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22
Aug 2011

How We Established Our Own Business

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In my post asking what you’d like to see me write about, two readers asked me to address the specifics of how my husband and I set up our home-based business, and I’ve also had numerous emails about this subject over the years.  So I’m going to lay out the basics of what we did, and what has worked for us.  This post is a bit long, but since I’ve had so many questions about this subject over the years, I want to add as many details as possible – both the things we did right, and the stuff I wouldn’t repeat.  I hope it helps!

**** EDIT:  I would add that just because this stuff worked for us, obviously it’s not a how-to manual and it won’t work for everybody or every business.  We worked hard, but we also had a lot of luck on our side.  This post is meant to highlight the steps we took, some of which might work for you if you’re thinking of starting your own business.  But please don’t feel like you have to do the same things we did or make the same decisions we did.  The world is a much different place than it was ten years ago, especially when it comes to online businesses. ****

1.  A disclaimer… We’re in the individual health insurance industry.  It has been great for us for nearly ten years.  But I wouldn’t recommend it right now to someone starting from scratch, simply because everything is so up in the air with health care reform.  The reform law that passed last year has significantly cut our commissions (and likely driven a lot of newer agents out of the industry, because it’s a lot easier to weather commission cuts if you have a large, established client base), and there are a lot of unanswered questions about how the industry will work as of 2014.  And of course, the whole law is headed for the Supreme Court, so it’s anybody’s guess how this will all shake out.  In a nutshell – insurance is great, but if you want to become self employed, I would steer clear of individual health insurance at least for the next few years.

2.  We eased our way in.  My husband quit his corporate job in early 2002 and started selling health insurance.  I kept my corporate job for another year and half so that we could live off of my income while he got things started.  At that point, I quit my job and joined him.  During the first year he was self employed, he made very little money, and it would have been particularly rough if we had both jumped into being self employed at the same time.

3.  We had no kids and very little in the way of financial obligations when we first became self-employed.  On the other hand, we also had no savings or assets to fall back on.  Our rent was about $700/month, we had no debts, and our living expenses basically amounted to food, gas, utilities, etc.  So it was relatively easy to make do on very little income.  It would have been nice to have a little bit of savings to cushion us, but we were very young and living paycheck to paycheck.  We bought our first house after my husband had been self-employed for about a year, and that bumped our housing costs up to about $1280/month.  Definitely a stretch.

4.  We used credit cards to get by.  I know this is a big DON’T when starting a business, and I wouldn’t recommend it.  But it worked for us.  By the time I had been working with my husband for about a year, we probably had $35,000 in debts.  This was partially due to making barely enough money to pay the mortgage and using credit cards for stuff like groceries, although most of the debt was business-related.  We spent a lot of money on marketing:  pay-per-click with Google, multimedia business cards, buying leads from an agency we worked with in the first couple years… it all added up, really fast.

5.  We played the credit card game, transferring balances from one card to another in order to get zero-interest deals.  It actually worked really well for us, but that’s because I tend to be extremely detail-oriented with stuff like that, and I always made sure that I read the fine print and got things paid off before the promotional periods expired.  Again, using personal credit cards to start a business is probably not the best idea.

6.  We incorporated.  This was an excellent move, but one that we didn’t make until 2006.  Looking back, we should have done it sooner.  Once we incorporated, we were able to completely separate our business and personal finances, and become W-2 employees of our business.  Much more official than the self-employed status we had for the previous few years.  By that point, we had nearly paid off our various debts, but once we incorporated, we had the option to get a business loan if we needed it, and we did get a business credit card.  That would probably have been a smarter way to go about financing the start-up costs of our business, but we didn’t know what incorporation entailed and didn’t become educated about the benefits until we had been self employed for a few years.  We went through an online company that specialized in incorporation paperwork, and I think it cost us about $500.  We’re an S-corp, which has worked perfectly for us (there are several options for incorporation – do your research from both a business and tax perspective before you settle on an option).

7.  We lived poor.  I think “fake it till you make it” is terrible advice.  I know some people will disagree, and I know that there are a few professions where it might actually be good advice.  But for most of us, clothes from a thrift store (which look just like clothes from the mall!) and a used car or bike will work just fine.  So does a small house or apartment.  Even with our frugal lifestyle, it took us until 2007 to pay off the debts we incurred to start our business (most of that money was spent in 2003 and 2004).  If we had financed new cars, eaten at fancy restaurants, bought new clothes, etc., it would have taken much longer.

8. We transitioned to working on-line back in 2003.  This was probably the best move we made in setting up our business.  Over the course of about two years, we went from having a mostly car-based business to having a mostly home-based business.  These days, we literally never leave the house for work at all.  We can “meet” with far more clients  in a day than we ever could have when we were driving all over the state.  We can work from anywhere as long as we have high speed internet and a phone.  The best part about working on-line is that we’re both home all day with our sons.  My husband is in his office (either in the basement or out in the office we built in our backyard) all day, but he can take breaks to come and hang out with us, and I get to be with our boys all day, taking breaks to fit in business-related work when I can.  (I only work about 15 hours a week for our business these days).

