Lightening Online

This is post number 6 in a series of posts related to our journey toward a simpler life.

If you haven’t read the first 5 posts, you might like to read them first:

Post 1: A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step
Post 2: Joe Dominguez
Post 3: Tracking Spending
Post 4: You Cannot Steer a Stationary Ship
Post 5: Living the Dream

I seem to have this tendency to present the image of being “fine” and in control as much of the time as possible, regardless of how I’m truly feeling. A typical response from me over nearly any topic is likely to be “no worries”. If someone asks you how you’re going, how do you respond? I’d imagine the most typical responses would include the words “good” or “fine”, no matter how things really are. Why are we like this? Do we somehow think that people will think less of us if we’re completely honest with how we’re going? Or is it more to do with how we perceive what the person is really asking - are they really asking how we are? Do they really want to know?

Maybe it’s just me that struggles with this, but somehow I doubt it.

In May 2006 I was diagnosed with having had a nervous breakdown. A situation that once I began to recover, made me scratch my head and wonder “how did this happen?” “How and why did I let things get to this point?” I think perhaps it left some of my friends wondering how they hadn’t seen it coming either. Even my DH hadn’t really seen it coming.

On reflection, perhaps it’s not all that surprising at all. We had had quite a line up of stresses in our lives in the lead up to this point. Family struggles, business issues, deciding if we should move, dealing with drought, kids in hospital, motorbike accidents, building a house and moving were some of the major ones. On top of all that life was moving at a lightning pace and while we knew we needed to slow down a little – deciding what to cut out was all but impossible.

And I’d not really felt myself ever since my 3rd child had been born. I had been diagnosed with mild Post Natal Depression when he was 6 weeks old, but for some reason I had expected it to just go away on it’s own. I put my decreasing ability to cope with day to day stresses as being more about my lack of ability to mother 3 children than anything else.

I was unraveling some knitting last night and marveling at how much easier it was to unravel it than it was to knit it. Once I got the process of undoing it started, it all seemed to fall apart quite easily really. That’s a bit like what happened in my own life in 2006. Smaller stresses got bigger and bigger. Tears flowed more and more readily and my sleep patterns became more and more erratic. Once I wasn’t sleeping properly, the tiredness added to all of the other issues and things kind of spiraled quickly out of control from there. I was left a bit like my pile of unraveled wool. Bent out of shape, all over the place, in a limp pile on the floor.

According to my GP, my driven nature (me? Driven?) had led me to push myself until all of my emotional reserves were used up and I kind of fell in a heap. My body and my brain revolted on me and said “no more”. Physically I was exhausted. Mentally I was exhausted. And emotionally I was running on empty. I reached the point where I just could not face going out amongst people. I knew that they would want a piece of me and I simply didn’t have any pieces left to give.

It certainly wasn’t an easy time in my life. To begin with I wasn’t too concerned. I knew I’d been running on flat out for pretty much most of my life. So I figured a few days of rest and I would be right again. Some of those days are quite a blur to me now. I remember thinking perhaps it would help if I did some things I enjoy – like baking. I couldn’t bake! I couldn’t cook a meal. I couldn’t read my piano music. I couldn’t read a book. Most of the time I couldn’t even carry on a decent conversation. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to eat. I couldn’t remember things (which was a real dilemma for DH as he’d always relied on my memory since his isn’t very reliable).

There was a bonus with losing my memory though - I didn’t remember the things I’d forgotten so there was less stress there! In fact, there was an underlying “ignorance is bliss” kind of feeling in those early days. Perhaps functioning in a similar way to a medically induced coma, my brain seemed to shut down all non-essential functions in order to restore itself to a better state of health.

During this time my body couldn’t handle sudden noises or even minor amounts of pain (in fact, I still have a low pain threshold and a very sensitive nervous system). On a good day I could manage to give my children a hug goodnight – but that was it. Much of the time we had to try and farm them out to neighbours, especially in the early days when DH was busy trying to put our crop in. Not being able to mother my children was the most painful blow of all. All of my life I’ve wanted to be a mum and I really didn’t want to stop now.

As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months - my initial lack of concern grew into severe frustration that I couldn’t just “fix” this problem or make it going away.

There was one moment during that those early weeks that has stuck vividly in my mind. DH had taken the kids with him around the farm and I was home alone. I remember sitting on his side of the bed and thinking “this is it”. “This is all there is for me.” “I’m going mad and I’m going to end up in an institution.” I talked to DH about it when he got home and he very wisely told me that thinking I was going mad was possibly the surest sign there is that I wasn’t. That if I truly was going mad, chances were that I would have no idea of the fact. My GP agreed with him and assured me that what I was going through wasn’t going to be a permanent state – it might take some time but I really was going to come out the other side of this.

