Found Money

I've been laid up with gout for the last couple days, with little to do but feel sorry for myself. I'm pretty good at that.

Yesterday, as a diversion, Brittan and I went through our budget with a fine tooth comb looking for places to cut and save. Lo and behold, we found quite a bit. Getting to it means some lifestyle changes, but it's all with a plan in mind.

We really want land. As in, we want a small hobby farm. While it's great growing vegetables here in town, it's not the same has being able to raise chickens and our own beef. We're not looking to become commercial farmers, I would never want to work that hard! But we want to expand the level of self sufficiency we've been discovering. We want to simplify our lifestyle and increase frugality.

To make that dream come true, we need to save as much as possible over the next 3 years. At that time, we plan to sell our house and go rural.

We are doing things like, changing where the thermostat setting is, altering our dining out habits and clothing purchases. We are going to cut out Brittan's cell phone since she no longer works outside the home. We were going to turn off our cable service, but that would oddly have increased our cost of phone and internet and end up costing us the same as WITH cable. We're dropping some of our marketing projects for IOU NO MORE. And we're going more frugal on our groceries. We even made big alterations to our vacation budget. We are serious.

This is something we want to do. It's about delayed gratification. Dave Ramsey would say we're going to "Live like no one else so that later on we can live like no one else."

We'll update you from time to time regarding our progress. Stay tuned.