Paving

Did you notice in the photo I posted of our house yesterday that instead of a path of weeds like the last photo I posted, we now have a lovely paved path full of character? Well, I wouldn't have expected you to notice that. :-)

My clever DH has been at it again. Lately he's been getting quite a few little house projects done which is soooo exciting. :-) One of the benefits of him not working as much this year is having the time to get a few things done that have been waiting for some time now.


Here's a direct comparison for you. It does look a bit less green I guess but it'll save me having to weed the front path all the time (or have it looking scrappy). Hopefully it'll cut down a bit on the dirt and mud being dragged into the house as well.





Here is a close up of the path. The slate was collected from our other farm so the only cost we had was about $40 worth of concrete mix. DH bought himself a cheap concrete mixer to make a path out the back for the kids to ride on and it has well and truly paid for itself already (compared with paying someone to come in and do the work for us).


I love the character of the stone. I think it's so much more natural looking than paving bricks. Although we do intend to use bought paving bricks under our pergola sometime down the track as we want a more even finish.

This shows how the path goes around to the gate that DH made not that long ago. When the kids get home from school they walk along the path and through the gate to come in the back door.

I think he's intending to put some of this paving on the other side of the gate as well.

I feel so blessed to have a DH who can add some lovely touches to our home without it costing us a lot of money. There's a lot of satisfaction in those DIY projects as well.

Living the Dream

This is post number 5 in a series about my journey toward a simpler lifestyle. Not that there is much "simple" living going on during this particular time. LOL.

If you haven't read the first 4 posts, you might like to do that first:

Post 1: A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step
Post 2: Joe Dominguez
Post 3: Tracking Spending
Post 4: You Cannot Steer a Stationary Ship


For years, whenever we drove past this farm, DH and I would simultaneously turn to look up the driveway, wondering if we'd ever make the move to live here. Then we'd laugh about the fact that we'd both done the same thing and wonder out loud as to whether or not we'd ever build a house here. It was obviously a dream deep within our hearts to have our own home, here on our own farm.

At that time there was actually an old house sitting here. A VERY old house, built in post-war times with a hodge podge of materials and moved piece by piece from the other end of the farm to here. Some people were quite upset when we knocked it over but the reality was that it would have been VERY expensive to fix and even then we would have ended up with an old home, built with low quality materials and no 2 doors the same size. The last person to live here was quick to defend our decision, pointing out how bad the condition of the place was even when she'd lived there 20 years before. It wouldn't have been safe either - a puff of wind blew over two of the walls of the outside toilet and garage that we had been considering leaving standing. In the end the whole lot was dismantled, bulldozed and buried in a hole.

Once the house had been bulldozed and the site prepared for our transportable, it became quite apparent to those around us that something was happening here. We then got a lot of comments about what a beautiful spot this would be to live and that a lot of people had driven past and thought it was such a shame that no one lived here.

The way we deliberated for years over whether or not to build and move here, you'd think making that decision was going to be the hardest part of the process. :-) Unfortunately not. Once the decision was made to build and move, we had to make the choice between building a more solid brick home (on which there was a 3 year wait for builders at the time) or spend half the money and less than 12 months building a transportable home.

Then we had to decide on a design and a company that we wanted to purchase our home through. That was easier said than done as well. We narrowed it down to 2 companies but we hadn't come across a design that really suited what we wanted. In the end I sat down with an outline of the largest single lift home we could have and designed our own!!!

Designing our home was a bit of a surprise for me. Up until that point, where I would live had always been decided for me. My first flat I agreed to without having ever seen it (my parents viewed it on my behalf). Our first home as a married couple was a house owned by DH's parents in the town (rental was scarce so we didn't have any other options) and then when we moved into the farmhouse, it was expected that we would live there for at least the length of our working lives. Now, I had the opportunity to actually *choose* a home AND choose all of the colours for both inside and outside AND I got to draw up the design as well. It just wasn't something I'd been expecting to ever do (especially the design my own part).