I suspect though that this moment in time will remain a very pivotal point in my life. I guess in a way it was similar to a “near death” experience. When you think life as you know it is over, it really starts to bring into perspective the things that are truly important in life. I can tell you right now, how much money in the bank account or how much “stuff” we had accumulated were far from my mind as I went through the process of grief, wondering if I was ever going to experience “normality” again.

Thankfully for us, this wasn’t a huge revelation. We’d already started to turn our backs on the consumer mentality by this point (although it was definitely still a regular struggle). What it did do for me though was really cement in my mind that we were heading in the right direction. None of us know what tomorrow is going to bring. The only guarantee we have in life is the moment we live in right now.

It’s not about living life in fear. It’s about living life in freedom. It’s about being able to reflect on your day or your week and saying “yes, I made some good choices with my time”.

As 2006 progressed and the rains dried up, the stress levels of many farmers around us rose. But my nervous breakdown had been a precious gift to DH and I. We were truly able to step back and say “hey, we might lose the farm and that would be horrible and sad, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. We have each other. We have 3 beautiful children. Money really ISN’T what it’s all about.”

We’ve been through a lot in the past 18 months. And my recovery still isn’t complete. Do I look back and wish that none of it had happened? Not for a second. Many times I wanted it to be over but I haven’t regretted going through the experience. They say that during the difficult times in life is when we learn and grow. I have learnt so much about myself, about life and what’s truly important, about how our bodies and brains are so intricately linked together. Yes, it was hard, but I feel that what I gained through that time in my life was far more than what I lost.

I’m not the same person I was 18 months ago. And I like the me that I am now better than I like the me I was back then.

There’s still some hard yards to go. My body is taking a long time to get back to “normal” and I have to be very careful that I don’t overdo it. Something that is easier said than done as a mother to 3 children. It’s kind of ironic though. Back at the start of 2006 DH and I struggled to know what we should cut out of our lives. Everything seemed SO important to us. In the end we were forced to cut ALL of it out and you know what – the world didn’t stop turning.

I think at times we can be just as guilty of cluttering our lives with too many activities as much as too much stuff. Somehow we are convinced that it’s important to DO all this stuff. We rush around in a crazy haze, feeling like life is already too short to fit in everything we want to achieve. Where does this come from? There’s a whole lot more to simple living than just turning our backs on rampant consumerism. Our lives can get just as complicated and overwhelming by our “volunteer” activities as they can by desire to work flat out to build wealth and possessions.

My nervous breakdown has presented us with many gifts. One of them was a clean slate with our activities. We had no choice but to stop them all and now, as my health improves, we are choosing which things are the most important to add back in. Just like the unraveled knitting, as the needles resume their work, stitch by stitch life begins to take a new (and hopefully better) form.

As you might imagine, this post has been hard for me to write. Hard from the point of view that reflecting on such a difficult phase of my life brings with it a certain amount of grief. Hard from the point of view that sharing it takes from me some of my low levels of emotional energy. Hard from the point of view that sharing something so *deep* makes me somewhat vulnerable. But most of all hard from the point of view that so much has happened in the past few years and I have learnt so much that I don’t know which bits to include and which bits not to include (hence a half a dozen rewrites).

Does all this mean that we now have our lives all together? LOL. Not even close. Does it mean that we’re now on the path to simple living without wavering? Unfortunately not. I’m still susceptible to niggling doubts about whether we’re moving in the right direction. And I definitely still have my “keeping up with the Joneses” moments. *sigh*

I know this post has been long so if you’ve gotten this far – thank you for reading. It’s nice to have you along for the ride as I reflect on this journey. I’m finding it a really helpful reflection time for myself about where we’ve been and where we’re heading.

Next Instalment: Words of Wisdom

This is part 4 in a series sharing my journey from mindless consumerism to a more simpler way of life. If you haven’t already, you may like to read the first 3 parts before reading this one.

Part 1 : A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
Part 2: Joe Dominguez
Part 3: Tracking Spending

I mentioned in my last post that we haven’t followed all of the “Your Money or Your Life” ideas and principles. What the author did was set aside as much of his income as he could into investments and cut his expenses right back. When the income from his investments was high enough to cover his low expenses, he quit working and continued to live for a number of years on that investment income. His theory is that even if you continue to work voluntarily - there is so much more enjoyment and freedom from not being paid for that work, that quality of life really improves dramatically. He also advocates taking on extra hours or jobs in the short term, to speed up the process.

While this all sounds good in theory, there were a few issues we had with putting it into practise. The biggest one being our children. With 1 at school, 1 preschooler and a baby, the last thing we needed was to take on more work in order to make our future more secure. Our kids weren’t going to stay young long. We needed to have time to spend with them NOW.

As far as I can determine, Joe was a single man who was on a highish level of income to begin with. He also invested his money into long term government bonds which at the time promised a high set return. Returns on the same type of bonds are nowhere near as high now. He also spent at least part of his life living in a communal style living arrangement, making his living expenses cheaper. Kind of tricky to manage if you have a spouse and 3 children.

