BLUF: The researching, acquiring, maintaining and disposing of stuff that wasn’t making us happier wasted valuable time and money. In becoming intentional with our spending and downsizing our stuff we’ve simplified our lives, taken back time and sped up our path to FI.
It feels really strange to think that at 40 years old we may have hit the peak of our accumulating things. It goes against the grain of everything in our consumerist US culture. The blueprint for the classic American dream is something along the lines of:
- Buy a new car
- Buy a house
- Fill house with stuff
- Upgrade your cars
- Get a bigger house
- Upgrade your stuff inside the house
- Buy a vacation house
- And on, and on, and on.
Always reaching for more stuff. However, a combination of learning about these people called minimalists, learning about FI principles and the 2020 pandemic really started to shift our mindset about what our American dream looked like.
A Change In Perspective
2020 really was an interesting year in the ManagingFI household. You see, I found the concept of FI at the end of 2019 and I dove down the rabbit hole of podcasts, YouTube videos and blog posts.
This video from Mr. Money Mustache was one of the most influential in making me step back and think about stuff and what would make me happy. It’s also the first video that I showed to Mrs. MFI about FI to help try to explain to her this “financial independence” craze that her husband was now obsessed with learning about.
In true MMM style it was an over the top PowerPoint showing how ridiculous the pursuit of more can be if you just keep scaling it up. This point hilariously shown below by illustrating that if a mansion, Benz, Bentley and butler makes you happy then even more of each will obviously make you happier!
Somewhere along the way I came across the concept of minimalism as well since some people simplify their lives massively to reduce expenses and reach FI.
A Vision of Our Future and Stuff
In the process of being exposed to all these different concepts and points of view I was starting to form a few different hypotheses:
- We don’t know where we want to retire to but know that it isn’t NY (the tax state). We should travel around and try living in different places when we’re FI.
- Spending money on stuff wasn’t making me happier and would make FI harder to reach.
- The researching, acquiring, maintaining and disposing of the same stuff that wasn’t making me happier takes up my time.
The idea of traveling around and living different places evolved over time. We’ve always loved to travel and in 2017 Mrs. MFI and I took a 2,000 mile RV road trip across the southwest in this sweet, sweet ride.
It was our first RV experience and it planted the seed that this method of exploration could be for us since we expect to have a dog. By 2019 that seed of future nomadic living via RV life was starting to grow. Mrs. MFI was getting more onboard and interested in the idea and we took a look at what was out there for RVs. We found out that you can spend a lot of money on an RV and get one that’s even fancier than our house.
I should point out that this nomadic vision is still many years off in our mind at this point since we didn’t really know what was possible for FI or early retirement. I was tracking our spending to some degree but I hadn’t learned about the 4% rule or figured out what our FI number was. We just knew that downsizing and hitting the road in some form was something of interest in the future. That was our general direction.
Questioning “The Stuff”
I’m not quite sure where I would fall on the scale between minimalist and …maximalist? when it comes to stuff. Mrs. MFI is pretty simple in her needs and has never been much of a shopper. I was never shy about spending money but I generally dislike clutter.
I’m not one to waste a lot of money on decorations, clothes or furniture but I did buy quite a few technology items and gadgets along the way. The most absurd example of this along the way was probably this 50″ plasma TV. I bought this on sale during black Friday in 2005 for $2,000. Yeah, absurd. On the plus side I still have that TV along with a ham of a dog 🤣.
During the 2020 pandemic as we were stuck inside I started to realize that the things around me were often not adding value to my life. On the contrary, many of these things were causing me to spend my precious life researching, buying, maintaining and eventually disposing of them.
Things like this DeWalt table saw. Purchased brand new for $500 and probably used 5 total times as you can see by the fact that it still looks brand new. How many hours did I spend researching which one to buy and where to buy it? How much time did I spend buying it, getting it home and putting it together? How many hours of work did I do to pay for it? All of that for it to spend 99% of it’s life sitting on the shelf in my garage. What a waste.
The Corvette
Over the years I had become a “car guy” enjoying autocross, drag racing and speed in general. I had a motorcycle for many years and after selling it I was itching for something fun. We were saving a fair amount of money at the time but pre-FI we didn’t have a goal with our money so buying this wasn’t an issue. I found a great 2009 C6 Corvette in New Jersey and drove down, bought it with cash and drove it back in one epic day.
I loved the car. It was a 6-speed manual with 430hp of head turning, pin you into your seat with acceleration, adrenaline inducing fun. It was a beautiful looking car that I probably bought as much for the “look what I have / look at me” factor as I did for the performance.
The corvette came into focus in 2020 as one thing that I both loved and hated at the same time. I was working from home 90%+ of the time so I was hardly driving period, let alone the Corvette. Mrs. MFI is not a flashy person and felt uncomfortable in it so we often didn’t take it together. If I wasn’t sure of the safety of the area that we were going to or I didn’t know the parking situation I wouldn’t take it for fear of scratches, dings or vandalism. Having 3 cars means 50% more inspections, oil changes, repairs, tires, brakes and car insurance premiums. I was fortunate to have a big enough garage to store it during the harsh NY winters but I had to play a game of car Tetris every spring and fall to do it.
