The Buy (Almost) Nothing Year
I’m going minimalist to pay off my house in one year. Join me to transform your finances and your life.
Yesterday, Oct. 30, 2020, I sat down and projected my financial situation for the next month the way I do every payday, and I discovered two things:
- On my current trajectory, I could have $20,000 cash just sitting in my savings account by the end of November, and
- With some stringent but achievable adjustments in my spending, I could pay off my house by the end of next year.
For some readers, these goals will seem like not such a big deal. For others, these two goals will feel like near-insurmountable lifetime achievements — the stuff of hopes and dreams. For me, these goals represent a major step towards a dramatic life change I hope to make around age 40 in which I leave my steady nine-to-five job for a second act career.
We all start in different places — different families and socioeconomic backgrounds, different attitudes and approaches to money, different geographies, all of which influence what we can achieve and how difficult to the struggle will be. We start in different places, and that’s okay.
A little about where I’m starting
Personally: I grew up working poor in the western reaches of Chicagoland. My parents worked long hours — my father first and second shifts, my mother overnights — at manual labor jobs that paid poorly. We filed for bankruptcy when I was four, and some of my earliest memories are violent fights over money. I started working (babysitting, mostly) at 12. A real job (the library, then a bakery, then retail) at 14. An exceptionally bright student, I studied my way into a top-tier public university, then took up sex work (stripping, mostly) in the summers at 19. I grew up equating self-worth with net worth, a toxic understanding of myself and how the world works that followed me around until a divorce, complete mental breakdown, and ultimately, deep spiritual transformation at 31. (I’m writing a memoir about it.)
Financially: I work a nine-to-five government job that is occasionally (but not always) fulfilling, but very secure, even amid a pandemic, social unrest, and economic upheaval, where I earn about $68,000 annually (more than the average American, less than the average American household), and also contribute to a decent, fully funded pension fund, in which I will vest in another three years.
My home is a 120-year old, 1,000-sq. ft. workers cottage in a cool but economically depressed small Midwestern city, purchased for $56,000 at the bottom of the Great Recession. Owing to a cash-out refi (that made good economic sense) earlier this year, as of today, I owe $53,401.86. The mortgage is $420/mo. not including taxes and insurance. I’ve been house-hacking since before it was called house-hacking, and two roommates pay a combined $660 rent.
After a decade of paying down credit card debt only to rack it up again, my only debt aside from the mortgage is a student loan totaling about $86,000. I am praying that Public Service Loan Forgiveness comes through when I am eligible in another four years and four months. (But who’s counting?)
How about you? Maybe you’re in a better spot. Maybe worse. Maybe you haven’t even thought deeply about your financial situation and its implications for constructing a life of meaning.
I believe that everyone starts at different places in life, and that those early advantages, disadvantages and experiences matter. But I also believe that we owe it to ourselves and the world to take whatever hand we’ve been dealt and think deeply and creatively about how to use what we’ve got to build lives of meaning, substance, joy, and goodness.
This project is about more than buying less stuff, paying off a house, or any numerical goal you or I might have. It’s about constructing a different life.
The goal and the (rough) plan
My goal is to employ the tenets of minimalism to reduce my purchases to a bare-but-not-really-that-painful minimum, thereby saving enough to pay off my house by the end of 2021 and giving myself more freedom to craft a more meaningful life. (You’ll have to read all the way to the end to find out if I actually do it, because right now I don’t even know.)
I spend a lot of time thinking about the intersections of money, meaning, and spirituality, and lately have been influenced by modern minimalist thinkers like The Minimalists and Becoming Minimalist, though I’ve been into minimalist ideas since reading Your Money or Your Life more than a decade ago. Minimalism is not, by definition, living with just 100 possessions in a tiny house and wiping with reusable toilet paper (though you do you). Minimalism is being extra consciousness about how you craft your life and what you choose to bring into it.
Through this project, I hope to not just save a pile of cash, but bring you along with me, collectively deepening and transforming our relationships with money, ourselves, and the world in which we live.
Along the way, I’ll be sharing:
- Guidelines, so you can adapt them to your own situation and play along
- Progress and pitfalls, so you can learn from my mistakes
- Probably a few musings on life, money, and making meaning, drawn from my past history in sex work, retail, government, and religion
- Resources from other deep thinkers on minimalism, consumption, faith and humanity, for your further reading
Join in.
Want to participate in your own Buy (Almost) Nothing Year? It could be life transforming. Follow me to see more of how I do it (it’ll be a surprise for all of us), and drop a comment below with one concrete change you’ll be making in your buying habits over the next year.
Just wanna watch? Kinky, but cool. Hit that Follow button and cheer me on. I would be honored and emboldened by the encouragement.