With all these obstacles, is financial independence still a viable goal today? Yes, I think it can be. I know many people on the Simple Living Network have achieved it or are well on their way to achieving it. I don’t believe it’s the only way to go though. Like many things, we decided to take some of what we had learnt and apply that while pretty much discarding the rest.

To be honest, as I was reading through some of the posts on the Simple Living Network, trying to get my head around what Simple Living really meant, I was feeling more than a little overwhelmed. So much of what people were saying gave me such a sense of peace and yearning from within. I knew I was starting to scratch the surface of what I wanted in life. But getting from where I was to where I wanted to be became the more frustrating and overwhelming question!!!

At about this time I had what you might call another “ah ha” moment when the thought occurred to me that “you cannot steer a stationary ship”. We had become almost paralysed by the conflict between how our life currently *was* and how we thought we wanted it to *be*. Being constantly swayed by the pull of others around us to continue to focus on building wealth and stuff didn’t make it any easier. It was tempting to just give up at this point. But the yearnings for something other than what we had so far experienced in life wouldn’t go away.

DH and I talked and decided that all we really needed to do was to take a single step away from the lifestyle that no longer seemed to suit us and toward where we thought we wanted to head. I guess in way I’ve returned again to where I started from - a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Rather than getting overwhelmed and frustrated by focusing on an unknown “end point”, we instead needed to take it 1 step at a time and see how that went.

When you learn something new or different or decide to change direction in life somewhat, it’s easy to want to jump into a fast car and zoom straight to the destination. In reality, life takes lots of twists and turns as it meanders along. The sad thing is that if we rush too quickly to where we think we want to go, we miss so much along the journey. What I’m slowly learning is that each and every step along the pathway of life is precious in and of itself. Each new day is a blessing. If we go too quickly we miss things that MATTER.

So as we began to move, we started to find it became easier to move in the direction we wanted to head. In fact, as we took teeny tiny baby-steps toward a more simpler life, we found doors opened up that we’d never come across before. We believe that this was confirmation for us that we were heading in the direction God wanted us to go (at least for now anyway).

Our dream to get bigger and bigger in our farming enterprise and then retire at around 50 was replaced by the desire to have more time NOW. At this point in our life, DH was farming a reasonable amount of acres and working together with his father and his brother. On top of that he was working 2 off-farm enterprises with his brother. So there was always a HUGE list of things that needed doing and time was of a premium. With working 2 other blocks away from where we were living, as well as the contracting business, it felt like DH was rarely close to home.

The new dream was to live on the 1 farm that was ours (well we’re still paying if off but it’s in our name) and maybe even 1 day be able to just farm that 1 farm. It would be an incredibly small number of acres to live off as a family but it would be an AWESOME lifestyle. Instead of getting bigger and bigger, what we really wanted to do was get smaller.

So, what is simple living really all about? How do you define it? Guess what - I’m still not sure I really know. Here’s a quote from the homepage of www.simpleliving.net that for me sums it up reasonably well:

“Simple living — aka voluntary simplicity — has just about as many definitions as there are individuals who practice it. Simple living is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. Rather, it is about living an examined life — one in which you have determined what is important, or “enough,” for you, discarding the rest. ”

I guess for us it’s about being good stewards of what is in our care. Not just money but possessions, time, the environment, family and friends. It’s about recognising that people are more important than THINGS. It’s about enjoying plenty of stress free time with our children while they are in our care. It’s about recognising how truly blessed we are in the country we live in and wanting to pass some of that blessing on to others who often struggle to have even their basic needs met. It’s about having TIME to enjoy life rather than over-programming our timetable. It’s about finding contentment with what we have rather than always wanting what we don’t have. I’m sure it’s about all those things and more but these are the things that come to mind as I’m typing this post.

Are we there yet? Not even close! Has the story come to an end? Not yet……

Next Instalment: Dream number 1 fulfilled - the new house arrives!!!

This is part 3 in a series about my journey from mindful consumerism toward a more simpler lifestyle. If you haven’t read part 1: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step or part 2: Joe Dominguez , you might like to take a moment to read those first.

Before I get too far into what I want to share in this post, I do want to let you know that we haven’t followed all of the recommendations that were part of the tape series by Joe Dominguez. Some of what he suggested didn’t work well for what we wanted in life and I will come back to that. I feel that’s it’s important with anything you read or hear about, to take what works for you and feel free to discard the rest. I know there are some programs that need all the necessary steps taken in order to work. But we’re all unique beings and I don’t really believe that there is a “one size fits all” approach to how we live our lives.

So yesterday I was talking about money = life energy and about maximum fulfillment for the minimum amount of dollars spent.

Once we’d made our way through to the end of the tape series, we were interested in the concept of tracking our spending that is suggested as an essential part of understanding our money and spending more in align with our values.