Talk about overwhelming!!! So many decisions, so little time. There's nothing like drawing something on a piece of paper and hoping against hope that it's going to look alright when it's built! Too bad if it doesn't cos you're going to have to put up with it for a VERY long time. The pressure!!! Add on to that the fact that we didn't qualify for a regular home mortgage as we were placing the house on acreage - so we had a bit of rigaramole trying to work out finance as well.

Hang on a minute - what happened to our plan to simplify our lives? This sure doesn't feel all that simple!!! But it is all part of the bigger picture to get to where we want to be in life. I think it is a part of simple living to KNOW what you want or what will make you happy and to chase after that. I think many people in our society chase after money with an expectation that more money will make them happier. Whereas many who move down the path of Simple Living recognise that money alone ISN'T going to bring them happiness.

The farm didn't do all that well financially in the year leading up to signing the contracts for our house and we spent many times scratching our heads wondering if we were doing the right thing. It was something we prayed about a lot and God kept telling us to trust him. That can be easier said than done at times! :-)

Just as we were about to head over to Adelaide and sign the contract, our eldest son got sick and ended up in hospital. We had to postpone the contract signing and hope it didn't affect our quoted price. DS recovered and we got the contracts signed. Then came the fun part - looking at tiles and paint colours. The funniest thing about our tile choices was that we visited the tile place several times and had settled on what we like within the range that was covered by our quote. Then on the day we went to record all the selections, we took one final look and completely changed our minds in about 2 minutes. LOL. All those hours of looking and deliberating, only to spot a different tile that we hadn't spotted on our other visits and decide that that was the one we actually wanted.


This is a photo of the tile we ended up choosing as a border tile in our bathroom. The blue underneath is our tablecloth, not the colour of the wall. I have a spare tile floating around. :-) It is soooo much nicer than what we had chosen before so I'm really pleased we spotted it, even if it was last minute.

Most of our colours, we selected to be very neutral so that we could add colour or change colours with a few accessories. We have a lot of cream throughout the house. Even our ceilings are a cream colour rather than white. We had them painted a half strength of our wall colour. It gives the home a much softer feeling than white ceilings do. That was an idea that we copied from one of the display homes we looked at.

This is our bench top. What we had originally chosen was no longer being made by the time we chose our colours so we had to make a very fast decision on what to have. Somebody commented to me that it was a very "Jodi" colour. I wasn't sure if that was a compliment or not but I like it and I guess that's all that matters.

It took a bit of a balancing act but we wanted to build a *nice* home for a reasonable budget rather than a *cheap* home for the least amount of $$ spent. One of the misconceptions of simple living is that it involves living as cheaply as possible. For some people this is the case and for most people I think frugality is an important part of achieving the type of lifestyle they like. But even frugality is about *mindful* spending in my mind rather than simply *cheap* spending. We spent extra on insulation, a solar hot water service and a recycled water system. All of these things fit well with our values and reduce our consumption of water and electricity. We also made a few choices on extras to turn our house into a home. Colourbond for the roof and guttering etc, a rendered finish to give the house a more solid look and some decorative touches like a nicer wood trim and more decorative doors etc. And a spa bath in the bathroom. :-) Now we don't need to go away in order to have a retreat. Can only use it when we have enough water though - we don't have any piped water here, just our own stored rainwater.

The drama didn't end once all the colour decisions were made though. Just when DH was about to begin dismantling the old house, he had an accident where his motorbike hit a kangaroo and he broke a couple of ribs and his collarbone. Now how we were going to get done what needed to be done? Thankfully some friends came to the rescue and had a house dismantling day.

I'll never forget the day we travelled to Adelaide to have a look at our partially built house. I was so nervous I thought I was going to wet myself. LOL. What if we hated it? What then? We walked inside and there were building materials everwhere. Doors lying against walls, not yet installed.... well, you can imagine what a half built house would look like. That day I fell in love. I loved it so much I almost cried. Our house! Our home! MY creation! Our dream - in the flesh. It was real! It was happening. And I LOVED it!!! I think it's like when you hold your baby in your arms for the first time. Suddenly all the horrible moments of pregnancy and birth seem to vanish into thin air. That's how I felt about all the dramas we'd had leading up to that moment.

