  So, in essence, I was “retiring again”.  Once I realized this was really happening, I got giggly about it.  I’m sure it wasn’t as funny to those I was leaving behind but I started to get tickled every time I’d say it.  I kept pinching myself to be sure this wasn’t a real dream, that this was truly real life!

Leaving to nowhere was maybe easier than going to a new job, in which case, my company might have been a bit more cautious and let me go immediately.  Though I have never understood this practice.  I mean, if I’m leaving and I know I’m leaving, then I know I better get all the stuff I want to steal (information, data, contacts, staplers) BEFORE I actually give my notice.  Duh.

Point #2: Be sure you are taking care of you.  I recommend taking care in how much you share as you prepare to leave the Rat Race.  I know I wrote above how I was always going on and on about leaving, and that is a fine tactic.  At least, it worked out okay for me.  But when you get serious and close, don’t ruin yourself by thinking you can share your detailed plans with just anyone.  It probably isn’t a good idea to trust your HR person, even if you are BFFs.  This person has their own ass to cover and, if it ever comes out that they knew beforehand, their job could easily be on the line.  So sharing with them puts them in a difficult position.  Not sharing is really about protecting them.  This is one reason so very few people at my place knew details as I got close to leaving.

Side Concern: What about the employee that worked for me?  Am I not outing her now?  Well, they REALLY need her, so I’m not too worried about spilling the beans.  And as she likes to say, “They need me more than I need them!”  It’s so true. (Yeah, you’re seeing why we got along so well, right?  She’s the Queen of Sarcasm, a Jersey Girl and she knows the ins and outs of ISO system requirements better than anyone there, and better than many outside that plant for that matter.)

Be sure that you have all your ducks in a row, find someone OUTSIDE your work environment to bounce ideas with, and definitely think about what backup plans you might need.  I still have in my mind that, if things get really crazy, I can always go back to work full-time.  I don’t WANT to, but I am willing to, if that is what my family needs.   Most companies these days are not worried about their people as there are lots of other cogs to fill your place if you leave.  So be sure to have what you need in place for the separation and think through to assure that you’ve planned for contingencies moving forward.

And a part of the above includes Point #3: Keep your bridges intact.  Be sure that you maintain your integrity and your relationships throughout the process of moving on.  One of the things I always do when leaving a job is reach out to co-workers, clients and suppliers to let them know how much I appreciated their support, friendship, mentoring, etc.  None of us gets here on our own.  We all have help along the way and it’s good to recognize that.  Usually we only tend to let people know when they have let us down, but I have found great happiness in letting people know when they have impressed me or helped me in a way that was above and beyond the normal call of duty.   I was always one to send a note to someone’s boss when they did a job quickly, very well or with great enthusiasm.  I appreciated people and I think it has helped me get lots more done, especially when I was in a pinch.  And I always did what I could to help other people when I could.  It’s just good Karma.

I had a fellow practitioner of this way of life visit me at the bookstore recently.  We have just re-started Storytime for kids Saturday mornings and she happened to be there at that time.  She noted how pleased she was that we do this and that I had such a great voice.  I explained that I was not reading the story and she said, “Yes, but you made a great announcement at the end and you have a terrific voice.”  Awww!  I was really touched.  It’s not every day that people take the time to tell you something positive but it sure feels good when they do.

Well, I’ve shared in the first few posts the route I took to get to here, Retired at 45.  As I move forward, I’d like to hear from you as well.  Do you like what you’re reading?  What kinds of things would you like to hear about next?  Where are we going to go on this journey together?  Let me know in the poll below.  Or tell me on FB comments.  Or send me an e-mail.  I want to hear from you too. 🙂

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If you Plan, you can. If you don’t, you won’t.

Tags

dreaming, planning, Rat Race

OK, we…

1. Focused on reducing our materialistic consumption.
2. Eliminated debt so we didn’t have to keep working for more and more money.
3. Figured out what really mattered to us.

Then…  4.  We made a plan to achieve our dreams.