How you track your spending isn’t really all that important. Some people prefer to use some kind of computer budgetting program, others use their own spreadsheet set-up and others prefer a more “non technological” approach. I fall into the last category. It was simply too many steps for me to have to turn on the computer, open up a program and enter my figures. I also like the portability of having a hard copy.

Once again it was frugal aussies to the rescue and the same person who lent me the tapes attempted to explain to me via email how she set up her spending book. Up until this time, we had written a budget of sorts for pretty much every year of our marriage. But we’d not been tracking our spending very well so we never knew whether or not we were under or over budget. This made our budget almost useless.

In that first 6 months I had been keeping a record of what we were spending on groceries - more to give me an idea of whether or not we were sticking within our grocery budget and how much I was perhaps “saving” on our grocery spending. I was tracking our spending in an upward direction - every time we spent money, I’d add it on to the total and *hope* that at the end of the month the total was less than our budgetted amount.

With the idea of a spending book, you enter in your budgetted amount at the beginning of each pay period (we get paid monthly so it’s nice and simple) and then each time you spend you SUBTRACT the total from that amount. What this means is that at a very quick glance you can see how much is LEFT in the budget to be allowed to spend. Then when the next pay period comes around, you ADD it to whatever you have left. It’s similar in a lot of ways to the idea of putting cash into envelopes or bags but I found that method didn’t work well for me as I may buy products across various budgetted categories in the one store. This way I can come home and sort out which parts of the receipt go into each particular category.

This particular system has worked well for me for a number of reasons. With my location to shops, some months I spend way more than other months. It means that in categories like clothing I can accumulate the budgetted amounts for several months and then do a big shop up. It also allows for things like school fees to sit in the *red* (where I overspend the allowed amount I write the figure in red) for most of the year as they’re paid at the start of the year and the budget for them is divided up monthly. I find this doesn’t matter as amounts like Christmas gifts are accumulating earlier in the year and not used until later - so the 2 offset each other.

To give you a bit of an idea, it looks something like this (I use an exercise book for mine):

At the top of each page I write the name of the category and the budgetted amount per month.

For example: Groceries: Fruit & Veg $180 per month

The page is then divided up into 3 lots of 3 columns (so a total of 9 columns).

I have 3 columns per entry which are DATE DETAILS AMT LEFT

Here are some of my actual entries. My budget for a year begins on the 1st February as that is when the farm budget begins and it ended up being easier to assess any changes to be made at the same time as DH is assessing his. You can start them whenever - I know many people use financial years for theirs.

1/2 Deposit $180.00
1/2 F/L $20.59 $159.41
6/2 F/L $4.99 $154.42
12/2 F/L $23.18 $131.24

(I’m having some trouble with formatting so I’m trying to use colours to represent each column - I hope you can make some sort of sense of what I’m trying to explain. If not, feel free to ask questions).

F/L is my shorthand for Foodland. For most of my groceries I include some kind of code for where it was bought in case I need to find the receipt at a later date. For categories like medical, gifts and clothing, I will record the item rather than the store as this gives me more information down the track should I need it. It’s great if I’m buying gifts throughout the year and need to know roughly how much I’ve already spent per person for example.

This is the 3rd year I’ve been tracking our spending and the amount of freedom from stress it has brought has been incredible. Just knowing where we are in the budget at any particular time has been wonderful. Our spending awareness has increased dramatically and our overall spending has decreased.

Joe Dominguez recommends taking an extra step with these figures. He suggests working out a “real hourly wage” and then relating all of your spending to how many hours you’ve had to work in order to have that money to spend. This is where it all kind of ties together.

To work out your real hourly wage you take your total pay for a set period of time and subtract things like tax, travel expenses and any other work related expenses (extra clothing, food, childcare and any other costs you wouldn’t have if you weren’t working). You then divide this by the number of hours it takes you to do that job. Not just the number of hours worked but also lunch breaks and travel times, any additional work brought home etc etc etc.

As an example (these are made up figures by the way):

You earn $1000 per week

Tax $250
Travel costs $100
Clothing $10
After School Care $100

Your “amount in your pocket” earnt is $540

Now your week might be a 38 hour week but it takes you 1 hour each day to get to work, you have 1 hour a day in unpaid lunch breaks, spend 1/2 hour most nights thinking about work related issues and on average spend another 2 hours per week over and above the 38 hours you’re paid finishing off or in conversations with the boss on your way out the door. That’s a total of 52.5 hours you’re spending each week in order to complete your 38 hour a week job.

So your real hourly wage is the amount of dollars that end up in your pocket divided by the actual number of hours it takes you to have your job.

Or $540 divided by 52.5 If my calculations are correct your real hourly wage would be $10.28 an hour.

Now you apply this real hourly wage to your spending decisions. Let’s round it down to $10 to make it easier. If you want to go out for a meal that costs you $100 - then it’s costing you 10 hours of your “life energy”(converting $ to life energy) to do that. What you then need to decide is whether or not it is worth it to you to go out for that meal or not. Some people would say yes, others would decide they’d rather throw together a quick pasta meal for $10 and effectively be able to have the other 9 hours of working time to themselves.

