If you find value in this weekly letter, feel free to share with any friends and family you think might enjoy a dose of simplicity every Friday.
No preamble this week, your time is precious after all (especially on a weekend). Let’s dive straight in:
I simplified my finances
An obvious one, but probably the most important.
The average American owns:
There are car payments. Mortgages. Subscriptions. Your kids’ activities.
That’s a hell of a lot to manage.
Way back in the day when I started to practice minimalism, my first step was to get my spiraling finances under control which in the first instance was paying off credit card debt.
My husband and I were considering purchasing a second car, but we decided to see if we could live with one (newsflash, we could).
I created a spreadsheet with all my incomings and outgoings so I could take control of it all.
It started with something like 30 lines of outgoings. Everything from mortgage payments to credit card payments and all manner of things I was buying like clothes, household goods, subscriptions, cleaning, and car-related expenses.
Nowadays, I have 10 lines of outgoings. Simpler, and much easier to keep track of.
Essentially, I stripped my finances to the bare bones and re-built them around a simpler, easier system that didn’t have me tearing my hair out, wondering every month who I owed and how much.
Simplifying my finances got me out of debt, saved me money, and got me to a point where I can sleep at night.
It was by far the best simple living decision I ever made.
I stopped being so wasteful
Another couple of stats for you here, the average American household:
Throws away 40% of their food.
Produces 1704 pounds of waste per year (three times the global average).
The amount of waste I was producing had started to bother me. It was both from an environmental standpoint and also that every time I put out a garbage bag, I couldn’t help thinking about how much money I had spent in order to produce that waste.
So I became thriftier. I learned how to cook like a chef, eliminating almost all my food waste. I composted. I reused or repurposed whenever I could
I’m not a zero-waste kind of person. I’ve seen people try that lifestyle and kudos to them because it’s very hard to achieve and very time-consuming.
But I still wanted to reduced my waste to the bare minimum, and I did.
My bank balance grew and I was happy with the knowledge that I was not contributing more than I should to landfill.
I never upgraded my car
My husband comes from a line of petrolheads. He spent his teenage years working as an engineer on a racing team. His parents live and breathe cars.
Me? I couldn’t give a shit.
When husband bought his car back in 2007 for £11,500 ($15,000) I’m sure he didn’t think he would be owning it for 13 years. But as time went on, his love for cars dwindled and we decided it wasn’t worth buying another one. The one we had served us perfectly fine.
We owned that thing until 2020, only finally selling it because we were heading off on our permanent traveling adventure.
This car also doubled up as the delivery van for our wine store, because I always refused to spend money on a commercial vehicle.
We utilized every inch of it, getting our money’s worth, and then some.
And it saved us a buttload of cash too.
I created my own version of simple living
Everyone has an opinion about minimalism, and for those who aren’t keen on the movement, those opinions aren’t always positive.
You should like white walls. You shouldn’t have too much art. You should only like a certain aesthetic. You can’t own this, that, and the other.
I call bullshit.
Probably the most important simple living decision you can make is figuring out what simple living means to you, and to you alone.
I love cooking, for instance. Delving into my kitchen (during my pre-traveling years) you’d be forgiven for thinking I was a maximalist.
Cookbooks lined the shelves, I had numerous crockpots, jars, and jars of ingredients, specialist equipment like mandolins and Chinese clay cooking pots, and an outdoor pizza oven.
But every single piece of equipment, crockery, and everything else was in constant use. There was no excess, even though there was a lot of stuff.
Simple doesn’t have to mean sparse. Simple just means it makes sense to you.
After all, you’re the only one who has to live in the world you create. So you’d better be making decisions that work for you, not what someone else thinks should work for you.
Something to read
3 articles from my collection
3 of the best articles I’ve read this week
Why I decided to rent instead of buy - Jessica Rose Williams
Now That I’m a Dad, I Can Finally Be Honest About Overpopulation - Jared A. Brock
The Curse Of The Angry Ex-pat - Slow Train
I know I sound like a broken record here but as most of my work - and what I read - is hosted on Medium, you’ll need a subscription to read more than 3 articles a month.
The good news is that it’s only $5 a month to gain access to thousands of writers that will blow your mind.
If you sign up here, I’ll get a portion of your membership fee (at no extra cost to you) which helps keep this Substack nice and free.
As always, wishing y’all a happy weekend filled with whatever it is you’d like it to be filled with. Much love.