Experiences, Activities, and Events

by Freedom on May 16, 2012

One of our goals in downsizing and moving from our 4 bedroom house to a 2 bedroom apartment is to free up time and money so that we can create more meaningful experiences and participate in more fun activities.  We want our life to be more about experience and less about stuff.  Before moving, we had a good idea of how that might play out, but we weren’t sure it would really work out that way.  Now that we have a couple of months of this new lifestyle under our belts, I can say that it has been working out as planned.

I want to share some of the things that we’ve been doing since we downsized.

Disney Trips

We love the Disney theme parks.  We live in Orlando near Disney and have annual passes, and we love spending time riding rides, seeing shows, and enjoying the attractions.  Our house was about an hour from the parks, and when we moved to be closer to work, we also ended up being closer to Disney.  We now live about 15 minutes away, which makes it much more convenient to head over, especially in the evening or if we only want to go for a couple of hours.

After downsizing, we’ve been visiting the four Disney parks more often.  Our daughter, Faith, loves going and we enjoy it also.  Several times we’ve headed over in the evening to sneak in a couple of rides and dinner while still being able to get home in time for bedtime.  We’ve also had more money available, meaning we could eat at the parks more often.  This allows us to spend more time in the parks and also to go more often.

Beyond the money factor, we really have more time to visit the parks.  We are no longer chained to our house on weekends working on housework or maintaining the yard.  This means that every weekend, we really have both days available to fill with fun activities.

Roller Skating

Our daughter has taken a shine to roller skating recently.  It’s about $20 for the three of us every time we go.  Before our downsizing, that would have been in the budget about once a month.  Now we are able to go once a week.  Sometimes we even go twice a week to take advantage of free pizza night, where we get to skate and eat pizza for $20.

Movies

I’m sure you already know this, but going to the movies is a big expense.  For a family of three we spend about $25 for tickets and another $20 or so on popcorn and drinks.  Before downsizing, going to the movies was almost never in our budget.  Now we have the freedom to spend the money to enjoy a movie and munch on some popcorn.

Weekends Away

In February we had to travel to Tampa, about two hours away, for a doctor appointment.  Normally we would drive over, go to the appointment, and then drive back.  This time we decided to stay for the weekend.  We hit up priceline for a good hotel rate and planned some activities for the weekend.  On Saturday we visited the Lowry Park Zoo, which is rated as one of the best children’s zoos in the United States.  On Sunday we went to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium to see Winter the dolphin (the dolphin from the Dolphin Tale movie.)  It was a great weekend.  Faith had a great time, and Dream and I enjoyed getting away for the weekend.

Clearwater Marine Aquarium - Winter the dolphin

Clearwater Marine Aquarium - Rescued Sea Turtle

We’re hoping to plan some more weekends away this summer, and maybe hit up some of the local beaches.

Disney Cruise Vacation

This was our biggest event of the year.  Part of our plan is to take at least one big vacation every year.  My fondest memories as a child all revolve around family vacations.  In the current economy vacations seem to take a back seat to daily life more often than most of us would like.  It happened to us more than we liked.  We are making family vacations a high priority in our new lifestyle.

We just got back from the first of these vacations.  We took a 3 night cruise to the Bahamas on the Disney Dream.  It was simply amazing.  The ship was fantastic, our room was absolutely spotless, and the staff was amazing.  The ship was so great that we stayed on board when it docked in Nassau.  (We had been there twice before, so we weren’t missing much we hadn’t already seen.)

Disney Dream - A View of Nassau

After departing Nassau, the ship headed to Disney’s private island, Castaway Cay.  It was really nice to not have to dodge all the shady characters when getting off the ship.  The only shady character we saw at Castaway Cay was Captain Jack Sparrow, and he was busy taking pictures with the kids, so we were able to slip by.

We spent the day lounging on the beach and swimming in the cool clean waters.  We also rented bikes and rode to the lookout tower to take in the views of the turquoise Caribbean waters.  Before the heading back to the ship we did a little snorkeling.

Disney Dream - A View of Castaway Cay

Disney Dream - A View of the Caribbean from our Balcony

It was hard to come back to real life after our vacation, which is exactly how a vacation should feel.  We’re looking forward to many more adventures like this.

The Future

There you have the highlights for the last few months.  I’ll try to keep the blog updated with our adventures as we experience them.

I’d love to hear from you.  Has downsizing made room for more experiences in your life?  If you are in the process of downsizing, what adventures do you have planned?

 

 

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Splitting Meals to Save Money… and Calories

by Freedom on May 15, 2012

Many times when we go out to eat, my wife and I will split a meal.  Serving sizes are so humongous these days that we can both be very satisfied (and sometimes still completely stuffed) by eating half sized portions.

We’re more likely to do this at self-serve or mostly self-serve places like Chipotle, Tijuana Flats, and Pei Wei.  These types of places make it easy to split a meal, we simply ask for an extra plate.  Some places will even split the meal onto two plates for us.

The money saving component isn’t really the main reason for this, although it does play a part.  The main reason was simply that we were being served too much food.  Often we didn’t want to take home left-overs and many times we weren’t going directly home after eating.  It just made more sense to get a right-sized portion.

After the first couple of times doing this, we realized that our eating out budget could include two nights per week instead of the one night we had been doing.  Eating fresh served meals is almost always better than old soggy left-overs. We started splitting meals more when we made this observation that we could eat freshly prepared meals out more often.

We find that it’s also a calorie saver.  We tend to overeat if we have a huge plate of food in front of us, and this is less likely when we are splitting a meal.