9.  My husband spent hundreds of hours in the early years of our business teaching himself the art of search engine optimization in the evenings, after a full day of work.  This has paid off tremendously for us, but there were many late nights in front of the computer.  If you’re going to be self-employed, you’re going to have to put a lot of time or money (or both!) into marketing.  Being self-employed does not mean that you work whenever you feel like it.  Especially early on, it pretty much means that you work all the time.  But if you’re ok with that, the amazing thing about the world we live in today is that you can learn – online, from home – just about anything you put your mind to.

10.  We didn’t seek out glamorous, cool jobs.  There is nothing exciting about health insurance.  Actually, we think it’s pretty interesting, and all the legislation surrounding it for the last few years has been fascinating to us.  But when you’re at a party and tell someone you’re a health insurance broker, they tend to say “oh, that’s cool” and then change the subject.  We are not astronauts.  But that’s fine with us.  My husband has always wanted to have his own business, and he loves the challenges that come with being his own boss.  But in general, we do not find our primary fulfillment from our career.  We look at our business as a way to earn money, and we seek fulfillment from the things we love (gardening, raising our boys, being outdoors, spending time with family, learning new things, etc.).  I know that some people are very successful at making something they love doing into a career.  But having the mindset that work has to be something you love can also be a big hurdle to clear if you’re looking at setting up your own business.  Just food for thought.  Whatever you do for a living, I would recommend doing it to the best of your ability.  Don’t be a slacker.  But don’t feel like you’re selling yourself short if you’re earning an honest living doing something that is “just a job”.

11.  We’re honest.  This is huge.  Working for yourself means that nobody is looking over your shoulder on a daily basis, making sure you’re being ethical and honest.  Some self-employed people get themselves into trouble because they start to feel like they can do whatever they want.  They tell customers what they want to hear (or what needs to be said to make a sale, whether it’s true or not), they stretch the truth with the IRS, they fudge compliance paperwork… there are all sorts of traps that you can fall into if you let yourself start to deviate from the path of honest-and-ethical-all-the-time.  In the insurance industry, there are some carriers that pay higher commissions than others, and there are always carriers that are running various bonus programs for agents who sell a high volume of their products.  But our philosophy is that the best strategy is to sell each client the product that works best for that client, and that the money will take care of itself.  We might not have always qualified for the best bonuses or the highest commissions, but we have lots of clients who have been with us for nearly a decade.  Our BBB and insurance license records are complaint-free, and we rest easy at night knowing that all of our income has been reported to the IRS (yes, even the income that the payers didn’t report), all of our records are in order, and all of our clients have received honest advice.

12.  We paid ourselves first.  For about a year in 2003/04, we didn’t contribute any money to our retirement plans.  That was our roughest year in terms of income, and we were barely able to pay our mortgage.  But by the summer of 2004, we decided that we had to make retirement savings a priority again, even if it meant tightening our already-tight belts.  So we started small, putting $100/month into each of our IRAs.  As we earned more money, we increased the amounts we were contributing to retirement.  We’ve kept our day-to-day living expenses about the same for the last five years or so (not as frugal as we were in 2003, but nothing extravagant either), which has allowed us to set up a SEP-IRA through our business, max out our HSA and IRAs each year, and also create an emergency fund.  If we’re able to keep on earning a good living from our current business indefinitely, that’s great – we’ll just retire a bit earlier.  But if not, it will be nice to have a bit of a cushion.  Especially now that we have kids.

13.  We stopped taking advance commissions very early on.  The first couple of years that we were “self-employed” we were actually contract workers for a large insurance brokerage.  We were self-employed, and only got paid if we made a sale, but many agencies will pay advance commissions to agents.  Basically, when you make a sale, they pay you ten months of commissions up front.  That makes for some nice paychecks, but it also means you’re in debt to the agency.  If the client ends up cancelling, you have to pay the money back.  If the client keeps the policy, the debt to the agency will be repaid in 10 months, but it becomes a never-ending cycle.  Most of the other agents we talked to had quite a bit of advance commission debt, even though they were making big paychecks every month.  We decided we’d rather live off of what we were actually earning, and switched to as-earned commissions.  That was painful at first, but we slept easier at night.  And it made it much easier to transition to setting up our own agency, since we were no longer relying on a larger agency to pay us advance commissions.

14.  We worked hard to build solid relationships with the top insurance carriers.  We avoided cut-rate carriers, even if they were offering sweet commissions and extra bonuses.  We wanted to make sure that the products we were offering our clients were from solid, reputable carriers rather than some new carrier that had just entered the market and was offering trips to Hawaii for brokers who sold lots of their policies.

I hope this is helpful for those of you who are interested in setting up your own business.  A lot of this stuff will apply to many industries and lines of work – not just insurance.  The internet has given us more opportunities than ever to be our own bosses and work from home.  Of course, it’s also created lots of scams and traps for the unwary.  If something sounds too good to be true ($8000/month, working from home, no experience necessary, start tomorrow!), it probably is.  Establishing a successful internet-based business isn’t easy, but if you make it work, the rewards are huge.

