Wanderlust: How to Live the Life of your Dreams
- Rachael Mora
- Jan 12, 2017
- 4 min read
Whew! Back from yet another amazing trip with the love of my life. I hear so often “How can you travel so much” and “where all this money is coming from?!? I assure you – we work hard to play hard. There’s no trust fund or crazy high paying job fueling our adventures – just good old fashioned extremely hard work. I’m going to break this into a few posts, starting with our own story, then providing some tips for how you can achieve the same thing; keep your eyes peeled for posts regarding how you can reduce expenses and bring in side income to fuel your dreams!
A lot of people seem to think like we just sort of fell into this life. We didn’t. We painstakingly evaluated what kind of life we wanted and planned out steps to get there. We’re always re-evaluating our expenses and looking for additional ways to save or new sources of income. We focus on enjoying the now, even when we’re working towards something else in order to ensure we’re not always looking for the next thing. I love today, even though I’m working towards tomorrow.
So… what did we do when we painstakingly evaluated what we wanted in life? What do we do to continue saving for what we want?
We designed and built a tiny house in my awesome Mom’s back yard to reduce our monthly expenses and sometimes rent that house on Airbnb for extra income (and camp at Mom’s on those nights). We both work full-time jobs that we love, and I sell LuLaRoe with my mom and sister on the side. Multiple income streams/side hustles are the answer to all our wanderlust & dreams.
We save a lot for retirement. We’re working hard now so that when we decide to start a family we can have some flexibility as far as how we want to balance time with our kids with the need to make money. We’re saving for land for an eventual house that we hope to build/sub-contract to reduce waste. Someday we’ll need to save for a car but for now the good old Yaris does just fine. Oh yea, that’s right, we also share a car to reduce expenses.
Our biggest consistent expense in life (outside of retirement savings) is our cellphone bill. Two smartphones and a ton of data doesn’t come cheap (Plus someone (okay, me :p) uses more than her fair share of data, so we upped our monthly allotment).
I’ve found that once you decrease the major expenses in your life as much as you can, the smaller ones just aren’t that big of a deal.* We go to dinner with friends. We buy the nice beer. We spoil our dogs. We maximize our vacation time from work to make every effort we can to be doing something new and exciting, creating memories and living our life to the fullest in the ways that are important to us. That takes some sacrifices, like living in a smaller home, camping on Mom’s futon to rent our home out (my mother is amazing but sometimes sleeping in your Mom’s house as a married couple with two dogs has its drawbacks :p), sharing one car, commuting literally everywhere with another human (lucky we like each other), cooking at home, no new game systems and exciting toys, no new laptop until it’s absolutely necessary to survival (we totally lucked out and won an old PC computer in a work drawing and that has bought us some time on the looming necessary computer purchase). There are a lot of things that other people do that we just don’t. But that’s what allows us to take trips together, which is something we love to do.
*Side note: I realize I come from a place of extreme luck and privilege to even be able to have all these jobs and to have been able to save the capital to take risks like building a tiny house and selling LuLaRoe. I’m not trying to come across like these opportunities are easy or do-able for everyone because I know that they aren’t. I’m just sharing our experience and what has worked for us, and hoping to help others make decisions that can help them achieve some of the same things if they want to.
I find it important to note that we rarely cut expenses that feel like sacrifices to us. We’ve made decisions that save us money but feel completely in our comfort zone and do-able for us. I wouldn’t recommend eating ramen noodles and drinking water if you love eating out. Identify the things that you don’t even realize you spend money on, and get rid of those. The likely scenario is they’re not bringing you joy, and you’ll be much happier if you can eliminate those and have more to focus on the things you love.
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