Today I write to you from a place of longing and wishful thinking. I long to be free to live in a way that is simple, yet fulfilling. To live off the land and solely on what comes from the combined skills and talents of my husband and myself. Since we were married, almost 6 years ago, it has been a dream of ours to be financially free to create and live stress/debt free and do things that were important to us, without having to compromise our lives working in a job that we didn't enjoy. Since then, I have tried to live this way on my own as my husband encourages me to to what I feel is necessary for my creative expression and happiness. However, the financial stress has not really made that possible. Yes I have the time to do the things I feel are important for me, but living with one income to pay for everything is something that is always in the back of my mind. Not only that, knowing my husband has to spend 40+ hours working jobs he does not enjoy and do not bring him fulfillment is not what I had in mind.
Now this is where I feel most people just give in, or more common, just don't see or think there is any other way around it. It's just accepted that you work, and toil your entire youth through middle age to pay for a certain standard of life with massive debts from your education, cars and homes. It isn't until retirement that you really get to do what you want to do. To me, this is all backwards and has never been the kind of life that I wanted to live. I remember talking to my husband on the phone one night, before we were married and telling him that I don't think that I could live in the current time and place that we live in. I hated all the pressure and expectations put on me by society to "know" what I want to do and spend the next 8 years of my life in school and the next 20 years after that of my life in debt. I told him that the only way I thought I could live is if I went off into the forest and lived the way humans lived over 10,000 years ago. I remember feeling desperate and that everything that happened in the last several thousand years had been a mistake. I laugh to myself right now, remembering this and I'm still thankful that my husband was in my life during that time to help me get some perspective on how I could live outside of that in the here and now.
Fast forward to now, and we arrive at the current tiny house movement. We don't want to live in a tiny house, because we are young and plan to have more children. The tiny house movement is great because it goes along with a lot of what we want to accomplish in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, I feel like that tiny house movement caters to those who have already lived the life that I don't want to live and have great credit and money already put away from their careers. I say this because, how else do you just drop everything, buy land and built a tiny house that ends up costing ten, twenty, or even thirty thousand dollars. It's great that people want to get out of living in our current system, but what about those of us who refused it from the start and don't have a hundred thousand dollars to show from it? Is my journey as liberating because I didn't "leave it all behind" to start a home stead. When I say "it all" I mean the three thousand square foot home and the career. What if you refused it from the get go, which meant that you live pay check to pay check because you didn't go into massive school loan debt. In the current system, no debt also means, no credit. Which to me is completely backwards. How does it make sense that the person who buys things they can't afford looks better then the one who lives within their means and saves for the things they need? So here we are.
It may take us longer, and it may be more radical, but we will get there. We have began serious talks to leave our $1000 a month apartment by the time a year lease is up. It might take a year of living in an RV or something of the like, cramped and mostly uncomfortable, but that's what I am willing to do to achieve our goal of having land and living sustainably. If giving up a year of relative comfort, allows us to be on a road to financial freedom then I am all for it! So welcome to the cusp of our homesteading journey.
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