 

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Category: Debt, insurance, just my life, lessons learned, work  6 Comments
11
Aug 2011

Downsizing My Craft Supplies

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Ten years ago, my sister-in-law got me hooked on scrapbooking.  I started out with a scrapbook full of my pictures from the time I spent living in Africa, and then moved on to scrapping our daily lives.  I did several albums over the years, and always enjoyed working on them.  Then we had our son, and my scrapbooking came to a pretty grinding halt.  I know – most people start scrapbooking to record their children’s lives, and my timing is a bit backwards, but it is what it is.  I did about 20 pages of his baby album the summer after he was born, but it stops when he’s about three months old, and the rest of the pages are blank.  I’ve made a few gift scrapbooks since then, but have switched to mostly posting photos on Facebook for friends and family, and archiving them on the computer for us.  I still imagine myself scrapbooking again, but with our business, two little boys, our garden, exercise, etc., my days are completely filled up now, with no time left over for crafting.  If I have a free hour in the day, I’d rather spend it playing trains with our son than making a scrapbook page about him playing trains.

Someday I may come back and work on our son’s baby book again, and someday I might start a baby book for our second son.  But that day is not now, and it’s probably not likely to be anytime in the near future.  What is likely to be happening in the near future is our basement finishing project (I know, we were supposed to be starting on that months ago.  But the garden had to take priority in the spring/early summer, and we had a baby in the middle of all that too…).  We decided that the less stuff we have in the basement, the easier it will be to work down there, so we started clearing stuff out.  One whole corner of the basement had been devoted to my craft supplies, even though I’ve done very little crafting since we moved here.  There was a large table (covered in craft stuff) and a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves next to it, all full.  I had stuff that I didn’t even remember (my mother-in-law has been buying my scrapbook supplies for ten years, a lot of which I had never opened).

I’m not getting rid of all of it.  We’re planning to include a counter-top-style built in craft area in the basement, with some shelves under it to hold supplies, and a place for my sewing machine.  But the area will be a lot smaller than the current “craft area”, so some pruning was in order.  I started by going through my fabric scraps and sorting out all of my felted wool scraps (I had used them to make diaper covers for our son a few years ago, but haven’t used them since and don’t have any plans to use them in the future).  I posted a listing on Craigslist for a free box of wool scraps and soon got a reply from a lady who has a “very crafty” ten year old daughter who would love the wool.  We emailed back and forth, and it turns out that the little girl loves anything to do with crafts, and the mom said she would be thrilled to have any craft supplies that I don’t need anymore.  Knowing that a specific little girl would be getting my stuff made me much more motivated to clear out my supplies.  They’ve been gathering dust in our basement for two years, and she’d actually be using them.  After about an hour down there, I’ve got quite a stack for her:  a drawer organizer, a shelf organizer, a large bag of fabric scraps, the box of wool scraps, and a large box of various scrapbook supplies.  Hopefully they arrive with a car that has lots of trunk space…

I also listed the table on Craigslist, and had several responses right away.  Listing things for free is an easy, fast way to get rid of stuff you don’t need anymore.  And one of the bonuses of purchasing things used is that when it’s time to part with them, you don’t feel a need to recoup the money you spent on them, since it wasn’t much to begin with.

So this weekend, we should have a person coming to pick up the table and a little girl getting lots of craft supplies.  My craft area in the basement feels much more manageable now, and I think it will all fit in the smaller area we’re planning for it.  As time goes by, I’ll revisit the craft supply question.  If I’m still not using what’s left, I’ll let it go.  There’s really no point in holding onto stuff just because we imagine ourselves using it someday.  In an interesting coincidence, Miss Minimalist wrote a post today that addresses the same issue.

Are you holding onto stuff you don’t use, just because you imagine yourself using it someday?  Or because someone gave it to you and you feel like you shouldn’t get rid of it?  Or just because…?

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Category: family, hobbies, just my life  10 Comments
10
May 2011

Children And Money – Does It All Even Out?

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We’ve all heard how expensive children are.  And there are definitely some expenses that are tough to avoid.  We’re paying about $270/month for health insurance for our two boys, and there’s not really a way around that expense (we have a high deductible health insurance policy already, so that cost is on the low end of the scale).  We’re also putting $100/month into each of their college accounts.  Technically that money is still ours, and growing.  College accounts are not a necessity, but they’re something that we feel will be a worthwhile investment years in the future.

Other than health insurance and the college accounts, we have very little in the way of expenses for our boys.  We’re only three years into the whole parenting adventure, but we’ve managed to avoid a lot of the expenses that tend to go along with having very young children.  I still shop exclusively at Goodwill for our older son’s clothes, and our younger son is just wearing hand-me-downs.  We wanted to give our son a bike for his third birthday, and we found one on Craigslist for $20.  It needed a bit of work, and my husband spent a couple hours fixing it up before we gave it to our son.  But for $20, we ended up with a perfect birthday present that our son loves.

Our son adores trips to the library and the local parks.  He likes going for bike rides and feeding ducks.  He spends his days playing in the backyard, “cooking” in the living room with all of my pots and pans and utensils, drawing, and “crafting” with stuff like pipe cleaners and return address stickers that come in the mail.  It’s rare for us to spend money on stuff to entertain him (although we did spend $75 on a used train table earlier this year, and he’s had lots of hours of fun with it).  He mostly uses his very active imagination and the wealth of stuff that he finds in the house and out in the yard.  His clothing costs us next to nothing.  We did spend quite a bit of money on his mattress, but that’s something he’ll use for a long time, and we felt that it was worth the cost.

