March 2004

Doggone Delay

Our annual extended trip to San Diego was abruptly postponed at the end of the 2003 due to our dog, Sophie, coming up lame around Christmas. Turns out she had a torn ligament in her left hind leg that required surgery and a subsequent extended recovery period. We decided that the best option was to simply delay our trip and make it a somewhat shorter spring visit instead of a winter retreat. The good news is that Sophie is recovering according to plan and after four months will be able to return to full activity.

Once again thanks to the hospitality of our simple living friend Jeff Saar, we'll be "living in the yurt" for most of our California stay and we're looking forward to doing some serious grandparenting with our grandson Erik, now two and one-half years old.

Financial Independence or Financial Self-Sufficiency?

As those of you who have read Getting a Life know, we declared a self-defined state of Financial Independence(FI) – our point of Enough -- in January 1994. Since then we’ve lived on income generated from savings. It’s been a great 10 years! In fact we’d venture to say that it’s been the best 10 years of our lives. With Your Money or Your Life principles embedded in our psyches, we’ve continued to live simply and have managed our financial life frugally. Most of our expenses have remained about the same over the years. Some, like clothing, gifts and haircare have even shrunk or disappeared! Just like Your Money or Your Life says, we’ve largely outsmarted inflation and until this year we’ve continued to live comfortably on the same $30K per year that we did back in ’94.

While doing our annual review this January however, we realized that we weren’t going to be able to make it on that amount without making some drastic cuts that would cause us to feel deprived or insecure. How did this situation come to be?

• Our health insurance premium continues to increase much more rapidly than we forecast. Although we were able to halve our premium by changing to an HMO (Group Health Co-operative) in 2002, that rate went up $1200 in 2003 and now another $1500 for 2004. And there is no end in sight to these escalating rates.

• Beginning in 1996, we’ve gradually changed to eating mostly organic food. We’ve mitigated the price differential by growing a large organic garden ourselves and by careful shopping but this choice has increased our grocery expense by several hundred dollars per year.

• In 2002 we chose to bring a dog into our family. Sophie has brought great joy into our lives and we’ve not regretted our decision, but she’s not free. In 2003, her expenses – including pills, food, treats, license, shots and vet bills – were almost $1000. And that’s not counting the cost of her recent surgery.

• With the birth of our grandson Erik in mid-2001, we decided to spend several weeks each year in Southern California in order to be involved grandparents. Again, we’ve managed to find ways to minimize our expenses for our annual jaunt south but there is an incremental increase of a few hundred dollars primarily in the area of food and transportation (our mileage doubled while in California last year for example.)

• In the summer of 2003 we lost our “bartered” deal for yoga classes when our studio closed. So far we’ve been unable to duplicate that arrangement and now have to pay for yoga classes if we want to keep up our practices.

Note that with the exception of the health insurance premiums, the other increases were the result of choices we’ve made. Our definition of what is “Enough” for us has changed based on decisions that we couldn’t predict 10 years ago.

Although we may no longer be “financially independent” in the sense that we can cover our living expenses totally from passive income, we are still financially self sufficient. By that I mean we have the ability to generate additional income through a variety of sources without re-entering the regular workplace. We can still be our own boss and choose the work we want to do. For example, Jacque has assisted making candy for a small business, worked as a election inspector, is making a custom quilt on consignment and assisted with cooking classes at the local natural foods market. David has started Heitmiller Handyman Service (see http://www.seanet.com/~gettingalife/ for more information) utilizing his lifetime of accumulated handyman skills to generate some additional income. We know exactly how much we need to meet our newly defined “Enough” number and when reached can stop working if we choose.

You may be asking yourself, “Why don’t these guys just write another book to generate additional income?” Well, we don’t rule out that option. Both of us have book ideas that we’ve kicked around for several years. But the book business is highly competitive and the financial rewards can be negligible after a lot of time and effort. If we do write other books, we’d rather not have to count on their financial success for income.

Finally, we see our current shortfall as a temporary situation. We have several other income streams that we can begin to tap into in a few years including social security, vested pensions from former employers and IRAs.

Although we’ve had to adjust our lives somewhat to handle our changing situation, financial self sufficiency still feels pretty darn good and allows us to maintain a flexible lifestyle.

News Briefs

• Study Groups- David continues to organize and facilitate Study Groups. Last fall the group completed another module from the Northwest Earth Institute called “Economic Globalization.” Participants thought this unit was the best one so far. The group took a break over the winter but will start up again in May.
• Jacque stays involved in the Knitter’s Guild, Northwest Needle Arts Guild, a meditation group and volunteers regularly at a local low-income housing unit gathering for elderly women. She’s taking a sabbatical from her Master Gardener work for 2004.
• “Advanced” Voluntary Simplicity Once a month we attend an “advanced” Voluntary Simplicity study group on Mercer Island, WA near Seattle. We still find the support and sharing that goes on in a group setting to be valuable. Members of this group have been on the simplicity path for a number of years and several are financially self-sufficient, working for themselves on a part-time basis while pursuing a wide variety of interests and supporting worthy causes.
• Recycling “Finds” Our city neighborhood is becoming denser as planners encourage “infilling” to mediate suburban sprawl. The effect is many older homes are being torn down to make way for multi-unit townhouses and condos. For frugal livers these teardowns can be a goldmine of re-usable building materials. Recently we purchased a nice solid-core wooden raised panel front door for $25. We also carted away several nice light fixtures for $5 each to replace our old “plain Jane” models. From the same site we also salvaged garden stones, stepping stones, a lavender plant and a rhododendron for free.

Book Recommendations

Here’s our current recommended reads:

I Am Wind You Are Fire: The Life and Work of Rumi by Annamarie Schimmel, Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992. Rumi scholar Annamarie Schimmel provides an in-depth analysis of the famous Sufi poet’s life and work. As a history buff, David appreciated the historical context that was provided, the evolution of Rumi’s work over his lifetime and a better understanding of the multi-faceted meanings of the mystic’s poetry.

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez, Penguin Books, 1992. If you’ve enjoyed Richard Rodriguez’s essay’s on PBS, you’ll appreciate his explorations and insights of Mexican-American life in this book. Using his own Mexican-American roots along with the experiences of others, Rodriguez delves into the differences of outlook between Protestant and Catholic, gay and straight and various ethnic groups that make up the California landscape. His sharp insights are thought provoking and illuminating.

Simplicity Lessons: A 12-step Guide to Living Simply by Linda Breen Pierce, Gallagher Press, 2003. For most people who decide to simplify their lives the process starts out as an inside job. As Linda Breen Pierce, author of Choosing Simplicity, describes it in her new book Simplicity Lessons: “many people are attracted to simplicity because of personal stresses in their lives-- too much work and debt, too little time and pleasure”. Read Joe Leeak’s complete review of this book.

Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle, New World Library, 2003. Tolle illuminates the fundamental elements of his teaching, addressing the needs of the modern seeker by drawing from all spiritual traditions. Stillness Speaks takes the form of 200 individual entries, organized into 10 topic clusters: Silence and stillness -- Beyond the thinking mind -- The egoic self -- The now -- Who you truly are -- Acceptance & surrender -- Nature -- Relationships -- Death & the eternal -- Suffering & the end of suffering.