This exercise isn’t designed to make you stress out about every dollar you spend. Quite the opposite in fact. It’s designed to help you make decisions and spend your money on things that are really important to you. That way - you’re getting the most value for each dollar you spend.

I guess in a way at this point we’ve come a full circle from that first step where we decided that we’d try and *save* $5000 from our budget rather than earn an extra $5000. This was what worked for us (and with my paltry $2 an hour real hourly wage it was an easy decision).

I was so excited by the “ah ha” moments that we were having that I decided to do an internet search on Joe Dominguez in the hope of learning more about him and his ideas. That search led me to the Simple Living Network run by a group of people committed to sharing ideas to do with Simple Living. At this point I’d not heard of “Simple Living” so my huge learning curve wasn’t even close to being over.

Next Instalment: what I learnt about Simple Living

This is the second post in a series outlining our journey away from excessive consumerism and wealth creation to a more “simpler” life. If you haven’t already read “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step“, you might like to read that first.

So, we’ve jumped onto the “frugal bandwagon” and discovered that it’s not such a bad lifestyle after all. Plenty of room for improvement of course - I’m not sure if I’ll ever stop learning new ideas. And I certainly can’t claim that I’m frugal all of the time!

I think it was toward the end of 2004 that one of the girls from the Frugal Aussies group suggested that I might enjoy the content on a set of tapes she owned. She offered to send them to me on loan. I then sent them on to another person within our group and so on. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to find in listening to the tapes but so far we’d been happy with the twist our life journey was taking so I was quite excited at the prospect of being challenged in relation to our attitude toward money. The tape set was called Transforming Your Relationship with Money or something along those lines. The speaker on the tapes was a man named Joe Dominguez (fingers crossed I’ve spelt his name right). I later found out that a book by the same person “Your Money or Your Life” is basically the same content.

I started listening to the tapes while I was doing the ironing. That didn’t work out so well in the end. I was so busy stopping to take notes that not much ironing got done! LOL. I’ve just dug out those notes - I think a bit of a review is always a good thing. See, sharing this with you is helping me! There is a LOT of material in this course and I won’t even try to go through it all. But I will say it impacted me in many ways. I asked my DH to listen to the tapes as well and he too had a lot of “ah ha” moments. What I want to share with you are a couple of parts of this course that really helped change the way my DH and I started to view money and wealth in general.

One of the most significant things that stood out in my mind was the definition of money. How would you define money? I was thinking of it as a way to exchange goods and services. However, he challenges this idea and states that “money is something you’ll exchange your life energy for”. Life energy is a finite thing - we all have X number of hours in the day (although none of us know how many days we’ll have). It’s about recognising that when we go out to work to earn money, we’re using up some of our life energy to do that. Once we recognise this fact, it’s easier to make a more conscious decision about whether certain purchases are worthwhile or not - based on the fact that the money to buy them *cost* us a certain amount of our life energy. The great thing I love about this concept is that there are no right or wrong answers - what matters to one person may not matter to another and that’s okay. There’s no restriction on what you do or don’t spend your money on - only the suggestion that you do so consciously rather than automatically.

The whole concept of money = life energy was a completely foreign one to me and it did take me a while to get my head around it. But it does make sense. You could argue that this gives a higher weight to the importance of a passive income (a passive income being something you earn from investments that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of time from you). That is certainly a part of Joe’s overall plan and I’ll come back to that in a later post.

The other concept that really stood out to both DH and I was the spending vs fulfillment curve. In a nutshell it is a concept that suggests that not all dollars spent are equal when it comes to how much fulfillment/enjoyment we receive in return for that spending.

To give you an example. Once upon a time, it was a treat to go to the roadhouse and buy hot chips for lunch on our way home from church. As things got a little bit more comfortable finance wise, we started to do this every Sunday. After a while we got bored with just hot chips and so we started adding other items to our lunch to increase the *fun factor*. What began as a $5 outing grew to $20 (still providing the same level of enjoyment but now costing us 4 times the money) and on it grew from there. Eventually it got to the point where no amount of money spent could continue to offer us the same level of enjoyment that our original $5 had bought us. Spending more money hadn’t increased our fulfillment - if anything it ended up decreasing it. That’s just one example of many trying to explain to you how the more money you spend, the more you need to spend in order to get the same level of fulfilment.

His point is that when you first start out on your own with your own money - you get quite a bit of fulfilment from purchasing even the most basic of needs. As you get into more *wants*, the amount of enjoyment/fulfillment you receive per dollar starts to slow down. So you need to spend more and more money in an effort to gain that fulfillment. You can even reach a point where spending more money starts to decrease your sense of fulfillment (my own theory - that this is based on a certain amount of frustration in the pursuit of happiness and perhaps even a subconscious realisation that money isn’t going to buy you happiness). He goes on to explain that if you can find your point of enough - you find your point of minimum spend for maximum fulfillment.