The only trouble we run into is the feeling we get when splitting a meal at a sit-down restaurant.  I feel a little bad for the wait-staff when we are paying so little for a meal, as I know they depend on tips as part of their income.  I usually tip a little extra to make myself feel better about it.

I’d like to hear from you.  Do you ever split meals to save costs or calories?  What has your experience been?

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Feeling Poor on $100,000 per year

by Freedom on April 5, 2012

I just saw another article pop up on Yahoo about people feeling poor while earning a six figure salary.  I’ve seen articles like this before, and I can definitely relate.  We’re not in the six figure bracket, but we are in the upper five figure area.  We had similar feelings to those expressed in this article.  Here’s the link so you can check it out for yourself.  http://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-person-earn-more-100-000-still-feel-151200753.html

This article discusses a family living in Tampa, Florida.  They live in a moderately priced home and have all the typical bills.  They also have one car payment and are paying for their kids college.  I imagine that after all their bills are paid, they don’t have much left over.  They aren’t exactly living an extravagant life.  Yet at $100,000 per year, you would think they should be. Maybe $100,000 just doesn’t go as far as it used to, or maybe our expectations got inflated.

I know how they feel.

We always felt like we should be living an easier life.  A good salary should make financial matters easier.  We were spending a fortune to live in our house.  Our “must have” expenses (housing, utilities, food, and any contractual obligations like car payments or cell phones) were around 75% of our income.  That only left 25% for other things.  That little bit left over got spent on maintenance items, home and garden stuff, or fun stuff.  25% is not much left to split among our wants and savings.

Now we’ve adjusted our lifestyle by selling the house and renting an apartment.  Our “must haves” are at 50% of our income and we actually have some paycheck left over at the end of the month.

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Renters Are Not Losers

by Freedom on April 4, 2012

There is a stigma associated with renting, especially when renting anything other than a house.  The common thought is that people rent because they cannot afford to buy a house.  This means they are lower income earners and implies they are lower class people.

We are seeing both sides of this stigma, and for a while we thought the same thing.  I think we are conditioned to think that we must buy a house to show true success.  This is simply not true.  Now we are on the renting side of the equation, and we feel like people think less of us because we live in an apartment.

The concept of proving success through ownership of “things” is a core belief that we need to overcome in ourselves.  It is a tough belief to overcome.  When you strip away all the tangible items that define success, what do you have left?  You end up with a bunch of intagibles that can’t be compared on simple scale.

Strip away these tangibles

Big fancy house = success ??

Brand new expensive car = success ??

The latest brand name clothing = success ??

Expensive watch = success ??

And what do you have left

Happiness = success ??

Freedom = success ??

Let’s strip away all that nonsense down to find the root of the success factor.  The root of that is income.  How much money do you make.  If you want to make this real simple, you can poll your neighbors and ask how much money each one makes, put that in a list from lowest to highest, and all of a sudden you have a clear picture of financial success.

Why do we find the need to compare ourselves to others and to constantly compete for that top spot in financial success?  I like to have enough money to do the things I enjoy doing.  That doesn’t require any comparison at all.  If I’m doing the things I enjoy, why should I care what my neighbor is doing?

Even so, it is tough to be judged by those that think we don’t measure up.  We made some tough decisions to get our financial matters in order and to start living below our means.  We are being very realistic about what we can afford and about what are the most important things in our lives.

Sometimes we feel like failures because that’s how others see us.  I’m sure many of our old neighbors are wondering why we really sold our house.  I’m sure that most of them think we were having some real financial difficulty.    I bet that many of them think we were behind on house payments or were at the risk of foreclosure.  The truth is, we were living paycheck to paycheck while making all of our payments on time.    We were stable, but not in the position we wanted to be in.  The house and all the bills associated with it was pulling down and we wanted more freedom to do the things we wanted and to spend our money on the things, activities, and experiences we wanted.

Living paycheck to paycheck in order to have your dream house and dream cars is no way to live.  We checked out of that life and into a new one.  We are working to change our core beliefs about success and failure while trying to lessen the effects of how other people view us now.

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Your Hobbies Are More Financial Than You Think

March 23, 2012

We all have hobbies.  Hobbies are enjoyable ways to pass the time.  We often have hobbies that are tied to making or saving money.  After all, who doesn’t like to have some (or save some) extra money. Some are obviously financially related, like couponing or selling items on ebay.  But you may be surprised to [...]

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Is This a Good Time to Sell a House?

March 13, 2012

I had a comment recently that deserves a some more attention. I can understand you wanting to have the freedom to travel, but is now a good time to try and sell your home with the market being so depressed? This is a great question and one we spent a lot of time considering before [...]

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One Month after Selling our House and Moving into an Apartment

February 23, 2012

We sold our house and moved into an apartment one month ago.  We were aiming to simplify our lives while saving time and money.  A month in and things are going well. The Good and the Bad I find myself missing something unexpected about living in our house – the sound of rain falling on [...]

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Freedom to Travel and Freedom to Do for Others

February 6, 2012

We had a couple of goals in mind when we began concocting this crazy scheme to sell our house and move into a more affordable apartment. We wanted to easily afford to travel more, and we wanted to be able to treat our friends and family to dinner, movies, or other activities. Within the past [...]

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The Cost of Packing and Moving

February 2, 2012

Buying boxes and packing material made our move much easier than our prior moves.  Having a bunch of same size boxes, and having enough boxes to pack everything in really made things easier. In the past, we would scavenge boxes from wherever we could find them.  We always ended up with a many different sizes [...]

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First Day at New School

January 23, 2012

Today was Faith’s first day at her new elementary school.  We had planned to get her signed up last week, but it took a couple of trips to the school to get all the paperwork together, and then Faith came down with a bad cold.  So, she ended up with a few extra days off [...]

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