As Dan says, “If you plan, you can.  If you don’t, you won’t.”

This is probably an over-simplification but in the end, it’s true.  Like the quote from Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t… you’re right.”

In our early discussions, Dan and I thought we wanted to go to Sedona.  We honeymooned there and had friends who’d moved to the area (Cottonwood) and we thought life would be nice there.  Then we realized there was no water.  Even back in 2003 the water wars were already in the news in the Southwest.  Since water was probably a key in maintaining happiness (being a basic requirement for life), we started to look elsewhere.  Eventually, we realized Minnesota was a better location, Land of 10,000 Lakes and all.

How did this happen?

In 2001, my mom and her husband (also Tom, one of the three after whom my son was named) had moved to his hometown, Alexandria, MN.  We visited for Thanksgiving that year and told ourselves Minnesota was WAY too cold for living.  But our son spent a couple summers up with Gramma Ruth and mentioned that he wanted to live in Minnesota when he grew up.  I know, it’s crazy to think a kid will have any idea what he’ll want as a grown man but I’m still hoping he ends up here someday.

Dan & I had also visited Minnesota in the summer too, and on a trip to Itasca State Park over 4^th of July a few years later, fell in love with the place.  This was in no small part due to the song “Ghost” on the Indigo Girls’ album “Rites of Passage”, which I must say is an altogether amazing album, one of my favorites.  “Galileo” is probably my favorite track… but I digress. The lyric I love is this:

The Mississippi’s mighty but it starts in Minnesota at a place where you could walk across with five steps down. And I guess that’s how you started, like a pinprick to my heart, but at this point you rush right through me and I start to drown.

When we reached the Headwaters of the Mississippi, I felt at peace.  Maybe this was the Universe giving me a sign, maybe it was a confidence in knowing I’d found and was on vacation with my true love, maybe it was just my sentimentality, maybe none of the above. Maybe for Dan it was the amazing hail storm that struck dropping golf balls of frozen slush that covered the ground in the heat of the day. But, for both of us, something stuck that day.

So thin threads… that is the substance of which a life paths seem to be built.  Little things that lead to bigger and bigger things, in a new or continued direction, depending on which strands you decide to pick up and follow.

We made a dream page together with photos of land filled with trees, outdoor showers, windmills, cottage rooms, flowers.  We put to paper what we hoped would become a reality in the next few years.  We searched for land, finally finding a piece that we could afford, we started building and planning for how we’d make a transition to a life outside the Rat Race.

We downsized our stuff, paid down the house, got our son Tom through high school and started into college and then Dan said he thought it was time for him to search for a job in Minnesota so I could leave the Rat Race.  I didn’t think I had ever heard more beautiful words.  I didn’t believe it could happen at first, and even as we got closer, it was hard to have full faith and confidence that everything would fall into place.  But it did.

He’d spent 12 weeks in 2013 at the Harn creating a space where we could live full-time.  (We quickly realized we still had quite a ways to go when we got to serious thinking about moving and living there full-time.  We still needed water and a heat source.)  We started working on getting the Indiana house ready for sale.  I started packing as if we’d be moving by fall.  Dan took a trip in May 2014 to Minnesota to look for work but nothing striking happened.  Meanwhile, I made plans for a 3-week trip to Missouri in September to visit an EcoVillage called Dancing Rabbit, hoping I’d be able to leave my job by July or August. Surely by the end of August I could find a way out?  While I felt this would happen, I saved enough vacation to make that trip without quitting… just in case.

We listed the house on June 18^th , our son Tom left for a six-week trip to China on the 20th and Dan headed back to Minnesota the next day.  We figured, if Dan could get a job by July, then when Tom returned in early August, he and I could pack a truck and move everything to Minnesota.  Dan called June 26th to tell me he’d gotten a couple offers and was coming home that weekend.  We were moving over the 4^th of July.

Whoa, boy!  I had to slam the packing into full gear to make this happen.  Knowing we were getting closer to making a reality of my dream to leave the Rat Race was a definite energizer!