Have I totally confused you yet? LOL. I’m not finding it easy to explain what I mean without writing a complete novel here. If what I’ve shared so far has tweaked your interest a little, you might like to try and get hold of Joe’s book “Your Money or Your Life” and read it for yourself.

I do have a little more I’d like to share with you on what we learnt through listening to Joe’s tapes. I haven’t quite made it to the “Simple Living” part that I was going to today. But I will get there!

Next Instalment: More on Joe Dominguez - How Joe’s definition of money can help you find your point of “enough” or “maximum fulfillment for minimum spend”.

Well I must admit it came as more than a little surprise to wake up this morning to a message from Robin letting me know she’d nominated me for a Frugal Subversive Award that was begun by Rhonda Jean . So thank you very much Robin and also Rhonda Jean for starting the award in an effort to raise awareness.

Now it’s my turn to pass on the award to 3 bloggers who I think are deserving of the award. I’ve never done anything like this before so I have no idea if there are specific “do’s and don’ts”. Of course, the good thing about that is that I can do whatever I like - oblivious to any so called “rules”. LOL.

Firstly I would like to nominate Rhonda Jean . Can I do that? Guess I just did. Specifically because at the moment Rhonda has been blogging about green cleaning products. I think that changing what you use to clean is a great and easy way to cut costs, help the environment AND improve the health of your family. I’m a BIG advocate of basic, green, cleaning so thanks Rhonda Jean for showing others how they can make small changes that result in BIG results.

Secondly I would like to nominate Emma . I suspect this might come as quite a big shock to Emma but she is someone I admire hugely. Emma is raising 2 boys without a huge income and doing her best to make the most of her situation - to get herself out of debt and move toward other savings goals. Just like the rest of us, she has times when she succeeds and times when life kind of “gets in the way”. That’s what I love about the blogworld - real people sharing what they’re doing and how they’re trying to do better, one step at a time. I’ve never heard her use her situation as an excuse not to keep striving toward her goals. To me she’s living proof that it’s “not how much you earn but what you do with what you have” that makes a difference.

Emma has also been trying to assist me with my limited computer savvy-ness - to post links to my blog. Fingers crossed that this time I’ve finally got it sussed. Thanks Emma.

My third nomination goes to Lisa . I’ve been following Lisa’s meanderings through some of the Adelaide markets with close attention. It’s inspired me to do some market shopping of my own when I get the chance. When we go to Adelaide I have limited time so I’m using her experiences to narrow down where I might visit when we’re there next. Thanks Lisa. She also has some amazing recipes on her blog - including the most awesome stack of fluffy pancakes which I really must get the recipe for!

You know there are so many blogs out there with interesting things to read on them. It’s not easy to pick 3. But if you’re not already a regular reader of the above blogs, I hope you take the time to visit them. I suppose I should now go and let them know that I’ve nominated them!

And here is a copy of the original notes that go with the award so you know what to do next:

If you are given an award and want to take part in this meme, you can in turn select three other bloggers who have inspired you to be a frugal subversive. Passing the rules on with the award will make it easier for everyone to participate. Congratulations on the award. I hope it helps you spread awareness near and far.

MEME RULES

1. When you are tagged, write a post with links to three blogs who have inspired you with their frugal creativity or innovation.

2. In your post, please link back to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme and save the award graphic.

3. Leave a comment or message for the bloggers you’re tagging, so they they know they’re received the award.

4. Display the Frugal Subversive Award badge to identify your blog as part of the movement that is turning its back on consumerism at any cost.

I’m sure you’ll all recognise the quote I’ve used as my title for this post. A quote from the very famous Confucius. I thought this was quite an apt topic following on from my baby steps post. I want to share with you a little of how our journey in life has changed quite significantly in recent years.

Just 5 short years ago, DH and I had goals that are quite different to our goals of today. He started farming with his father the day he left school and his dream was to build up quite a sizable farming business and get it to the point where he could employ at least one, if not more people to assist with the workload. Farming is a difficult business to find a balance in. Often there’s more work than 1 person can handle but not always income for more than 1 person. Rising land prices and the increase in standard machinery prices (and sizes) were making it harder and harder to farm small acreage and the answer in our minds was to continue to increase in acreage as a way to offset the amount of equity tied up in our business.

We’d been attending a number of training type seminars trying to get a handle on the best way to run our business as well as our personal finances. One of the things we learnt was the very poor return that farming brings in relation to the number of $$ that are tied up in land and machinery. We’d also been learning about the importance of passive income in building wealth and given the poor returns in farming, it made sense to us to look to accumulating some off-farm assets of some description. It seemed to make sense to us also that investing off-farm would give us the opportunity to sell these assets should farming go into a bit of a decline through poor seasons.