We don’t make trips to Target or Babies R Us.  We use cloth diapers exclusively, and have never purchased formula or baby food (our son eats what we eat, and has from the time he started eating solid foods, thanks to an inexpensive baby food grinder).  We try to keep clutter to a minimum, and that includes “kid clutter”.  We’ve found that we just don’t need most of the stuff that is marketed to new parents.  We kept all of the stuff we did use with our first son when he was smaller, and that means we literally need nothing at all for our second son.  I’ll probably look for a double jogging stroller sometime this summer once our baby is old enough to sit in one, but they are pretty easy to find on Craigslist.  Other than that, I can’t think of anything we need for our baby that we don’t already have.  I know that hand-me-downs won’t work forever, since we’re starting to get into the stage where our older son will be wearing out his clothes before he grows out of them.  But we have “free” clothes for our baby for at least the first three years.

One huge bonus that we have is that we don’t pay for child care.  We’re lucky, but we also put a lot of effort into establishing a home-based business several years before we had children.  My husband works full time at our business, and I work very part-time (about two hours a day right now) so that I can mostly be a stay at home mom to our boys.  Child-care is definitely a huge expense if you have to have it, but I know a lot of families have found that with a little creativity they can either switch to living on one income or two part-time incomes, or rearrange work schedules so that both parents can take turns being at home with the children.

Even though we’ve kept our child-related expenses to a minimum, just the health insurance and college accounts comes to nearly $500/month.  But there’s a flip side to the expenses that come with having children.  There are a lot of things that we aren’t spending money on anymore, that we probably would be if we didn’t have children.   Before we had kids, we usually took at least one vacation a year, usually to a relatively far-away destination.  We had more shopping trips, and weekend get-aways to little resort towns.  We went out to eat and to the movies…  These days, we much prefer to take our sons to the park or to the library.  Our younger son doesn’t care where he is as long as he can nurse whenever he likes and get snuggled most of the day.  Our older son is just as happy at a lake with a pail and a shovel as he would be at a beach on a tropical island.  We tend to focus our entertainment activities around things that are fun for a three-year old, and we’ve found that most of those things are free or very low cost.  We spent Mother’s Day at a huge park about ten miles from our house.  Our son’s best friend was there too, and the kids had a blast feeding ducks, riding their bikes, and playing on the playground.  Total cost:  $3 for the bread we got for the ducks.

So although we’ve found that there are definitely unavoidable expenses that go along with having kids, we’ve also found lots of areas where our expenses have dropped in the last few years, specifically because we have children.  I know that this won’t always be the case.  Ten years from now, I know I’ll be making a whole lot more food than I am now (leftovers might be a thing of the past!) and we’ll have more expenses for our boys as they approach young adulthood than we do now when they are little.  But I think that we’ll be able to stay pretty frugal with two kids as the years go by.  What do you think?  If you have kids, do you think you’re spending more or less overall than you were before you had kids?

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Category: baby, just my life, kids  20 Comments
20
Mar 2011

I’m Still Here!

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My apologies for the dust on the blog lately.  Our baby is due in just over two weeks (and our son came ten days early…) and we’re in a mad dash to try to get all of the loose ends tied up on the various projects we have going on.  We’ve been spending every weekend and a lot of our evenings lately working on our backyard shed, which we have nearly finished transforming into an office.  In January, we had a 10 x 12 Tuff Shed installed.  Then we added additional studs inside so that we’d be able to finish it with drywall, and insulated the whole thing.  We drywalled the interior (including a vaulted ceiling with exposed rafters… it was slow going!), textured the walls and ceiling, and painted everything (we used the same wall color that we used in our bedroom at our old house, and used white for the ceiling and trim).  We went to a local used construction supply store and found used baseboard and wood to make windowsills, and also scored nearly a full roll of flooring underlay while we were there.  We put in laminate cherry wood flooring, and found some great deals at a thrift store and on Craigslist for a used futon, office chair, desk, and lamp.  All that’s left to do is paint the inside of the door, which we’re hoping to do tomorrow.  Whew!  Projects like that always seem to take longer than we think they will, but at least we’re nearly finished.  And now my husband will be able to go to work without having to spend his entire day in the basement, surrounded by concrete walls and no view.

The backyard office is completely solar powered, which we think is pretty awesome.  It’s quite a distance from our house, so running electricity out there from our breaker box would have been a major process anyway.   But we also really liked the idea of using solar power on a small scale, and figured this was the perfect opportunity to try it out.  My husband found all of the various components online, and put it all together with a marine battery to store the electricity.  The battery has to be stored in a sealed container that is vented to the outside (in order to prevent the buildup of hydrogen gas inside the storage container), and he also built a wooden cabinet around the battery/inverter area to keep everything protected and tidy.  He connected it all to a regular light switch, so you can just flip a switch on the wall when you walk in and that turns on the inverter.  The inverter we got is 400 watts, so we can’t run too much stuff out there, but it’s plenty for what we need: a laptop, a couple of lamps with CFLs, and a 250 watt heat light for cold days.  It all works perfectly, and we’re both excited to put the finishing touches on the office so that he can start working out there during the day.

In addition to the shed remodel, we’ve also been getting things going for this year’s garden.  We’ve got two beds of greens planted outside under our cold frames, and they’ve just started to sprout in the last couple days.  We’ve also go 50 tomato seedlings and 25 pepper seedlings started in the house, and they will be going into the hydroponic system within the next week or two.  We’ve been turning over the dirt in our garden beds, and will be adding compost to them soon so that they will be ready for seedlings in May.