I look at our house now and wonder how on earth they drove that 500km on the back of a truck!!! It's kind of mind boggling really. But I saw it with my own eyes. In fact, I thought it was going to slip off the back of the truck as they manoevered it into our yard. Funnily enough (well actually it's only funny in hindsight because it didn't happen), the guy driving the truck thought he was going to lose it as well. You could actually see the whole house slip sideways as the truck tilted on an angle! My baby splattered all over the highway would NOT have been a happy sight. The trucking guys suggested that next time we might want to order a smaller house. DH just laughed - we weren't planning on there being a next time!!!

Because we were only moving 10km, we moved ourselves. It was quite a few weeks between when the house arrived and when we could actually move in. The painters came and rendered the outside for us. We needed the electrician to wire everything in and install our solar hot water service. The plumber had to come and install our recycled water system as well as connect the house to both that and our water supply (rainwater). Then the electrician had to return to wire up the recycled water system. Floor coverings needed to be laid. A makeshift fence had to be put up so our 1 year old didn't end up down on the highway. DH laid some roll-out lawn so the kids weren't playing in a dust bowl or mud bath while we attempted to grow lawn. The list of tasks seemed endless.

So while all this was going on. I was moving our gear in, 1 ute load full at a time (we had a 4-door ute as our family vehicle at that time). There is nothing like having to pack and cart all your belongings one load at a time to make you realise how much STUFF you have. We had only been living in the farmhouse for 5 years and although we added 2 children in that time, I hadn't realised how much STUFF we really had.

DH likes to remind me of the day I moved the contents of our pantry cupboard. We had been trying to use up as much of our food on hand as possible so that we didn't have to move it all. When it came to packing it all up - I still had 4 reasonable sized boxes of pantry stuff. When I put it in my pantry cupboard - it looked almost bare. I said to DH on that day, "I never ever want to fill this pantry up with food". I knew it would take a LOT of food to fill it. Guess what....said pantry cupboard is full!!!

One of my simple living goals has been to reduce the amount of stuff that we have. This house is smaller than where we were living and we have no alternate storage space (not even a shed) which I think has been a good thing for me. Any stuff we have is right in my way - it's a good way to encourage decluttering. I know I'm still a work in progress in this area and recently I've been trying to get back into regular decluttering efforts. I really LOVE the idea of having less STUFF. And all the time I'm decluttering, I find I'm much less inclined to go out and buy more stuff to add to our home.

The first night we slept here was awesome. We were living our dream! What a fantastic feeling!!! :-)

Next Instalment: A nervous breakdown? That wasn't part of the plan.....

More Op Shop Finds

Yesterday was the day to go back and pick up our butchered and cut up sheep. Naturally I jumped in with DH for the ride so I could revisit my favourite op shop. 2 hauls in as many weeks! :-) But it might be a while before I get back there again.



I wasn't sure how much I would find having only been in there less than 2 weeks ago. Being a small country town I wouldn't imagine their turnover is huge. Then again, visiting regularly is the way to snap up some really cool stuff (the kind of stuff that never hangs around long).



Here's what I came away with:



* pumpkin patch warm denim jacket in size 5. I've been mourning my 3 year old growing out of the size 3 jacket that I bought at a pumpkin patch clearance sale years ago so this was by far my most exciting find of the day! :-)



* plain denim jeans and a nike jumper for my 9 year old.



* a striped winter top with matching scarf for DD (should fit her next year).



* a Wiggles Anthony toy for DS. He has Murray so now he has 2. I paid $15 for Murray when I bought him so 50c for one in excellent condition was a bargain!!!



* a soft merino wool jumper in excellent condition.



* a pair of Adidas shorts for myself that feel like they're still brand new. Even better was finding them stashed amongst the kids stuff so they were only 50c!!!!



* black top and denim capri pants for me (also in kids section for 50c each).

Here's a photo of my "haul":

I spent a grand total of $7!!!! DS also picked up a toy car but he didn't want to stop playing with it long enough to add it to my photo. LOL. I don't think the lady charged me for it either as DS was having such a great time playing with it while I was browsing.

