today we’re tackling two topics: the question of how to define financial independence (and whether we’ve already reached that milestone without noticing), and sharing the contents of our already-full life bucket!
this weekend we visited mono lake, an ancient and super salty lake. all that salt means that swimmers in the lake float easily. which got us thinking: it’s easy to think that swimming is swimming, but it’s not. we can make swimming hard for ourselves or easy for ourselves, and the same goes for our finances.
our bloggy buddy steve, who writes think save retire, started the about series a few weeks back that all bloggers are invited to continue, and more recently wrote a series on his own blog that he dubbed the “our next life” series. we love the name, obviously, and thought — why not also make it a series that we all contribute to? so this is our take. and we’d love for you to write your own and link back! who’s in?
when we think about early retirement in the abstract, the visions we each have revolve around getting out into the big wide world. our individual visions differ in the where, but not much in the what, the how or the why.
the movement to live simply is all around us. minimalism. tiny houses. the push to reject consumerism. the urban homesteading movement. slow food. we’re all in on simple living, but that doesn’t mean we’re minimalists.
we like the thought of doing something different, and bucking tradition. it makes us feel like we’ve figured out some secret. but we’re still down with tradition in some pretty big ways.
Today we have a guest post from Eat the Financial Elephant on the weight of your decisions — both in finances, and in backpacking.
Today we’re guest posting over at Eat the Financial Elephant about our dirtbag dreams, and how reaching the summit of a mountain is a lot like reaching financial independence.
we’ve realized in recent years that the world is divided into people who think of themselves as campers, and those who don’t. and the latter group may find the very concept of camping intimidating for a whole host of reasons. we’re here to tell you non-campers that it’s much easier than you think, it’s not as dirty as you might imagine, there are ways to make it plenty comfortable, and you can really take camping to any level you want, starting simple and working up to more advanced forms.