In short - we were firmly entrenched on the treadmill of life that says work hard, build wealth, get bigger in business etc etc etc. At the same time, farming was going through a few reasonable years and we enjoyed the freedom of having a few more $$ to spend. Nothing hugely extravagant. A few more take away meals and eating out a little more often. Some more expensive clothes for the kids. Upgrading our vehicle to a 4WD so I could drive it through the paddocks more safely.

As is not uncommon within farming families, there were a few intergenerational conflicts. I won’t go into them in depth as they’re really a private matter. What I will say is that we were rather stressed out and seriously UNHAPPY. In a way we felt somewhat trapped in the situation we were in.

At that point it seemed an attractive option to us to move out of the situation we were currently in by building a house on the smallish farm that DH’s grandfather had sold to us. That would give us a little bit of our own space. A place we could truly call home. Of course the cost of building a home on a farm (where houses are not really considered *worth* anything and therefore unlikely to add value to our farm) was something that gave us pause. We thought, talked, researched and prayed about the decision for a couple of years before we finally decided it was the right thing to do.

Not being all that comfortable with taking on more debt, we then discussed what options we had to repay the loan. I got interested in a particular “selling from home” type business that promised better returns than many of them did. They had the usual “you can have it all” type spiel and for a few months we thought it might be the answer to our dilemma. Then I was involved in a conference training call where the speaker advocated that it was the right thing to temporarily “abandon” your children as they would benefit down the track. I was disappointed to discover that it really was like many of the same style of business that promise “work part-time for a full-time income” only to put into practise the complete opposite once you scratched the surface a little. I concluded that it wasn’t for me after all.

The next option was for me to physically go back to work (in a more regular, get paid by the hour type job). I did some basic calculations on what I thought my hourly rate would likely be (added a few dollars from what I’d been earning before) then subtracted tax, travel expenses in and out of town each day and child-care costs. All these brought my take home hourly rate down to around $2 an hour. It was going to take a LOT of hours for me to bring home the extra $5000 a year that we were hoping to find. Surely, there HAD to be a better way.

Around the same time I began to take more notice of a yahoo group that I’d been lurking on for some time. I don’t even know exactly how or why I joined but most of the time I didn’t even read the messages. Something made me take more notice all of a sudden and the old cogs in my brain began to turn. What if I could *save* from our current spending, the extra money we were wanting to pay for this house we wanted to build? It was an interesting thought. This was May 2004.

Little did I know what that one little thought was going to do to our lives. That in reality it was the first step in the journey of a lifetime!

With some help from some very wise and generous people on the frugal aussies yahoo group, I began to examine our spending. We began by setting up a separate account for our personal spending. We needed the incentive of knowing that any money we didn’t spend wasn’t going to simply be absorbed by the business. Otherwise there was no real benefit to us for our efforts.

I began writing down the choices we were making that saved us money. Just small little decisions here and there that added up over time. In fact, we were stunned to find that they’d added up to almost $600 in the first month alone! I still have that list as a reminder of how far we’ve come.I also started to write down what I was spending in the grocery store. I had a weekly budget but had no idea whether I was close to sticking within it or not. Some weeks we spent less but other weeks we spent more. I spent what I spent and while we didn’t appear to be extravagant in our spending - in reality we had no idea.

As things turned out, we finished the year with $6000 in our bank account!!!! That was after only 6 months and we were absolutely shocked with what we’d managed to achieve. Yes, it took some effort and thought. But I wouldn’t say we felt we’d been deprived in any way.

Next Instalment: Joe Dominguez and my first exposure to the words “simple living”. Yes, you have to wait to find out what happened next….

Last night I made my own Tortillas for the second time. Do you remember me saying I wasn’t sure if I would make them again or not? This time I decided to apply the baby step principle. Made the dough and left it to rest. Came back and divided it up into balls and placed them in a sealed bowl. Came back a little while later and rolled out 4 of the balls into Tortillas and placed them on a dinner plate, covered in plastic to stop them drying out (used cut up bread bags between them so they didn’t stick together). It took just another 2 stints of rolling out 4 Tortillas to complete the task. Come tea time I was nowhere near as worn out as I had been last time (when I rolled all 12 just before tea).

Well they were once again a HUGE hit with the family so I’m glad I’ve come up with a method of making them which seems less of a chore and more of a pleasure. I can see they’re going to become a regular on our menu plan.

It got me thinking about the whole concept of baby steps and how much of a wonderful concept this has been for me. I know it’s not a new concept. I first heard of it from www.flylady.net . I’ll admit I don’t follow her “system” completely - but I do like a lot of her concepts and have found them quite helpful.

I’m the kind of person who gets easily overwhelmed. If it feels like a task is going to take me a long time, I can’t seem to even think about starting it. Breaking it down into smaller steps seems to work really well and takes away some of that overwhelmed, panicked type feeling I get. I think my DD might be similar. I’ve noticed when it comes to tidying up her room, she will dissolve into tears of desperation very quickly. But if I ask her to pick up 10 things or pick up her clothes off the floor - she can manage that quite cheerfully. It’s just about breaking it down into babysteps.