I did contemplate buying some knitting patterns they had there but I wasn't sure I was quite up to something too complicated. So I left them and I'll see how I go with the knitting before I get too carried away with buying patterns. I have to be careful as it's just as easy to pick up too many bargains and end up with a heap of unnecessary stuff cluttering up the house.

And on a note totally unrelated to op shopping - the first of the lettuces I planted 10 days ago have just popped out of the ground!!!!! Who would have thought there'd be so much excitement over a tiny little green shoot. LOL. I have planted some other seeds so hopefully we'll see them soon.

You Cannot Steer a Stationary Ship

This is part 4 in a series sharing my journey from mindless consumerism to a more simpler way of life. If you haven't already, you may like to read the first 3 parts before reading this one.

Part 1 : A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
Part 2: Joe Dominguez
Part 3: Tracking Spending

I mentioned in my last post that we haven't followed all of the "Your Money or Your Life" ideas and principles. What the author did was set aside as much of his income as he could into investments and cut his expenses right back. When the income from his investments was high enough to cover his low expenses, he quit working and continued to live for a number of years on that investment income. His theory is that even if you continue to work voluntarily - there is so much more enjoyment and freedom from not being paid for that work, that quality of life really improves dramatically. He also advocates taking on extra hours or jobs in the short term, to speed up the process.

While this all sounds good in theory, there were a few issues we had with putting it into practise. The biggest one being our children. With 1 at school, 1 preschooler and a baby, the last thing we needed was to take on more work in order to make our future more secure. Our kids weren't going to stay young long. We needed to have time to spend with them NOW.

As far as I can determine, Joe was a single man who was on a highish level of income to begin with. He also invested his money into long term government bonds which at the time promised a high set return. Returns on the same type of bonds are nowhere near as high now. He also spent at least part of his life living in a communal style living arrangement, making his living expenses cheaper. Kind of tricky to manage if you have a spouse and 3 children. :-)

With all these obstacles, is financial independence still a viable goal today? Yes, I think it can be. I know many people on the Simple Living Network have achieved it or are well on their way to achieving it. I don't believe it's the only way to go though. Like many things, we decided to take some of what we had learnt and apply that while pretty much discarding the rest.

To be honest, as I was reading through some of the posts on the Simple Living Network, trying to get my head around what Simple Living really meant, I was feeling more than a little overwhelmed. So much of what people were saying gave me such a sense of peace and yearning from within. I knew I was starting to scratch the surface of what I wanted in life. But getting from where I was to where I wanted to be became the more frustrating and overwhelming question!!!

At about this time I had what you might call another "ah ha" moment when the thought occurred to me that "you cannot steer a stationary ship". We had become almost paralysed by the conflict between how our life currently *was* and how we thought we wanted it to *be*. Being constantly swayed by the pull of others around us to continue to focus on building wealth and stuff didn't make it any easier. It was tempting to just give up at this point. But the yearnings for something other than what we had so far experienced in life wouldn't go away.

DH and I talked and decided that all we really needed to do was to take a single step away from the lifestyle that no longer seemed to suit us and toward where we thought we wanted to head. I guess in way I've returned again to where I started from - a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Rather than getting overwhelmed and frustrated by focusing on an unknown "end point", we instead needed to take it 1 step at a time and see how that went.

When you learn something new or different or decide to change direction in life somewhat, it's easy to want to jump into a fast car and zoom straight to the destination. In reality, life takes lots of twists and turns as it meanders along. The sad thing is that if we rush too quickly to where we think we want to go, we miss so much along the journey. What I'm slowly learning is that each and every step along the pathway of life is precious in and of itself. Each new day is a blessing. If we go too quickly we miss things that MATTER. :-)

So as we began to move, we started to find it became easier to move in the direction we wanted to head. In fact, as we took teeny tiny baby-steps toward a more simpler life, we found doors opened up that we'd never come across before. We believe that this was confirmation for us that we were heading in the direction God wanted us to go (at least for now anyway).

