In which we discover that money can buy happiness, sort of….

’m quite sure happiness is a theme I will be revisiting since improving the happiness of the exceptional Mr. W. and myself is paramount to Project Simplicity.   I’m very curious about what makes people happy, not just myself, but what generally makes people describe themselves as happy. 

Here is kind of an interesting article on wealth and happiness from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/business/08consume.html?_r=3

I doubt I could be as dedicated as the woman in the story, but I do think that the stuff she’s done is amazing.  What interests me the most about the piece has to do with the idea that people get the most “happiness” from experiences rather than from objects.

I know this to be true in my own life and indeed if you look much of the stuff in my house you will find that lots of it is essentially experience related.  I’ve got loads of books, DVDs, a few games, and most of the animals are completely related to experience.   One of the things that I think will be a focus in our project and replacing as much of the stuff as we can with experiences.  How we are going to manage this is no doubt going to result in a load of new entries.

Now here is a gratuitous photo of me being all happy with my doggy.

In which we start to tackle monetary issues (part one of 8 zillion)

For all of our unmistakably brilliant marriage the amazing Mr. W. has handled our finances, recently however it has started to make him feel tense in a way that scares small children and animals so he handed the chore over to me.   To my mind this is, of course, an excellent move, in part because I am not stressed about these things and in part because I could use a new project and I actually have the time to devote one, especially if it results in a better life for us.

While we’ve never been wealthy (to my mind) it is true that, particularly when we were both working, we have generally had a fair amount of cash to ‘play’ with.   For example we don’t worry about spending money eating out or worry much about buying new toys.  I buy the best food for us (and for the pets) and we travel regularly.  It would be incorrect to say we don’t think about these things, we do, but they are not out of reach for us and they definitely ratchet up our expenses. 

Now I’m trying to come up with some strategies for reducing our expenses that will help bring them down without bringing us down.  First off I immediately moved our records into the Mac version of Quicken, this allows me to track what we actually spend our money on.  I needed two months of “normal” data to get a feeling for our spending habits.  My plan is to slowly bring down our expenditure by a bit a month.  Now I’m trying to find ways to help us achieve the reductions.

My most recent idea is that we get a star for any day we don’t spend money and for a day when we both don’t spend money we get a gold star.   The question is what do our stars MEAN at the end?  I doubt it will be enough just to get a star, after all I have a whole box of them and can give them all to myself.  No, it should equal something in the Real World.  One of the things that we spend money on is media.  I’m thinking that who ever has the most stars at the end of the month gets an extra 25.00 towards entertainment/media since that is one of our most severely budgeted areas. I’m at a slight disadvantage in this since I do most of the grocery shopping and errands but since Mr. W. normally eats out when he travels I figure that will even out over a whole month.   

 I also think we should get something jointly for days when neither of us spend any money.  Like we get to put 50.00 into a travel fund for every five days we don’t spend.   Or something like this

Of course you, dear perspicacious reader can the flaw in this plan!  It doesn’t actually reward spending less; it just rewards doing the spending on fewer days.  True my friend, too true.  What I’m hoping is that if we try to condense our spending to fewer days that we will spend less impulsively (since it will take more planning), and that we will use somewhat less fuel (since errands will be combined). 

I will let you know how it works.  

A time of change and some move on....

First off, it is worth saying that from this point on, the ingenious Mr. W. who is quite a photography whiz has taken most of the photos you will see. 

While we were in the process of readying the house for sale I got to work on figuring out what animals we would keep and generally coming up with a plan for those that we could not keep.  I take pet ownership pretty seriously, feeling that once in my care I’ve accepted an obligation.  The first order of business was goats.  Now, the reason I have goats is because many moons ago the W’s lived in Virginia, a place absolutely crawling with poison ivy.  It became readily apparent that I’m one of those people with a very severe reaction to even the tiniest amount of ivy but since we had a little farm we really needed a way to clean it up so I wasn’t constantly coming into contact with the toxic stuff.  So we came to having goats.

Fast forward 8 years and we still have goats, only one of the originals (Ms. Sumac) and three that were obtained to keep her company.  Since Ms. Sumac and her friend Roberta are older and (as far as I can imagine) not really useful to anyone, I decided we should keep them.  Goats live to maybe 14 or 15 and both of these ladies are around 9 or 10.  The other two goats are a different story, they are Cashmere does and while not especially friendly they do produce good fiber and are young enough to breed.  I turned to my friend the Internet and after a lot of searching I found this company:

http://www.goatseatweeds.com/

This turned out wonderfully – Lani, who owns the company, takes her herd of up to 1000 goats all around the west and southwest having them graze weeds from areas like parks!  I ask you, is there a better job anywhere for a goat?  Of course not!  So, my girls, Sticker and Thorn went off to become professional weed eaters and we got the unexpected benefit of having our remaining old lady goats settle down peaceably.  Indeed I think they are happier as two old spinster goats than as part of a herd.   