Our basement has been on hold while we’ve been working on the shed and the garden, but we’re nearly ready to get back to working on that project too.

So that’s where I’ve been lately.  Combined with running our business and taking care of our son, we’ve been busy bees.  But everything is going well with my pregnancy, and we’re excited about all of our various projects… never a dull moment around here!

 

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Category: garden, home improvement, just my life  9 Comments
16
Feb 2011

Non-toxic Oven Cleaner

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Confession time:  We’ve lived in our current house for nearly 20 months, and until today, I had never cleaned the oven.  I use the oven maybe 3 or 4 times a month, and the bottom of it was looking pretty grubby.  Cleaning the oven is not particularly high on my list of things to do, but with the possibility of both my mother and my mother-in-law using our oven to cook for us after our baby arrives (for which we are very grateful!), I decided that it probably needed to be cleaned.

Ten years ago, I would have headed to the grocery store to buy a can of oven cleaner and a pair of rubber gloves.  But since I no longer use any sort of toxic cleaners (or any cleaner that requires rubber gloves), I decided to see if my trusty baking soda and vinegar solution would do the trick.  I sprinkled baking soda all over the bottom of the oven, and on the open door.  Then I sprayed vinegar all over the inside of the oven and let it sit for half an hour or so while I worked on other tasks.  I used a razor blade knife (designed for cleaning ceramic stove tops) to gently scrape the stuck-on gunk out of the oven, and it came off with very little effort.  Then I rinsed everything a few times with water and clean rags.  It took me about 10 minutes of actual scrubbing/cleaning time to get it done.

So we have a clean oven.  Our son was able to hang out right next to me while I worked on it, and neither of us inhaled any nasty fumes.  For a while during the oven cleaning process, the kitchen smelled like vinegar.  Now it smells like nothing at all, which is what clean really smells like.  I didn’t have to go buy oven cleaner or rubber gloves (I buy baking soda and vinegar in bulk at Costco, and always have plenty on hand).  I’m convinced that there’s nothing in our house that can’t be cleaned with baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide and water.  For laundry, all I need is soap nuts and hydrogen peroxide.  A simplified arsenal of cleaning products is not only less expensive and easier to keep stocked, but it’s also a lot better for our bodies and the environment than a bunch of bottles of toxic cleaners.

Anybody have any other tricks for cleaning an oven without using commercial oven cleaners?

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Category: just my life, organic living  16 Comments
01
Feb 2011

Choices

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This article on Minimalist Mom yesterday was particularly interesting, and got even more so in the comments section.  Rachel’s life is quite similar to my own – she’s a stay at home mom who also works part time from home, and has a husband who is an entrepreneur.  She manages the bulk of the household responsibilities, while her husband earns the bulk of the family income.  In our situation, my husband and I are both W2 employees of our corporation – and have been for years now – but while he works at least 40 hours a week at our business, I work about 10 – 15.  I take care of most of the responsibilities of running the household (stuff like laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc.) and I’m with our son all day while my husband works.  In the evenings, we’re both with our son.  My husband takes care of stuff like the lawn, construction projects, fixing things around the house, etc.

20 years ago, I would have kicked and screamed if anyone had told me that I would eventually find myself with such a traditional division of labor in terms of gender roles.  As a teen, I had no desire to cook, clean, or do anything else related to “keeping house”.  I got a college degree, and then took a bit of a non-traditional path by joining the Peace Corps and spending two years teaching math in Africa.  I came back and got a job in the corporate world, and found myself moving pretty quickly up the corporate ladder.  At 24 I was a manager with 10 employees.  I went on business trips all over the country.  I wore suits to work.  I had a 401k and fancy business cards.  I worked 60 hours a week.  I hated my job and everything that went along with it.

In the summer of 2003, I quit my job and joined my husband in the fledgling insurance agency he had created the year before.  My income dropped significantly.  We went into debt to keep our little business running, and didn’t get it all paid off until 2007.  Life was definitely not easy from a financial point of view, but we were both so much happier working for ourselves.  We knew that eventually we wanted to have children, and that working from home would make things easier when we did.

When our son was born in 2008, I quit my side-job at the local library and scaled way back on the number of hours I was working for our business.  My husband took on some of the work I had been doing, and we settled into our new roles just fine.  Three years later, it’s still a very good setup for our family.  We realize that we’re extremely fortunate to be able to make a good living without either of us ever having to leave the house.  Although I’m the one taking care of our son during the day, my husband is just a few seconds away in the basement, and can come up to help us out if we need him.  He eats lunch with us every day, and sometimes takes a break in the middle of the day to take our son to the park, run errands, or just hang out with us in the backyard.

Although my teenage self would have shuddered at the thought of spending days washing diapers and cooking, I’m right where I want to be.  I’m sure that once our children are in school, my life will change again to focus more on our business.  (I realize that I’m fortunate to be in a situation where we own our business and I don’t have to convince anyone to hire me).

