A simple living update

I started this blog about a year ago because my husband, Ryan, and I were starting to make some major life changes and I wanted to document them. In October, we sold our house in Groton, Massachusetts, and half our stuff, then packed up the rest and moved into a newly renovated 1,000-square-foot loft in an old mill city, Lowell.

Now, 10 months later, I'm doing a little check in. For starters, we are so happy about the choices we've made. Leaving homeownership and Groton behind was absolutely the right thing to do.

As I write this, I'm sitting in my apartment and looking out over the Merrimack River.

I see trees and rocks and men wading out into the water with fishing rods. I hear the river as it moves at a lazy pace. I love the sound of moving water.

We gave up a beautiful little New England town with rivers and meadows, but got this gorgeous river view and walk in exchange. We exchanged beauty for beauty. By moving to Lowell, we also got easy walking access to the restaurants and venues downtown which includes sense of community that we didn't feel in the suburbs.

I frequently walk into Lowell and hang at a local coffee shop or stop at my favorite wine store or grab a glass of sangria at the Italian cafe. With these trips comes great conversations with my neighbors and with the store owners - there's a real sense of community here. Not to mention, when we need to go to the "big" city, we can get there in just over 40 minutes.

One of the nicest things about our new lifestyle is that we have more time for each other and to do the things we love.

We haven't added the time savings up, but owning a house meant that every weekend in the summer there was something that we needed to do. Ryan was regularly mowing an acre of land and driving to the dump to unload the grass. In the winter, he was shoveling or snow-blowing a long driveway over and over. We had a house that was two times the size of our living space which meant more to make dirty and more to clean. Now, we can knock out in a deep cleaning of our new places in just a few hours.

Then there's the money savings...

I'll admit, we haven't saved as much as we had planned to. That was part of the motivation for moving was to do a better job saving. The temptation when you have more disposable income is to spend it. But we are on track now. Everything is in place to have a great year of saving - and that includes a mindset about money that we are working on.

If you look at our fixed expenses, they've come way down. Our rent is about $800 less than our mortgage + taxes were. Our electric bill is very modest. We don't have to pay for any upgrades or repairs to our place. It's painful to think how much we spent on our house, including a new furnace our last winter there (ouch!).

The area of food is one we are looking at now. We spend SO MUCH on food. And I don't just mean eating out. We try to be careful with that (could be more, I'm sure). It's also the cost of the way we are eating these days - mostly fruits and veggies - and we try to go organic as much as possible. We've got more work to do in that area, but we are on it!

We do spend money on travel. We like to take trips. We been staying super local since our trip to France last summer. We just went away for July 4th and have a trip to coming up next weekend. We are very conservative and always look for good deals. We also eat cheaper meals and do whatever we can to save while still having a great time. This area is a priority for us, but strive to do it responsibly.

We are driving a lot less these days too, which means more savings of money and time. I did work a 5-minute walk up the road until I was laid off in June. From October to June, I only drove on the weekends. Fortunately, I immediately got a new job and it's only a 12 minute drive away, so that still keeps driving to a minimum. We do pay more than two times as much for car insurance. Ouch!

We still have too much stuff.

For all we got rid of, we still have too much. I'm reading a book on living simply that I will blog on soon. It got me motivated to get rid of more stuff and even be more focused on NOT bringing in more stuff. I did a sweep yesterday and found several boxes worth of stuff that we do not use and do not need. It's all going to the Lowell Wish Project. The items are in great shape, we just don't need them and they are taking up space. They include pairs of shoes, a down comforter, a volleyball, an extra place setting of our dishes, and a huge bag of clothes.

The fact that we are getting rid of a bunch of perfectly good stuff challenges us to think hard about what we bring into the house going forward (another blog post, I suspect!).

Living simply is a great challenge and one that feels very worthwhile. 

I find that as I clear away the clutter, what I have left is what's most important. Life is short, I don't want to waste the time I have on things that don't really matter to me.

Dude, where's my car?

Seriously, dude. Where is my car? I don't know because I haven't driven it for like a week.

In my new more simple life (that I haven't written about since October 19) I don't drive much at all. I can easily go five or six days without driving a car. That is probably hard for most people to imagine (unless you live in a city with public transport). For the past 14 years of my life I've driven at least 35 minutes each way to get to my place of work. Now, I live a whopping five minute walk from work.

Let me first say that it is most excellent to have a five minute walking commute. I leave my house at 8:55 and I'm at work at 9:00. Actually most days I've been leaving closer to 8:30 and I'm at work early. That is certainly a new thing. I have extra time in the morning. I can either get up at 7 and get to work out, have a leisurely breakfast, then get ready, or, if I have a late night, I can sleep until 8 with plenty of time to get out the door.

And then there's that popular commodity called gasoline. No joke, I think that I filled my tank for the first time in a month this past weekend. One tank of gas per month. Really, I think it's going to be more like a half a tank per month or maybe even a fourth of a tank. We shall see. That's some serious savings. I'm estimating that over the next year, I will save about $2000 from NOT buying gas. Not to mention the great feeling of being green!

That's all the good stuff. Which is really very good.

But living so close to work and driving once every six days can create a few dilemmas. First, I feel like my universe is very, very, very small. I walk two blocks to work in the morning, work for 9-10 hours in a refurbished mill and then walk two blocks to my home, also a refurbished mill. I'm definitely seeing that I'm going to need for us to take a weekend away in Vermont, Maine, Boston or NYC every once in a while just to break the monotony up a bit.

The other thing is there are times that I have no idea where my car is. NO IDEA. There are options. It's either behind the building, in front, on a side street (two to choose from) or in what we refer to as the "wild west", an area near our mill that actually does resemble an old gutted town from the "wild west."

Right now my Matrix is out back. I saw it this morning when I left for work and I was like, “Oh, yeh, I have a car.” Out back is the best spot, because I see it when I leave or when I take the dog to pee. But when it's in the other areas, it's really easy to forget its whereabouts and have to wander around to find it. Not good when you are running late, as I sometimes am.

One last challenge is there have been a number of break-ins since people starting moving into this building. Someone figured out and told their friends that there were GPS systems to be had and for a while there, those window-busters had a great time. It's quieted down in recent days.

Now, I would have had no idea if my car had gotten broken into, because I didn't know where the heck it was. : )

Lesson of simple living: Be prepared to ask "Dude, where's my car?"