If you’ve read closely or the section called “What I Believe…”, then you know I’m a big believer in Dream Pages.  While I don’t have handy the Dream Page we made together early in our relationship, in 2012 we each made a Dream Page to reflect our goals. Here are shots of one side of each of these pages.

These are only a few years old but they are coming true, sometimes in ways we couldn’t have imagined back then.  We kept them in our bedroom where we’d see them every day.  When I selected the photo of the family on the porch, I had no idea we’d be living with two generations in one house by 2014.  Or that photo of his and her feet… How could I have known that a Reflexology class for couples we took in 2014 would have me pretty much curing a sciatic issue Dan had been suffering from since 2000?  And, yes, I will tell you! We did get to a “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” show in Indy.  What a blast that was.  I totally groupied Carl Castle!!  He’s a doll, by the way.

I encourage you to put your own Dreams to paper and watch as they start to materialize in ways big and small.  Dream Big, and then start Planning.

And in case you want to check out “Galileo”… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RiU2T4Psyc    http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/indigogirls/galileo.html

Figuring out What Really Matters

Tags

communication, compromise, conservation, cooperation

A key step in our plan to Retire at 45 was…

3. We figured out what really mattered to us.

We made lots of steps along the way to figure out what really mattered to us:

• We knew our son Tom was of utmost importance so getting married to give him security was a first step; Dan’s adoption of him was the second, making what we’d already given credence a legalized entity.
• We agreed to quit smoking before we got married. (Danny says I had to be sure he could do it before taking the plunge.  It was the hardest time I’d ever had of it.)
• We agreed to vote, every year (otherwise, there would be no basis for complaining).
• We strove to be happy and to help others be happy along our way.
• We realized the planet was kind of falling apart so we might want to find an alternate plan for living more simply, healthy and still happy.

The more we read, the more we realized other things:

• How poison our food system is ~ Eating more local and organic was going to be key.
• How poorly designed our homes are ~ Finding ways to build efficiently and with less (size/materials/poisons) was important.
• How dependent we are on big systems ~ Water companies, electrical, phone and computer networks, the food and clothing industry overwhelmed us. Was there a way we could find more self-sufficiency?
• How busy life is ~ Determining what is really crucial to our happiness would likely involve a more simple life, a more slow life, a life less focused on stuff and doing and more focused on just being.

Meanwhile, life was happening…

We’ve come a little way from the days when it seemed we constantly figured out things a minute too late… though we still have some face palm moments. When we built the house in Indy in 2002, we bought a stick built house in a subdivision with an HOA.  Never Again.  What a mistake this was… for so many reasons.  We did some things right.  We put a basement on the smallest home they offered so kept the initial investment low while maximizing space.  We also added a screened-in back porch which became the favorite room in the house, especially for our cat Lucky.  But a couple years later as we learned more about green building, we realized we were not oriented for solar gain and we had poor window placement for energy efficiency.  We found out that the HOA didn’t allow solar panels of any kind and we couldn’t even have a clothesline.  Lucky for us, we had that screened in porch where we put up two clothes lines – they can’t tell you what you can do inside your own home.  During a power outage, we saw how helpless and useless our home truly would be without electricity, water and sewage systems. Needless to say, our goal to reduce our impact on the planet, which we realized was high on our list of important things, was going to be an uphill battle at this location.

Side story: We had a big realization in how poison our homes can be when we moved into the new house and, within a few months, I was having recurring dizzy spells.  Turned out, the outgassing of all the new carpet, cabinets, paint, etc. was overloading my system with allergens.  This turned into an almost year long process which included me being on disability for my job.  My company actually told ME that I had to go on leave, after I’d been working for months with pretty serious vertigo.  I had been having Dan drive me to customer visits as driving was no longer possible but it was the company that realized I was also probably not safe walking plant floors at our customer locations. I wanted to stay on, at least continuing with e-mails and claim resolution as best I could but they put me on an indefinite leave of absence. At one point I was sure I was going to have a new disease named after me, but in the end, it turned out to be only allergies. But that’s a longer story for another day.