The final straw was probably in the summer of 2020. I just got the car back from the shop and they forgot to do the oil change that I had asked them to do. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was just another thing to do that I didn’t want to deal with. It put the wheels in motion in my mind that this wasn’t worth it anymore. I decided that it was time to make a change and with that, I sold it shortly before my 40th birthday.
There are days when I miss having it of course. But, on the whole I do think that my life is happier for having sold it. I’ve reclaimed a lot of my time and money and simplified my life.
Everything Must Go! (Okay, not everything)
Mrs. MFI actually led the charge in downsizing our stuff long before 2020. She got interested in the idea of decluttering your life and embarked on a “40 bags in 40 days” challenge. The challenge is to do just that: remove 40 bags of “stuff” from your house in 40 days. On the surface it sounds absurd, but even in our modest 1,500 square foot house she was able to accomplish the feat.
In the summer of 2020 Mrs. MFI and I both hopped on the idea of taking a hard look at our stuff and asking ourselves a variety of questions:
- Why am I keeping this?
- Have I used this in the last year?
- Am I going to use this in the next year?
- Is holding onto this thing making my life better?
- If I get rid of it, could I rent or buy this again if needed?
- When we go mobile, would I keep this?
With that in mind, we start to sell and give away a variety of stuff. We sold things on eBay. We sold things on FaceBook marketplace. We gave things away using our local buy nothing group (which is fantastic if you’ve never heard of it). Things that couldn’t be sold were given away to Goodwill. We sold 40+ things for $3,200 not including the Corvette in 2020!
Letting go of stuff is actually a really hard thing to do mentally at first. I think the longer that you own something, the easier that it is to become attached to it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I might need this someday” and default to holding onto something that you haven’t touched in years.
For that reason we kept it simple and started with the very easiest stuff that we were the least attached to mentally. As we got into the process of letting go I felt momentum building and I was able to let go of things more easily. There’s still plenty of harder choices in the future as we get closer to downsizing out of house but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Impact Of Downsizing Our Lives
This shift in mindset from accumulation to downsizing and simplicity has really had a number of different benefits. Once you latch onto the idea that less is better, you become a lot more intentional with your spending. You really think about purchases and the necessity of them before bringing them into your life.
Time Saving
There are a number of ways where we’ve observed time savings from being more intentional about what we buy and also downsizing our stuff.
- Research Time: The less you buy, the less time you spend researching online. I’ve also become less concerned with finding “the best” of everything and just choosing something that’s good enough.
- Buying Time: The less you buy, the less time you spend and physically going to stores to buy, return and exchange things.
- Maintaining Time: The less you own, the less there is to break and be maintained. I’m sure I saved at least a day a year of time getting rid of the Corvette. This is especially true of electronic things that have to be configured or break easily and mechanical things that require regular maintenance.
- Upgrading Time: Once you “must” have something in your life it’s easy to either upgrade to the better thing or replacing it over time to keep up with trends. These days there’s no shortage of tech toys like this: computers, tablets, smart watches, Amazon Alexa/Google Home, smart home devices, vacuuming robots, electric cars, 4k TV’s and on and on and on. All of that takes lots of energy and time.
- Disposal Time: Eventually everything must go. Whether it goes in the trash, must be recycled, is sold or is given away it all takes time. Everything that you bring into your life you’ll eventually have to spend time and energy to do something with it.
Speeding Our Path To Fi
A funny thing happens when you become more intentional with your spending because you don’t want to accumulate extra stuff. Your spending goes down! As I detailed here, we’ve dropped our spending progressively through the years on various spending categories. This is especially true of my shopping category which was $5,700 in 2018 and is on track to be $2,000 in 2021. If spending goes down then obviously saving and investing can go up.
Additionally, if you have some sweet stuff to sell in downsizing then you’re going to generate additional money that can be invested. Selling the corvette and all that stuff allowed me to stuff a huge extra chunk of money into our taxable brokerage account. Thanks to the crazy bull market I have some substantial unrealized gains from that car.
Quite the financial swing when you factor in all the money saved in maintenance, insurance and depreciation. I saved 44% on my insurance with dropping the corvette being a big part of that.
Lower Stress
This one is harder to quantify but I find that having less clutter around the house is just more relaxing. It’s easier to clean. There’s less to be put away or moved around. It’s easier to find the things that you do care about.
When you have less stuff there’s less to break or be maintained so my to-do list of things on a recurring basis has dropped as well. No more car Tetris!
Action Steps:
- If you have a lot of clutter, consider doing a 40 bags in 40 days challenge. Challenges are a great way to get and keep you motivated.
- If you have things packed up in boxes from the last time that you moved, start there. If they aren’t sentimental, why are you keeping them?
- Walk around your house and look for things that you haven’t used in a year and don’t plan to use in the next year. Is this adding value to your life?
- For clothes, try the reverse hangar trick to see what things you haven’t worn in a year to consider getting rid of them.
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