I guess another aspect of my personality that lets me down is my impatience. I like things to be achieved “yesterday”. I’m sure that’s something many of you will find familiar. We live in a fast paced society where everyone is in a huge hurry - even if they have no idea why. Like the saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, I can’t help but feel that most things that are worth doing aren’t going to just happen in an instance. If I can be content to take babysteps toward my goals, I can enjoy the journey as well as the final destination.

There are so many parts of life where the concept of babysteps can be applied. From learning a new piece on the piano (or learning any new skill really) to recoverying from a major illness.

I’m having to be content with babysteps in my new garden. And we’re taking babysteps in turning our house into a home. Even our journey toward simple living has had to be done in a long series of teeny tiny baby steps. Of course, the concept of baby steps itself fits in very well with the ethos of simple living.

Well, I’d best be off and apply these baby step principles to the lasagne I need to make for tea. I’ve been procrastinating as I can’t really be bothered. The meat sauce is already made so all I really need to do is make the white sauce and assemble. I guess there’s an area of baby steps I haven’t mentioned - they only work if you take a step. LOL. This lasagne won’t make itself while I sit here.

What ways have you found the concept of babysteps helpful in your life?

I’m the kind of person who’s mind wanders easily. So much so that I’ll often walk into a room and wonder what on earth I was coming to get. Between leaving wherever I started from and getting to my destination, my mind will have travelled through half a dozen topics and recalling the reason I was walking to another room is all but impossible. LOL.

My DH often refrains from asking me what I’m thinking these days. One day when he asked “what are you thinking about?” I actually told him and he just laughed. My mind had skipped through a dozen or so thoughts (on different topics) in the space of about a minute. Mostly I find it hard to recall exactly what I’ve been thinking about and how I arrived at those topics but on this occasion I was able to follow the thought processes through from start to finish. I think it made him kinda glad he doesn’t have to live with my brain.

I’ve been doing some reading on relaxation and meditation and they say that you need to train your mind to be still. I must have a very undisciplined mind I think.

So I’ve decided that I need to give my brain some practise at *not thinking*. Actually, I’ve kind of started a step back from that and I’m trying to be more focused on whatever it is that is happening (or not happening) at the time. How often do we do things on automatic pilot while our minds are racing a mile a minute thinking about something else?

Given I was pondering all of this while soaking in the bath tub the other day, I chose drying myself to start this new habit. I tend to get out of the bath or shower and while I’m drying myself I’m always thinking about what needs to be done next or what’s happening the next day or going over a conversation I’ve recently had in my head. All sorts of thoughts will pass through my head, not one of them related to the task of drying myself.

So for the past few days I’ve been attempting to focus on drying myself and not think about anything else. Believe me, it’s a lot harder than it sounds. I think it’s going to take me some time before it becomes a habit. It’s well worth it though. Really paying attention to how nice it feels to rub a towel over yourself. Usually I hardly notice. Smiling at my pink toenails - or noticing they need cutting or polishing. LOL. Taking a few extra seconds to dry myself rather than rushing through the process. Just allowing myself to be fully, 100%, in that particular moment.

It’s such a simple thing to change and yet I really feel like I’m embarking on a significant step here. The process of living in the moment. I don’t know if it’s simple living, conscious living, slower living or what it is that you might call the path I’m heading down right now. Not that I think a “title” is necessary.

I’m just concerned that I get so busy trying to cram as much as I can into my life that I’m forgetting to actually *live* it.

DH tells me that this morning when he packed the kids off to school they were most excited about their lunchboxes. It’s funny isn’t it how at times we can go to a lot of cost or effort in wanting to keep our children happy. Some days it feels like it doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t keep them happy. Well this morning my kids were happy. What were they so happy about? Popcorn in their lunchbox!!!! LOL.

Popcorn is one of those things that has a cycle in this house. I make it for a while then stop and forget all about it. It’s not like it’s all that hard to make. I have a popcorn maker that DH bought me for my birthday many years ago. It’s not like it’s all that expensive either. Quite the opposite in fact. I can feed all 3 kids a snack for around 20c. It’s just something I don’t always think about.

My 9 year old DS had complained a couple of weeks ago that the youngest was getting popcorn while they were at school and “how come we never get any”. I think it might have something to do with the fact that the 3 year will ask for popcorn whereas with my 9 year old it can very much be out of sight, out of mind. My memory is about the same at the moment. So with the popcorn maker and popping corn tucked away in the cupboard - it doesn’t always get thought about.

So finally yesterday, when the 3 year old asked for popcorn, I made a full batch with a sprinkle of icing sugar on it and then when it was cool I packed up half a dozen snap lock bags (which we do reuse in this house - further to my rubbish challenge) for the kids lunch boxes.

Their reaction this morning just goes to show me that often it really is the simple things in life that are the best! LOL.