Our dream to get bigger and bigger in our farming enterprise and then retire at around 50 was replaced by the desire to have more time NOW. At this point in our life, DH was farming a reasonable amount of acres and working together with his father and his brother. On top of that he was working 2 off-farm enterprises with his brother. So there was always a HUGE list of things that needed doing and time was of a premium. With working 2 other blocks away from where we were living, as well as the contracting business, it felt like DH was rarely close to home.

The new dream was to live on the 1 farm that was ours (well we're still paying if off but it's in our name) and maybe even 1 day be able to just farm that 1 farm. It would be an incredibly small number of acres to live off as a family but it would be an AWESOME lifestyle. :-) Instead of getting bigger and bigger, what we really wanted to do was get smaller.

So, what is simple living really all about? How do you define it? Guess what - I'm still not sure I really know. Here's a quote from the homepage of www.simpleliving.net that for me sums it up reasonably well:

"Simple living -- aka voluntary simplicity -- has just about as many definitions as there are individuals who practice it. Simple living is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. Rather, it is about living an examined life -- one in which you have determined what is important, or "enough," for you, discarding the rest. "

I guess for us it's about being good stewards of what is in our care. Not just money but possessions, time, the environment, family and friends. It's about recognising that people are more important than THINGS. It's about enjoying plenty of stress free time with our children while they are in our care. It's about recognising how truly blessed we are in the country we live in and wanting to pass some of that blessing on to others who often struggle to have even their basic needs met. It's about having TIME to enjoy life rather than over-programming our timetable. It's about finding contentment with what we have rather than always wanting what we don't have. I'm sure it's about all those things and more but these are the things that come to mind as I'm typing this post.

Are we there yet? Not even close! :-) Has the story come to an end? Not yet......

Next Instalment: Dream number 1 fulfilled - the new house arrives!!!

Tracking Spending

This is part 3 in a series about my journey from mindful consumerism toward a more simpler lifestyle. If you haven't read part 1: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step or part 2: Joe Dominguez , you might like to take a moment to read those first. :-)

Before I get too far into what I want to share in this post, I do want to let you know that we haven't followed all of the recommendations that were part of the tape series by Joe Dominguez. Some of what he suggested didn't work well for what we wanted in life and I will come back to that. I feel that's it's important with anything you read or hear about, to take what works for you and feel free to discard the rest. I know there are some programs that need all the necessary steps taken in order to work. But we're all unique beings and I don't really believe that there is a "one size fits all" approach to how we live our lives. :-)

So yesterday I was talking about money = life energy and about maximum fulfillment for the minimum amount of dollars spent.

Once we'd made our way through to the end of the tape series, we were interested in the concept of tracking our spending that is suggested as an essential part of understanding our money and spending more in align with our values.

How you track your spending isn't really all that important. Some people prefer to use some kind of computer budgetting program, others use their own spreadsheet set-up and others prefer a more "non technological" approach. I fall into the last category. :-) It was simply too many steps for me to have to turn on the computer, open up a program and enter my figures. I also like the portability of having a hard copy.

Once again it was frugal aussies to the rescue and the same person who lent me the tapes attempted to explain to me via email how she set up her spending book. Up until this time, we had written a budget of sorts for pretty much every year of our marriage. But we'd not been tracking our spending very well so we never knew whether or not we were under or over budget. This made our budget almost useless.

In that first 6 months I had been keeping a record of what we were spending on groceries - more to give me an idea of whether or not we were sticking within our grocery budget and how much I was perhaps "saving" on our grocery spending. I was tracking our spending in an upward direction - every time we spent money, I'd add it on to the total and *hope* that at the end of the month the total was less than our budgetted amount.

With the idea of a spending book, you enter in your budgetted amount at the beginning of each pay period (we get paid monthly so it's nice and simple) and then each time you spend you SUBTRACT the total from that amount. What this means is that at a very quick glance you can see how much is LEFT in the budget to be allowed to spend. Then when the next pay period comes around, you ADD it to whatever you have left. It's similar in a lot of ways to the idea of putting cash into envelopes or bags but I found that method didn't work well for me as I may buy products across various budgetted categories in the one store. This way I can come home and sort out which parts of the receipt go into each particular category.