Although the commenter on Rachel’s post was adamant that women who leave or pause their careers to take care of children are doing themselves a disservice, I see it a little differently.  I just see choices, and we all have to make them.  We choose whether or not to partner with someone long-term or remain independent.  We choose whether or not to have children.  We choose career paths based on all sorts of different motivation:  some seek careers with high pay, others want prestige, some want fulfilling work, others want work that gives them flexibility in terms of how they spend their days…  There’s no one path or series of choices that works for everyone.  I have no desire to ever own a brand new car or live in a mansion.  I don’t need new clothing (since I can get all the designer stuff I want for pennies on the dollar at thrift stores) or high end purses.  I don’t want mani/pedis, facials, or massages.  Because my husband and I are low-maintenance, we don’t need a whole lot of money to be happy.  That means that we’re able to save for the future and have everything we need even though I spend most of my time taking care of our household.  Someone who does want all of those things that I mentioned might find that they need to have two full time incomes to make it work.  And if they choose to not have children, they’ll probably find it even easier to have those things.  That’s not to say that one way is better or worse, just that we have to make choices.

I have found that I’m much happier when I’m not judging other people who want something different out of life than I want.  Having a spouse and children makes me happy, but that doesn’t mean that it makes everyone happy.  Taking care of our household also makes me happy, but I know that it would make some people go crazy with boredom and frustration.  My husband and I feel most comfortable with completely shared finances, but I know that isn’t the case for all couples.  I think “dd” (the commenter on Rachel’s article) is being a bit overly dramatic in saying that most marriages break up and then we women will all end up living “off the government”.  One has to assume that dd has also had to make choices in his/her life – those same choices that we all have to make.  And while I assume that dd would make different choices than Rachel and I have made, that doesn’t mean that he/she hasn’t had to give up things in order to pursue his/her chosen path.  We can’t have everything.  We can’t be both single and married.  We can’t work full time and also be stay at home parents.  We can’t opt to work in a non-profit for $30,000/year and also live a millionaire lifestyle with a yacht.  We just have to choose which things are worth giving up, and which are worth pursuing.  And those choices will be different for all of us.

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12
Jan 2011

On Not Being Busy

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For as long as I can remember, I have thrived on being busy.  In the four years I was in college, I completed something like 170 credits (120 was needed for a degree), and also worked between 15 and 35 hours a week for the final three years of college.  After my time in the Peace Corps, I took a job that technically required 52 hours a week, but usually ended up being more, and that only increased once I became a manager.  After my husband and I started our own business, I took a side job at the library to help us make ends meet, and juggled the two jobs for several years.  I liked being busy.  I liked having  a long to-do list.  I felt successful and productive when I could look at all that I had accomplished in a day.

But I can feel myself changing.  I no longer have such a strong desire to always be busy.  I want downtime.  I want to sit on the couch under a blanket with our son and read ten library books in a row.  I want to work on whatever task I’m currently doing without six other planned tasks bouncing around in my head.  I no longer feel the need to be busy all the time in order to feel like I’m a productive, worthy person.

The Happiest Mom wrote a great article about “I’m-so-busy-itis” a couple years ago, and it’s well worth a read.  (Thanks to Rachel from Minimalist Mom for the link).  I’ve never been one to detail my to-do list to other people or complain about how busy I am, but I’ve always done so in my own head.  Especially since our son was born and I scaled way back on my responsibilities for our business, I’ve felt a need to make sure that I’m always busy in order to justify to myself that I’m still contributing as much to the family as my husband.  But I’m finding that I just don’t feel the need to be that busy anymore.  I don’t need to justify my worth to myself, and my husband would prefer that I be a little less busy anyway (although he works very hard, he’s always been better than me at unwinding and enjoying downtime).

I have lots of friends who fall into the “I’m-so-busy-itis” category, but I no longer feel any desire to be as busy as they are.  I want simplicity, a slower pace, and a relatively short to-do list.  I’ve been getting much better over the last year or so about not over-scheduling our weekends, and now I’m taking steps to simplify the smaller details of my life too.  Last week I unsubscribed from all of the political/social/activist websites that had been sending me an average of about twenty emails a day.  I had been getting so many that I found that I was just deleting most of them anyway, and now my in-box feels much lighter and cleaner.  I still feel just as strongly about my political/social views as I ever have, but I don’t need hourly emails to remind me of my views or encourage me to donate money or time.  Opting to receive far fewer emails is a very simple step, but it’s one that has made my life a little bit easier too, and I’m looking for ways that I can replicate this in other aspects of my life.

The biggest change I’ve made is the mental switch to not needing to be busy all the time in order to feel worthy, productive and happy.  When friends talk about their over-crammed schedules, I don’t feel inferior for having half as much on my plate.  Keeping our life as simple as possible – with lots of time to just hang out – is much more important to me these days than being busy all the time used to be.  A minimalist attitude towards possessions makes this much easier, since we don’t need to be on a work-spend-work treadmill.

All in all, I’ve decided that being constantly busy and hurrying all the time is a bit over-rated.  Even though I thought that I was thriving on that lifestyle for years, I definitely prefer the slower pace that I have now.  I still feel productive, and get a lot done each day, but my pace is more relaxed, and I like it that way.

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03
Jan 2011

Why I Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions

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Happy 2011!  I hope you all had a nice, relaxing holiday season.  Right now, we’re really enjoying the fact that our holiday decorations were limited to a little Christmas bear hanging on our wall clock, an evergreen bough on top of our kitchen cabinets, and a homemade reindeer ornament that our son’s cousin made for him.  Not much to do in terms of taking it all down!

