Less is More - The Adventures of Purging our Possessions

Purging is Peaceful

When pondering retirement, we have come to realize that it’s a good thing that we like our jobs! Given our current budget, the idea of retirement is laughable.  Our jobs are fulfilling but raises are rare, so to avoid selling our souls, we have decided to cut spending.  This requires many lifestyle changes, including; not eating out, mapping out our drives to save gas and adhering to a strict budget.  But one of the more interesting and satisfying ways to cut spending has been the purging of our material items that we don't need. We are only in the beginning of the process, but the preliminary results, so far, are liberating. The ultimate goal is to downsize our house, but for now we are downsizing our stuff.

My wife, Adrienne, is an amazing teacher. She loves what she does and she works hard to give her students the best learning experience possible.  I am a marine ecologist.  My job is awesome, but I make about as much as Adrienne.  So we are fortunate to be solidly in the middle class. We have a house and two old, but paid for, cars.  We have a dog and a kid in middle school.  By all accounts, we are living the dream.  We might save a little at the end of the month but not nearly enough to comfortably retire until we’re in our 90s.   

I have discovered an interesting blog on the topic, called Mr. Money Mustache.  MMM had a good job, lived a frugal life, and then retired at the age of 31, about the time that he and his wife started having children.  Now he has a very popular blog, with an almost cult following where he chronicles his frugal-life adventure. I think we drank the kool-aid.

MMM developed an algorithm that found that if you save 64% of your income then you can retire in 10 years.  I’m not sure if we can achieve that level of savings, considering our occupations, but we’re taking steps in that direction.

The other catalyst motivating us was a movie that we saw the other night on Netflix called The Minimalists.  It’s about these two guys, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus who traveled the nation helping folks learn to lead meaningful lives with less.  They assert that materialism is okay as long as the material items “bring joy”.  We have commenced our quest to dump everything that doesn’t bring us joy. I am now a regular at several thrift store donation centers. Our home is becoming more open and it already feels like a weight has been lifted off.  Another effect is that while clearing out, we regularly come across items that do bring joy, Things that we long ago lost track of, like a journal that Adrienne kept when Caleb was a baby.

Also, the stuff that we have donated to thrift stores can now bring someone else joy.  Additionally, the sale of these items can benefit battered women, the children's hospital, and the Goodwill charity. Finally, we can write these donations off on our taxes.  

So far the purged items have been mostly clothes, numerous nicknacks, and other chock a block chotchkies from so many Christmases past.   We have also donated 25 hats that I never wore and more than 50 books (many cookbooks) that we no longer read. We’ve bid farewell to  X-Box games, Leggos and toys, including an antique kalidascope.  My apologies to my family for the gifts that we let go, but now that they’re in the thrift stores the might become gifts again.  The quest continues.