In which the first wisps of a plan are conceived.

We started our plan by targeting the most obvious causes of complexity.

We require tenants to make our mortgage payment while living in the style to which we have become accustomed.

Although I’m at loath to admit it, we might, possibly, have more animals that we, strictly speaking, need.

We then came up with a basic plan to address these issues:  Sell the house and buy cheaper house (or rent) and re-home some of the animals.

Neither of these were easy choices, in fact I wrote some angsty stuff about the subject here:

http://personalbrainforage.blogspot.com/2010/01/houses.html

and here:

http://personalbrainforage.blogspot.com/2010/01/meanwhile.html

Suffice to say we did eventually decide on the above course of action.  From this then came The Three Months of Hell in which we asked our tenants to leave, wept with relief and then systematically removed everything they had cootified and replaced it with fresh new uncootied things.

Paradoxically, in order to get to the point where we can simplify by selling the house we had to devote an immense amount of both time and money into re-painting/re-carpeting/re-tiling and cleaning our walkout basement.  Then we had to do the more normal stuff you do when trying to sell a house, such as have the north wall replaced (what do you mean you didn’t do that?) have a consultant come and tell us to put most of our crap in boxes and hide it (she then replaced it with her own crap which consists mainly of silk plants and tat), rearrange our furniture and buy thing like “show towels” and fancy bedding.  We also hired a cleaning service to come weekly and a lawn service to see if the sad patchy thing we creatively call “a lawn” could be revived.  

The last thing we did (since we have phenomenal views) is to have professional window cleaners come and clean every window in the house.  This turned into quite the cosmic joke when two weeks later we had a huge hail storm that cause mud to splash about 12 feet up the side of house so that I had to go hose everything, including the formerly sparkly windows, down. 

From the time we decided to ask the tenants to leave to the time the house was properly listed:  107 days. 

You can see the listing here if you have a mind to do so:

http://tour.circlepix.com/tour/Nitro/loadingPage.htm?tourId=775332

In which I introduce the main characters and flesh out the setting

Last year the enigmatic Mr. W. and I looked around our life and decided that it had become too complex to be fun and too expensive to maintain.  Since then we have been slowing inching back the complexity of our lives hoping to get to a place where we can enjoy a certain level of freedom.

To be clear about this, our life is pretty complicated.  We live on a small farm just north east of Denver Colorado and much of the complexity is related to the farm itself.   Farms have a tendency to accumulate animals, things, and Stuff That Has To Be Done.  Naturally all these things are also expensive, or at least they are en masse.   Let this be a warning to people who think they are going to move to the country to make life simpler – this is not true.  Life in the country has many perfectly excellent rewards, but simplicity is not among them. 

Let’s review where we started with this project.  First off we have a house, not a huge house by any means.

We live in only the upstairs of the house (about 1600 square feet) and usually rent out the walkout basement.  This helps pay the mortgage but it also means living in very close proximity to people that you may or may not like.  Our last bunch of tenants nearly drove me mad so one of the things we want to do to simplify is to get a smaller house that does not require us to have tenants to make the mortgage payment. 

The house sits on about 10 acres and is zoned for all kinds of critters.  At the time we decided to simplify it was home to 4 horses (3 of them mine and one belonging to my sister), 4 goats, a small flock of chickens, 3 tenants, Mr. W. and myself, 4 indoor cats, and two dogs.   Because Mr. W. has no interest in the farmish side of living here we also hire a ranch hand to help out a few hours a week. 

I stay home and mind the farm (long story) and Mr. W., does work as a consultant traveling to other cities roughly every other week.  He makes an extremely nice living doing this however we have found that are closer to “living from paycheck to paycheck” than we would like.  Additionally Mr. W. does not want to have to keep doing this forever but would rather be able to choose his work.

To sum up the situation, we tend to complexity and would like to move to simplicity.  The goal is to create a life that is minimally expensive while meeting our needs and which takes a minimum of our time to conduct.  Now how are we going to achieve that?  

Introducing yours truly and the dashing hero of simplicity, Mr. W.

Here on Project Simplify I’m going to write out the ongoing efforts of my beloved ‘Mr. W. and myself’ to turn our lives from a complicated mess to a simpler mess. This is a pretty long project and I thought that documenting it might help somebody else who is trying to make the same kinds of life changes.  I’ll try to keep each post about one specific issue and I’ll tag them in an effort to make them easier to find.  This will also supply us with a fantastic record of our achievements so that when we feel like it is going slowly or we feel that we are not making progress we can look back over what we’ve done so far.   Here is an awesome little movie of us made by our friend who is not called Robert.