This particular system has worked well for me for a number of reasons. With my location to shops, some months I spend way more than other months. It means that in categories like clothing I can accumulate the budgetted amounts for several months and then do a big shop up. It also allows for things like school fees to sit in the *red* (where I overspend the allowed amount I write the figure in red) for most of the year as they're paid at the start of the year and the budget for them is divided up monthly. I find this doesn't matter as amounts like Christmas gifts are accumulating earlier in the year and not used until later - so the 2 offset each other.

To give you a bit of an idea, it looks something like this (I use an exercise book for mine):

At the top of each page I write the name of the category and the budgetted amount per month.

For example: Groceries: Fruit & Veg $180 per month

The page is then divided up into 3 lots of 3 columns (so a total of 9 columns).

I have 3 columns per entry which are DATE DETAILS AMT LEFT

Here are some of my actual entries. My budget for a year begins on the 1st February as that is when the farm budget begins and it ended up being easier to assess any changes to be made at the same time as DH is assessing his. You can start them whenever - I know many people use financial years for theirs.

1/2 Deposit $180.00
1/2 F/L $20.59 $159.41
6/2 F/L $4.99 $154.42
12/2 F/L $23.18 $131.24

(I'm having some trouble with formatting so I'm trying to use colours to represent each column - I hope you can make some sort of sense of what I'm trying to explain. If not, feel free to ask questions).

F/L is my shorthand for Foodland. For most of my groceries I include some kind of code for where it was bought in case I need to find the receipt at a later date. For categories like medical, gifts and clothing, I will record the item rather than the store as this gives me more information down the track should I need it. It's great if I'm buying gifts throughout the year and need to know roughly how much I've already spent per person for example.

This is the 3rd year I've been tracking our spending and the amount of freedom from stress it has brought has been incredible. Just knowing where we are in the budget at any particular time has been wonderful. Our spending awareness has increased dramatically and our overall spending has decreased.

Joe Dominguez recommends taking an extra step with these figures. He suggests working out a "real hourly wage" and then relating all of your spending to how many hours you've had to work in order to have that money to spend. This is where it all kind of ties together.

To work out your real hourly wage you take your total pay for a set period of time and subtract things like tax, travel expenses and any other work related expenses (extra clothing, food, childcare and any other costs you wouldn't have if you weren't working). You then divide this by the number of hours it takes you to do that job. Not just the number of hours worked but also lunch breaks and travel times, any additional work brought home etc etc etc.

As an example (these are made up figures by the way):

You earn $1000 per week

Tax $250
Travel costs $100
Clothing $10
After School Care $100

Your "amount in your pocket" earnt is $540

Now your week might be a 38 hour week but it takes you 1 hour each day to get to work, you have 1 hour a day in unpaid lunch breaks, spend 1/2 hour most nights thinking about work related issues and on average spend another 2 hours per week over and above the 38 hours you're paid finishing off or in conversations with the boss on your way out the door. That's a total of 52.5 hours you're spending each week in order to complete your 38 hour a week job.

So your real hourly wage is the amount of dollars that end up in your pocket divided by the actual number of hours it takes you to have your job.

Or $540 divided by 52.5 If my calculations are correct your real hourly wage would be $10.28 an hour.

Now you apply this real hourly wage to your spending decisions. Let's round it down to $10 to make it easier. If you want to go out for a meal that costs you $100 - then it's costing you 10 hours of your "life energy"(converting $ to life energy) to do that. What you then need to decide is whether or not it is worth it to you to go out for that meal or not. Some people would say yes, others would decide they'd rather throw together a quick pasta meal for $10 and effectively be able to have the other 9 hours of working time to themselves.

This exercise isn't designed to make you stress out about every dollar you spend. Quite the opposite in fact. It's designed to help you make decisions and spend your money on things that are really important to you. That way - you're getting the most value for each dollar you spend.

I guess in a way at this point we've come a full circle from that first step where we decided that we'd try and *save* $5000 from our budget rather than earn an extra $5000. This was what worked for us (and with my paltry $2 an hour real hourly wage it was an easy decision).

