About

Welcome to Rethinking the American Dream.  We are an average family, living in a house and staying just within our means.  We are tired of that lifestyle.

We want more freedom, and we are hoping to create this freedom through reduced consumerism and moving towards a more minimalistic life.  We are planning to reduce our “stuff” so that we can easily move from our 4 bedroom, 3 bath house into a 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment.

We did it!  In January 2012 we finally sold our house and moved into an apartment.  We are now closer to work, and have freed up time and money.  We are on our way to creating more experiences in our life!

We are giving up the house and much of the stuff inside to create more freedom.  We want to place a higher priority on life experiences and less priority on stuff.

Experiences > Stuff

This is very anti to everything that is normal in the United States.  Because of this we have chosen to take on secret identities.  We want to share our experiences, but like any good super hero, we have to keep our true identities secret so that we can maintain our new abnormally normal life in a state of peace.

You may wonder if we are so full of ego, that we consider ourselves to be super heroes.  That’s really not the case at all, we just figure it’s more fun to take on a hero like persona as we share our experiences in Rethinking the American Dream.

Freedom.  He is a husband and a father.  He has a good job that pays well above the national average.  He would consider this to put them in the middle class category.  He’s the big picture guy.  He’ll be sharing the overviews and the challenges as we progress.

Dream.  She is a wife and a mother.  She has chosen the path of a stay at home mom, so she could spend more time raising our daughter.  She also takes care of the home front, and I love her to pieces.  Dream is the details girl.  She’ll be sharing the smaller details, and will largely discuss the emotions involved in this process.

Faith.  She is a 6 year old little girl and is full of life.  She is living in the only house she has ever known.  She loves toys, yet understands that she can’t or won’t get everything she asks for.  She isn’t the typical uncontrolled consumerist, but she’s still far from a minimalist.  She won’t be doing much writing yet, but she is our constant source of inspiration to set experiences as the highest priority.

We are an average middle class family, about to embark on a decidedly un-average journey.  We have decided to give up the American Dream of home ownership.  We are purging all the useless crap from our lives.  We are planning to sell our house and move into an apartment.

We are doing this to gain more freedom and control in our lives.  We are freeing up money, but we are also freeing up our lives so that we can have more experiences.  Being tied to a house really limits the ability to move around, to travel, to do stuff on a whim.  There are so many worries tied to a house, it’s like a living near a constant precipice of disaster, and we want to escape that feeling.

Our ultimate goal is to make a return to the roots of the American Dream.  The origins for the American Dream are rooted in a freedom which includes a promise of prosperity and success.  Yet this success and prosperity have morphed into a rampant consumerism and quest for home ownership, which then limits our freedom.  Our goal is to return the freedom to our American Dream.

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