And that brings us to New Year’s resolutions.  In keeping with our “doing things our own way” style, we don’t do resolutions.   January 1 is a day, just like every other day.  Sure, it’s the start of a new year, but there are plenty of other beginnings we can celebrate too.  12 times each year a new month begins.  52 times each year we get to start a new week, and 365 times each year we get to start a new day.  Maybe it’s because my family doesn’t place a great deal of importance on any holidays (trying instead to make every day special), but January 1 isn’t any more significant to me than February 1.

Instead of resolving to make big changes at the start of each year, my approach is to make changes whenever I think of them, or whenever I’m feeling particularly motivated by something.  And I tend to avoid making too many changes at once.  Sometime in the fall of 2009, I decided to start making our bed every morning when we got up (something I had never done before).  It takes less than a minute to make the bed, but for the rest of the day the room looks great.  This was a simple change, and one that later helped motivate me to be more focused on neatness throughout the house.  These days, I can’t imagine leaving the bedroom in the morning without making the bed.

Last year, sometime in April, I started to be intrigued by the idea of minimalism, purging clutter, and limiting shopping.  I decided to stop going to my favorite thrift stores (except to donate stuff) and vowed to not buy any clothing for the rest of the year.  I have no idea what the specific date was, but I was successful in making that change too.  I very rarely go thrift store shopping anymore (if I do, it’s with a specific purpose, like new winter boots for our son), and I haven’t bought any clothes since April.  Of course, I was able to drag my box of maternity clothes up from the basement a couple months ago, so it’s sort of like I got a whole new wardrobe anyway…

It was also sometime last spring when I decided to stop spending valuable time and mental energy reading the news.  That was another very good change, and although the start of it didn’t coincide with any significant calendar date, I’ve been able to (mostly) stick with it.  (I say mostly because I do still have to spend a chunk of time each day online for work, and sometimes I find myself clicking on links that end up being time/energy wasters.  But I’m much more able to recognize those for what they are now, and get myself back on task relatively quickly).

There are lots of reasons why most New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure.  Some people try to take on too many things at once.  We all know someone who resolves to stop smoking, start exercising for an hour a day, give up soda, lose 20 pounds, and start meditating every morning… all on January 1.  For a very small percentage of people, making multiple radical changes at one time works quite well.  But for most people, it’s likely to be overwhelming.  I think that another reason resolutions made on January 1 tend to fail is because the date really is just another day.  There’s a lot of hype around the start of a new year, but it’s no easier to make major changes on January 1 than it is on March 23rd.  There’s nothing magical about January first.  Making changes in our lives requires just as much effort now as it would two months from now.  Sometimes I think that people make resolutions on January 1 simply because everybody else is doing it, rather than out of a deep desire to change something.  It might make more sense to make changes when the motivation strikes, regardless of the date on the calendar (January 3rd is just as good as January 1st!)

If you’re looking for a little inspiration in terms of making positive changes in your life, check out this article from Minimalist Mom.  And don’t worry about what the calendar says.  At any point in our lives we can make changes, both big and small, that will put us on a better, more rewarding path.  Listening to ourselves and paying attention to what we really want out of life is more likely to motivate us than the dawning of a particular day on the calendar.

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20
Dec 2010

Christmas Our Way

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We’ve already opened all of our Christmas presents.  Yep, we march to our own drum around here.  We have gradually simplified Christmas over the years, and eliminated nearly all of the gift exchanging we used to do.  My husband and I long ago stopped giving each other material gifts (for any event, including birthdays and our anniversary – we do things for each other instead), and although this is our third Christmas with our son, we have never bought him any Christmas gifts.  We’ve also stopped exchanging gifts with friends – none of our friends need anything, and neither do we, so it works out well.  My mother in law loves to give gifts though, and she continues to send a box of presents each year for Christmas.  She usually sends three or four small gifts for each of us, along with some clothing for our son.  I make her a scrapbook of her kids and grandkids each year, and from what we’ve heard, usually about half of their retirement community ends up seeing the scrapbooks.   This year, I made her a purse-sized one (using a 40 page, 4×6 album) so that she can carry it around easily.  It was the only Christmas gift I made this year (other than food I’m making for some friends and neighbors), and I had a blast making it.

Anyway, we got her Christmas box last week, and decided that it made more sense to space out the gift-opening rather than cram it all into one day.  We knew we weren’t going to open presents on Saturday, since we’re going to have all of my family here, and none of us exchange gifts.  We thought about doing it on Friday, but then we figured our son would have more fun with each gift if he opened them individually.

In addition to a couple of shirts and some pajamas, our son got a little dump truck, a small wooden train set, a couple of books, and a Mr. Potato Head.  He opened one each day, and got to thoroughly focus on each gift, one at a time.  Personally, I liked that a lot better than a big gift bonanza on Christmas morning.  Like I said, we follow our own drum beat…

This past weekend, our town held a food drive to benefit local families.  We talked to our son about it, and explained that there are people right here in our town who don’t have enough food to eat.  We took him with us to the local grocery store and loaded up a cart full of non-perishable food.  I didn’t have coupons (yet), but I paid close attention to sales, and we were able to fill the trunk of our car with food.  We took it over to the food drive headquarters, where some very enthusiastic volunteers were standing out in the cold to greet us.

We could have gone to Toys R Us and spent that money on a toy for our son.  But he’s already happy pretty much 100% of the time, and there isn’t anything he needs.  Donating food felt so much better, and our son spent the rest of the day asking questions about “kids who don’t have food” and talking about how we got them some food.  I know he’s only two, but I feel like we’ve started laying a good foundation for him to grow up with a sense of compassion and generosity.  And that’s more important than any toy could ever be.