So how did we figure out what was important?  Dan and I are big believers in talking, about everything.  As we talked more and more in getting to know each other, we found lots of synergies in our belief systems.  There were four tenets that helped us get to figuring out what was most important to us:

• Communication
• Compromise
• Cooperation
• Conservation

We knew that Communication was key in staying on track as a couple and to accomplish whatever goals we would have in our marriage and as parents. As long as we keep talking, we can work through anything, and we’ve walked through some struggles. This focus adheres to our son as well, who probably wishes we didn’t talk quite so openly about EVERYTHING.  But he does appreciate that we were and continue to be open with him.  We don’t lie to him (well, except for that one Santa Claus incident…) and it’s served us well.  I’ll share another time on my ideas for successful parenting.

Dan and I agree that neither of us should have to sacrifice but that we can Compromise.  There are things that I don’t agree with or enjoy but that aren’t important to me, so it’s fine if Dan wants to make decisions on things like watching NASCAR or listening to the Indy 500 (yep, there is a trend there).  I did go to the Brickyard 400 with him once and it was an amazing experience of a sea of humanity, but not something I care to repeat.  He pretty much stays out of craft world, allowing me to have space I need and to organize it however I want.  But in order to live together peaceably, we either need to agree on things or be able to find Compromise.  Luckily, we agree on much.  I will say Danny is pretty great about letting me do things the way I want most days. Though I have come to realize as I age that there is more than one way to do things, and that my way doesn’t always work best for everyone.

A big part of our success is being able to Cooperate.  This is similar to Compromise but more focused on action.  Our Cooperation takes many forms but definitely involves both of us doing our fair share.  There have been times when I felt like I was doing the lion’s share or when Danny has taken this role.  But usually, this is short-lived and often occurs when one or the other of us is feeling low on resources, so it is more the result of grumpiness or self-pity than a true reflection of reality.  We worked together on getting to this place where I could leave the full-time workforce.  We saved money, built for our future and planned for my escape.  Dan has done much more of the work on the Harn development while I have done more of the money-making in the last couple years.  We both have done work in housekeeping over the years (Dan is a better housekeeper than me, much better).  The running joke when I was working full-time and he was home-making, was that I FINALLY got the “wife” I always needed.  He’s quite secure in his masculinity even going so far as to put “Housewife” on his tax returns.  He really is a wonderful housekeeper and I’m struggling with being able to transition into this role as he’s moved into the workforce.

Conservation is something that we both agree is critical to a sustainable future.  With the poison in our food system, the consumption and destruction of our planet, the desperation in our consumer economy, it’s important to us to focus on reducing, reusing, recycling and just plain not wasting (time, money or resources).  A key goal in the plan to Retire at 45 was to move to a more Conserving way of life.  Dan achieved his Permaculture Design Certification in 2011 and our plan for the future is largely focused on moving toward a Permaculture Homestead with a more self-supplied food base that is rooted in Conservation.  The overlying principle of Permaculture is “Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share” (though there are lots of variations on this wording) which means that we care for our planet and the people on it while allowing for fair use of the available resources and yields.  I’ll be sharing more about Permaculture in later posts.  Until then, here are a couple links for your edification:  http://www.patternliteracy.com/resources/ethics-and-principles   http://www.permacultureactivist.net/intro/PcIntro.htm

Next week I’ll talk more about how we planned for and made happen the Dream to Retire at 45.

Eliminating Debt

Tags

family, local music, mortgage, reducing debt, Retiring early, Your Money or Your Life

The trip to the property with Tom and Celia over the 4^th of July weekend has been a success!  For those of you who don’t know, we call this place The Harn.  Danny created this lexicon for our House-built-inside-a-Pole-Barn… House-Barn… Harn.  We were worried about our city-girl, Celia.  What with peeing in the woods and such…  But everyone survived just fine.

So back to a bit more on how we got to this place in our lives.