I was so excited by the "ah ha" moments that we were having that I decided to do an internet search on Joe Dominguez in the hope of learning more about him and his ideas. That search led me to the Simple Living Network run by a group of people committed to sharing ideas to do with Simple Living. At this point I'd not heard of "Simple Living" so my huge learning curve wasn't even close to being over. :-)

Next Instalment: what I learnt about Simple Living

Joe Dominguez

This is the second post in a series outlining our journey away from excessive consumerism and wealth creation to a more "simpler" life. If you haven't already read "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", you might like to read that first. You should be able to scroll down and find it (there is a post in between that and this one).

So, we've jumped onto the "frugal bandwagon" and discovered that it's not such a bad lifestyle after all. Plenty of room for improvement of course - I'm not sure if I'll ever stop learning new ideas. And I certainly can't claim that I'm frugal all of the time!

I think it was toward the end of 2004 that one of the girls from the Frugal Aussies group suggested that I might enjoy the content on a set of tapes she owned. She offered to send them to me on loan. I then sent them on to another person within our group and so on. I wasn't really sure what I was going to find in listening to the tapes but so far we'd been happy with the twist our life journey was taking so I was quite excited at the prospect of being challenged in relation to our attitude toward money. The tape set was called Transforming Your Relationship with Money or something along those lines. The speaker on the tapes was a man named Joe Dominguez (fingers crossed I've spelt his name right). I later found out that a book by the same person "Your Money or Your Life" is basically the same content.

I started listening to the tapes while I was doing the ironing. That didn't work out so well in the end. I was so busy stopping to take notes that not much ironing got done! LOL. I've just dug out those notes - I think a bit of a review is always a good thing. See, sharing this with you is helping me! :-) There is a LOT of material in this course and I won't even try to go through it all. But I will say it impacted me in many ways. I asked my DH to listen to the tapes as well and he too had a lot of "ah ha" moments. What I want to share with you are a couple of parts of this course that really helped change the way my DH and I started to view money and wealth in general.

One of the most significant things that stood out in my mind was the definition of money. How would you define money? I was thinking of it as a way to exchange goods and services. However, he challenges this idea and states that "money is something you'll exchange your life energy for". Life energy is a finite thing - we all have X number of hours in the day (although none of us know how many days we'll have). It's about recognising that when we go out to work to earn money, we're using up some of our life energy to do that. Once we recognise this fact, it's easier to make a more conscious decision about whether certain purchases are worthwhile or not - based on the fact that the money to buy them *cost* us a certain amount of our life energy. The great thing I love about this concept is that there are no right or wrong answers - what matters to one person may not matter to another and that's okay. There's no restriction on what you do or don't spend your money on - only the suggestion that you do so consciously rather than automatically.

The whole concept of money = life energy was a completely foreign one to me and it did take me a while to get my head around it. But it does make sense. You could argue that this gives a higher weight to the importance of a passive income (a passive income being something you earn from investments that doesn't necessarily require a lot of time from you). That is certainly a part of Joe's overall plan and I'll come back to that in a later post.

The other concept that really stood out to both DH and I was the spending vs fulfillment curve. In a nutshell it is a concept that suggests that not all dollars spent are equal when it comes to how much fulfillment/enjoyment we receive in return for that spending.

To give you an example. Once upon a time, it was a treat to go to the roadhouse and buy hot chips for lunch on our way home from church. As things got a little bit more comfortable finance wise, we started to do this every Sunday. After a while we got bored with just hot chips and so we started adding other items to our lunch to increase the *fun factor*. What began as a $5 outing grew to $20 (still providing the same level of enjoyment but now costing us 4 times the money) and on it grew from there. Eventually it got to the point where no amount of money spent could continue to offer us the same level of enjoyment that our original $5 had bought us. Spending more money hadn't increased our fulfillment - if anything it ended up decreasing it. That's just one example of many trying to explain to you how the more money you spend, the more you need to spend in order to get the same level of fulfilment.

