As I journey toward simplifying my family’s life, I have had to evaluate just about every aspect of our existence. Finances did not escape this exercise. In fact, finances are probably one of the most affected areas of this minimalism journey to date.
One day I looked up and realized that we have 3 mortgages and far too many bank accounts. I’m not suggesting that this financial picture happened without my knowledge, but sometimes you’re just living life without pausing to take inventory.
Some of those bank accounts really had no money on them so it was silly that they were still around. To boot, two of the accounts were being charged monthly fees just to have open. What a waste of money! I don’t know if it was some type of nostalgia because they were the first accounts we each opened at the start of college, but whatever it was, they weren’t needed.
Let’s pivot back to the 3 mortgages.
I wanted to gloss over them, but when you decide to live with intention, that means facing the truth head-on.
We have 2 rental properties and our primary residence. Each home carries a mortgage. It’s not like I forgot about them. When I said earlier on that I looked up and realized that we have 3, it wasn’t in the literal sense. We pay the mortgages monthly and that makes me acutely aware of their existence. However, when you are working to simplify your life, you realize things that didn’t bother you previously may begin to bother you.
Not only do I want to minimize our stuff, but we also want to minimize this debt. As a result, we are on a debt-free journey to aggressively pay off the mortgages – all of them. It will be long, it may be arduous, but we’ll make it through.
Since we’ve been on this debt-free journey, we have implemented spending fasts for the foreseeable future. A spending fast means that we are only buying necessities as much as possible. We break this fast up into weekly no-spend challenges which gives us a small goal to work toward that chosen week.
It also means that there are less purchases to reconcile each month making budgeting much easier.
This goal further reinforces that we can live with less and that we don’t have as many “needs” as we thought. The extra win is that the less stuff we are spending money on, the less stuff we bring into our home. Minimalism journey victory.
Our personal finances are a big part of this minimalism journey, so we intend to do the work and reflect on our achievements and areas for growth often. We already see a shift that we appreciate and look forward to seeing how we thrive in this area.
Have you started a goal that affected more areas of your life than expected?
With Intention,
Sean and Simone
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