Last time I wrote about Reducing Consumption.  Dan and I believe reading Your Money or Your Life was a major turning point in our lives; it gave us much needed insights and tools.  We were able to evaluate our practices on spending and determine whether the things we were buying were worth the life force we were spending on them.  For example, if I made $20 an hour, then each time we bought $15 worth of pizza, it cost us about an hour of my work week.  (This vaguely factors for taxes and such for the sake of simplicity.)  We realized that much of what we bought were fleeting things and not worth our time in this way.  We had too many t-shirts already.  We didn’t need to see the movie at the theater, we could wait until it was at Redbox or on Netflix.  And if we waited for a while, that brand new phone would be free with contract or that latest TV would be half the price.  There is something to be said for delayed gratification.  We were well on our way to thinking about what was truly important in terms of dollars and STUFF.

2. We eliminated debt so we don’t have to keep working for more and more money.

Though we’d quit spending so much, we had been a part of the consumer society for so long that we’d accumulated a lot of debt over the years.  We knew a key to being able to Retire at 45 was to prevent debt accumulation going forward.  But we also needed to focus on debt elimination.  We had almost $50K in student loan debts from Danny’s college years that was trickling down slowly and we had a large house payment every month.  What we didn’t have was a lot of credit card debt as we’d always worked to pay off these debts every month.  This put us well ahead of the typical American.

For a while we were both working and were able to make double house payments.  This is one of the best things you can do to reduce how much you end up paying for your home.  Even if you can only make an extra payment a year, it adds up.  See more on “mortgage” below…  When the rates dropped, we refinanced the house and rolled the student loan debt into that loan making the interest tax deductible.  We tracked every penny we spent in MS Money (today we use Quicken) to have a handle on where we were creating debt so we could eliminate the debt that wasn’t worthwhile.  We determined that car maintenance was a lot cheaper than buying a new car every couple years.  We purchased a 2005 Toyota in 2006, with only 24,500 miles. That car now belongs to our son Tom and it’s got 225K miles and a few more dents.  We knew fixing these dents would not affect the usability of the car so didn’t waste money doing that.  A few years back, we bought a Smart car to reduce our gas expenses on my 72-mile daily commute.  We also bought this car used with only 8900 miles.  We let other buyers pay the depreciation and we got good cars cheap.

In my first post, I mentioned the 5-Year Plan that Danny and I formulated back just after the turn of the century.

Side Story: One of the first things we did was tell my financial planner about this 5-Year Plan.  And we heard laughter.  So, I realized I needed another financial planner.  And this gets to a crucial part of how life works.  I kept my eyes and ears open and… the Universe provided!!  I was on a Southwest Airlines flight for work (yes, I LOVE SWA so have to plug them even though I don’t fly anymore) and my seatmate was a gal from NY.  We started talking and I eventually mentioned this 5-Year Plan to her.  Lo and behold, she was a financial planner!  And she didn’t laugh.  She asked more about what we wanted to do and she listened to why, she told me a story of one of her clients she helped to get what the CLIENT wanted (she amazingly saw this as important to her business!) and she gave me her card.  And now we have a pretty amazing plan for meeting some financial goals for our future with our 401k and Roth IRA funds.  Here’s a link to Marg: http://www.nuccifinancial.com/

When we began our implementation of the 5-Year Plan, we knew it had to be done debt-free.  One of the people who influenced us is Rob Roy (http://cordwoodmasonry.com/) and one of the most important things we learned from him is the definition of “mortgage”.  It literally means Death Pledge.  Rob always encourages people to build as they can afford it, to not incur debt on the road to progress.  We decided to follow this advice.

