About 3 years ago as we were preparing to hit the road and begin our life as fulltime travelers we came up with a simple family motto that has guided our choices ever since. This is the first in a 4 part series where I share more in-depth my own thoughts about each part of our motto.

Simplify

Life is complicated! So we strive to simplify our life as much as possible.

Simplify stuff

We simplify by getting fid of stuff that we don't use or need. One of my favorite quotes is at least 90 years old. In 1928 an American humorist named Robert Quillen wrote in his column in The Detroit Free Press:

Americanism: Using money you haven’t earned to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like.

That phrase describes the life of so many people today. Living like that turns in to a never ending circle of making enough money to buy new, bigger and "better" stuff. Ironically many never have time to enjoy what they buy because they have to work so much in order to afford it in the first place.

Simplify for us is cutting out always having to have the latest, biggest and best whatever it is. To try to be content with what we already have. To always ask the question: Do we really need this.

Initially, there was a big effort to get rid of all the unnecessary things that we already had. As we got rid of the obvious stuff it became harder and now the focus has shifted to not getting new stuff and if we really need something new try to get rid of something else instead.

We took a carload every weekend for several weeks when we first started!

Having less stuff definitely makes for a simpler life but Simplify means more than just getting rid of excess things and having less stuff.

Simplify the schedule

Always having to coordinate schedules and figuring out who will pick up the kids and who has practice when can easily turn into a hectic puzzle that for many is normal life. We did not want that. To avoid it we had to cut things out. The first thing that went was that we decided that we would never both work at the same time, so my wife quit her job. This reduced our income at a time when we had a very ambitious savings goal. But simplifying life was more important than saving money (we still managed to more than meet our savings goal by significantly reducing our expenses).

Simplifying the schedule does not mean cutting everything out and doing nothing. Both our kids (Micah came later) took dance lessons during this time. But that was not difficult to fit in since it was only one time a week for each of them and I made sure that I did not have to work that evening.

Emelie really loves to dance so that was a priority for us.

Prioritizing becomes very important. The less important things we tried to remove from our schedule and the things that we decided were important, like dance class, we kept. This created time. Because of our effort to simplify the schedule we had more time to do things together as a family.

Simplifying life is not as much a goal as it is a journey. We are far from there yet. But our life is a whole lot simpler than it was just a few years ago and I have no desire to go back. Today we fit all the stuff that we need (and still a lot of things that we don't really need!) in a 29ft travel trailer. We make our own schedule and decide where to go and what to do. A simpler life is cheaper and that means we don't have to make as much money and can spend less time working. I would say our goal is to work as little as possible while making enough to support the life that we want.

Simple life in beautiful places! Picture from last night in Palm Springs, CA




Thanks for following the journey of me and my family
as we travel and roadschool our kids around the USA.


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