Last week, I wrote about the book How To Shop For Free, and I’m excited to start using a lot of those techniques to buy food for the local food bank.  For my own family, it’s true that there aren’t really that many coupons or stellar deals on the sort of food we eat.  But the food bank needs non-perishables (as opposed to the fresh and frozen produce that I tend to buy for us), and it’s possible to strike a happy medium between my own grocery habits and buying a bunch of junk.  When we shopped for the food bank on Saturday, I was careful to avoid junk food, but nearly everything I bought was on sale.  I bought mostly whole grains (oats, whole grain pasta, etc.), canned veggies and beans, natural peanut butter (with nothing added), etc.  I know that there are lots of coupons available for food that is relatively nutritious and fits the guidelines of what the food banks are looking for.  I’m planning to make this a monthly adventure with our son, and hopefully by combining coupons and sales I’ll be able to stretch our donation budget even further.

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18
Nov 2010

Overcoming Jealousy – Three Things That Worked For Me

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A few days ago, I got an email from a reader who wondered if I ever feel jealous of people who aren’t living a frugal lifestyle.  People who drive new cars and live in custom homes and have all the latest gadgets and gizmos.  Her question made me stop and think for a minute, but in all honesty, it has been a very long time (probably years) since I’ve felt jealous of anyone because of money or material possessions.  Here’s the gist of what I told her:

In the early years of our business, we made so little money that we were barely able to pay our mortgage, and not much else at all.  My husband and I had quit our jobs to pursue self-employment, so most of our friends were way ahead of us financially at the time, since they had stayed in their first careers.  They all had nicer houses and cars than we did, and money never seemed to be a problem for any of them.  All the while, I would sit and stare at the list of debts we had and wonder how in the world we were ever going to pay them off.

While we didn’t like having no money at all, neither of us minded being frugal – it sort of became second nature to us (to be fair, I was raised in a very frugal family, so it’s always been my nature to be thrifty).  We much preferred digging our way out of debt over buying a newer car or shopping for clothes.  It really helped that we were both on the same page as far as long term goals and spending habits.

What I’ve come to realize though as the years go by, is that the people I used to occasionally feel jealous of have their share of troubles too.  Marital issues, fertility struggles, and all the various curve balls that life throws at us now and then.  It’s just so hard to compare ourselves with other people, because we never really know exactly what they’re dealing with.  Who knows – they may be jealous of aspects of your life.

Several years ago, although I was always happy with my overall life, I did occasionally feel jealous of other peoples’ jewelery, cars, houses, appliances, etc.  I would also feel self-conscious if people saw me in my old Honda Civic, or shopping in a thrift store.  But I never feel that way anymore.  There are three major things that changed that for me.

First, my convictions about our responsibility for the environment became stronger, and started to shape nearly every aspect of my life.  I know that biking and walking are much better for the earth (and me!) than driving, so I hardly ever take my car out anymore.  I know that a smaller house is more energy efficient than a mansion, and our 1300 square foot house actually makes me feel guilty sometimes by how big it is – I would be wracked with guilt if we lived in a bigger place.  I know that buying stuff used is the most eco-friendly form of shopping, so anything else would make me feel irresponsible.  I know that making our son’s cloth diapers from recycled fabric was much better for the earth than buying disposables, so I was happy to do it.  We don’t own a dryer, but that’s something I’m proud of, because it fits with my beliefs about saving energy…. and on and on.  Basically, I no longer covet things that don’t fit with my “reduce, reuse, recycle” ideals.

The second big change happened just this past spring, when I came across blogs devoted to the idea of minimalism.  There are some amazing ones out there… Far Beyond The Stars, Rowdy Kittens, Becoming Minimalist, Miss Minimalist, Castles In The Air, and many more.  And there are all sorts of links on their blogs to other inspiring sites – it really is an awesome blog community.  Basically, I was feeling over-run with stuff, and I started to declutter.  I went looking online for inspiration, and came across these amazing stories of people who had literally gotten rid of nearly everything they owned in order to free themselves from material entrapment.  To say it was inspiring would be an understatement.  I ended up taking about five car loads of stuff to Goodwill, and I pretty much stopped shopping.  I still go to Goodwill every now and again when our son outgrows his boots or something like that, but I no longer shop for fun.  These days, if I compare myself to people, it’s people who have very little in the way of possessions, and rather than making me covet something new, it makes me want to go purge a closet.  Much better!

The third thing is that we got rid of our TV.  We’ve been without a TV now for a year and a half, and have only seen a handful of commercials since then.  I have no idea what the newest technology, cars, or clothes look like, because I’m not bombarded by commercials.  Instead, we use our laptop to watch stuff on Netflix, which is commercial-free.

I can honestly say that I no longer feel jealousy at all about money or material possessions.  That’s not to say that I never feel jealous… my dad has been on dialysis for years since an auto-immune disease destroyed his kidneys, and I sometimes feel jealous when friends talk about going on vacations with their parents or having their dads go hiking with them.  There are some things that we’ll always wish were different about our lives, that we can’t change at all.  But in terms of jealousy about money and possessions, I really feel like those three things have made my life green-eyed-monster-proof.

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