We had some savings when we started our land search.  Once we found our property in 2007, we placed 6% down and then financed the remainder on a 6% contract loan with the owner.  We paid off the land in less than a year.  Then we paid a contractor to put in a culvert to allow access in mid-2008.  Until then, our land was only accessible if we drove onto it from the neighbor’s property (there was a logging road that crossed both properties) or by braving the ditch, which usually had a few inches of water running through it.  In July 2009, we cleared a large space where we could build a pole barn.  This involved cutting about 200 saplings and small trees, which we accomplished with the help of our son Tom and my mother, Ruth Obert.  We worked hard!  Bruce Lindgren could now put in a driveway and clear a pad for the pole barn.  In late 2009, the barn was purchased and installed.  Everything was done as we had funds.  No financing. No mortgage. And we continued this way as we built the interior living quarters and then expanded the living quarters later (when we decided to NOT build a separate cabin on site).  Though we sometimes took advantage of 6 months same-as-cash financing to spread out payments, we never purchased more than we had funds for at the time of purchase.

Once we knew we were ready to make the plunge and move to Minnesota, we were able to sell the house ~ the biggest debt we owed.  Since we’d diligently paid extra payments, we’d winnowed down the loan considerably and were able to walk away with a nice nest egg to help us make the transition to life “retired in the woods”.  We had plenty of funds to live for a few years, even without any income.  When we finally closed on the house last November, it was like a huge weight off my shoulders.  No more house payments!  No more big taxes & insurance!  No more mortgage!  It was another piece in the puzzle to freedom and it felt really good.  Our Harn does have costs; taxes, insurance and electricity ~ but no mortgage.  And the taxes on it are about 10% of the taxes on our previous home.  Insurance is about half.  It gives us a real sense of peace to know our future homestead has been paid for as we’ve progressed and will remain affordable going forward.

We moved the majority of our STUFF to the Harn and we now live more minimally. We have a bed, some chests with clothes, a file cabinet, my sewing machines and some craft supply storage.  We have been very fortunate in having family help to manage this transition.  When Dan began looking for work in Minnesota, there were almost no jobs near our property.  We looked in other areas and found Detroit Lakes and Grand Rapids had some opportunities but the jobs seemed to be most potential in Alexandria.  This just happens to be where my Mom and her husband Tom are living and they were willing to put us up in their home.  They had two guest rooms and their basement guest room became our new bedroom.  We have our own bathroom and TV area and I was able to create a craft space making this a smoother transition.  But it is different living in space that is not “yours”.  As Tom notes,  the kitchen is over-crowded with more than one person, so we have to coordinate a bit!

While we don’t formally pay rent, Mom & Tom seem happy with our contributions which consist mainly of maintenance and housekeeping that help reduce their workload in this large 4000 square foot home, along with occasional tech support.  Their help has been a huge influence in our ability to make this transition to Retire at 45 more easily.

And the up side is that we really enjoy spending time together.  I know that there are so many people who never really get time with their parents once they move away for college or that first job. It had been almost 30 years since Mom and I even lived in the same state.  But now we spend loads of time together and it’s great.  We had an amazing evening for 4th of July.  Nothing spectacular, just enjoying a home-cooked meal on the back patio overlooking the lake, talking about life and enjoying the breeze and happenings on the lake.  We headed over to Bug-a-boo Bay for a quick drink and a listen to the band and then dropped off the grandson & his girlfriend at Arrowwood for fireworks.  Simple and wonderful.

I feel very blessed to have this time to enjoy doing yard work with my mom, transplanting some of her overcrowded plants up to my property, creating a connection with her there.  And there is a tremendous local music scene here in Alex. With Danny off work of late he too has had a chance to spend time out hearing the local and not so local musicians at Arrowwood Deck, Sixth Avenue Wine & Ale, the Maritime Museum Garden and Carlos Creek Winery.  There are people playing music all over this town!

And there are great events at the High School with musicians from far away.  There are Community Ed classes we’ve enjoyed together and I love having the time in my schedule to be able to teach some of these classes as well as taking time to learn something new.  And most of this stuff is free or darn near it so doesn’t incur a big amount of debt.

What we’re finding is that by working hard to reduce our possessions and our expenses, we’re now seeing an abundance of happiness in return.  Life is simpler and more enjoyable.  I’ll share more about how we figured out what makes us happy in the next post.