His point is that when you first start out on your own with your own money - you get quite a bit of fulfilment from purchasing even the most basic of needs. As you get into more *wants*, the amount of enjoyment/fulfillment you receive per dollar starts to slow down. So you need to spend more and more money in an effort to gain that fulfillment. You can even reach a point where spending more money starts to decrease your sense of fulfillment (my own theory - that this is based on a certain amount of frustration in the pursuit of happiness and perhaps even a subconscious realisation that money isn't going to buy you happiness). He goes on to explain that if you can find your point of enough - you find your point of minimum spend for maximum fulfillment.

Have I totally confused you yet? LOL. I'm not finding it easy to explain what I mean without writing a complete novel here. If what I've shared so far has tweaked your interest a little, you might like to try and get hold of Joe's book "Your Money or Your Life" and read it for yourself.

I do have a little more I'd like to share with you on what we learnt through listening to Joe's tapes. I haven't quite made it to the "Simple Living" part that I was going to today. But I will get there! :-)

Next Instalment: More on Joe Dominguez - How Joe's definition of money can help you find your point of "enough" or "maximum fulfillment for minimum spend".

Frugal Subversive Award

Well I must admit it came as more than a little surprise to wake up this morning to a message from Robin letting me know she'd nominated me for a Frugal Subversive Award that was begun by Rhonda Jean . So thank you very much Robin and also Rhonda Jean for starting the award in an effort to raise awareness. :-)

Now it's my turn to pass on the award to 3 bloggers who I think are deserving of the award. I've never done anything like this before so I have no idea if there are specific "do's and don'ts". Of course, the good thing about that is that I can do whatever I like - oblivious to any so called "rules". LOL.

Firstly I would like to nominate Rhonda Jean . Can I do that? Guess I just did. :-) Specifically because at the moment Rhonda has been blogging about green cleaning products. I think that changing what you use to clean is a great and easy way to cut costs, help the environment AND improve the health of your family. I'm a BIG advocate of basic, green, cleaning so thanks Rhonda Jean for showing others how they can make small changes that result in BIG results.

Secondly I would like to nominate Emma . I suspect this might come as quite a big shock to Emma but she is someone I admire hugely. Emma is raising 2 boys without a huge income and doing her best to make the most of her situation - to get herself out of debt and move toward other savings goals. Just like the rest of us, she has times when she succeeds and times when life kind of "gets in the way". That's what I love about the blogworld - real people sharing what they're doing and how they're trying to do better, one step at a time. I've never heard her use her situation as an excuse not to keep striving toward her goals. To me she's living proof that it's "not how much you earn but what you do with what you have" that makes a difference.

Emma has also been trying to assist me with my limited computer savvy-ness - to post links to my blog. Fingers crossed that this time I've finally got it sussed. Thanks Emma.

My third nomination goes to Lisa . I've been following Lisa's meanderings through some of the Adelaide markets with close attention. :-) It's inspired me to do some market shopping of my own when I get the chance. When we go to Adelaide I have limited time so I'm using her experiences to narrow down where I might visit when we're there next. Thanks Lisa. She also has some amazing recipes on her blog - including the most awesome stack of fluffy pancakes which I really must get the recipe for! :-)

You know there are so many blogs out there with interesting things to read on them. It's not easy to pick 3. But if you're not already a regular reader of the above blogs, I hope you take the time to visit them. :-) I suppose I should now go and let them know that I've nominated them!


And here is a copy of the original notes that go with the award so you know what to do next:

If you are given an award and want to take part in this meme, you can in turn select three other bloggers who have inspired you to be a frugal subversive. Passing the rules on with the award will make it easier for everyone to participate. Congratulations on the award. I hope it helps you spread awareness near and far.

MEME RULES

1. When you are tagged, write a post with links to three blogs who have inspired you with their frugal creativity or innovation.

2. In your post, please link back to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme and save the award graphic.

3. Leave a comment or message for the bloggers you’re tagging, so they they know they're received the award.

4. Display the Frugal Subversive Award badge to identify your blog as part of the movement that is turning its back on consumerism at any cost.