Tag: Minimalism

Welcoming the holiday season

I always love the first day of November. For me, it marks the beginning of the holiday season (sorry Halloween!). There are only a little over sixty days left to the year, and you start to feel that magnetic pull towards the new beginning promised by the following year. The holidays hold a different meaning for different people. Many look forward to gatherings over candlelit dinners surrounded by loved ones and an assortment of delectable dishes. It becomes more of a nightly occurrence compared to the rest of the year. Some envision twinkly lights hung on decks and shrubs and trees, peeking out of dark windows and above fiery fireplaces. The holiday music comes on the radio, and everywhere else, which could be a good or bad thing, depending. The wish lists are being placed in stockings, the stores are being filled with toys, and the malls are being filled with people, gathering to see the tallest of Christmas trees be lighted for the first time. The parties and celebrations may start snowballing, passing the days by until suddenly, you’re screaming at the top of your lungs, “Happy New Year!” The holiday season is fleetingly beautiful and joyous, and is undoubtedly my favorite time of the year.

This has always been the holiday season that I knew growing up. But now that I am a little older, I try to hold on to the days a little longer, and anticipated November and December happenings start to shift towards other things. Quiet mornings with my husband and slow risings out of a comfortable bed. Blanketed humans with gloved hands, holding warm mugs, both on couches and walking the streets. Turning the Christmas music off to hold conversations or listen to a crackling fire. Focusing on being present, rather than buying presents. Writing down a list of things I’m thankful for and reading it aloud on Thanksgiving day instead of placing it in a stocking. Looking at old photo albums with my parents, rather than taking another photo with Santa.  Counterintuitively making slowing down a priority, and creating space a mission.

Admittedly, I will still continue to do traditional holiday things. But the hope is that it doesn’t consume my season with traditional activities for the sake of doing traditional activities. With only a smattering of dates left for the year, these few months, days, and hours really matter. So let’s find the space to fill them with what matters most.

 

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About minimalism and letting go.

For the past few weeks, I have fallen into the trap (again) that everyone befalls at multiple points in their lives. The trap of putting living life on hold and falling into the endless cycle of worrying about money. Money is a tricky thing. It enters your mind and takes root, and it requires great force not to allow the roots to delve deeper and deeper into your body and eventually get under your skin. And while money was very easy for me to dismiss in terms of buying things and acquiring social status symbols, it nearly all together consumed me when it became the one thing holding me back from what I thought I wanted: Freedom. After all, I am human. So this blog post is a recap of what ensued the past few weeks, where-in I catapulted from practicing minimalism, to searching for financial independence, and then returning to minimalism and letting the rest go. One step forward, two steps back, and onward with the cycles of everyday life.

I’ve written endlessly about my transition from being a typical compulsive consumer representative of middle class America to being a loosely defined minimalist. A common misconception people have about minimalism is that it requires you to get rid of all your stuff and live with very little. I like to embrace the concept of getting rid of the excess stuff, and keeping the things that hold meaning or things that you love. Our home is far from bare, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job stripping it of its excesses. If it doesn’t pull at our heart strings, it is donated for someone else who could love it more. What you learn from minimalism is that it is a constant reassessment of your life, and as you rid yourself more and more of the excesses, it becomes easier and easier to realize that there are far greater and important things in life than just stuff.

So I entered a stage where I was reassessing other aspects of my life, and I became interested in a community practicing financial independence. As I dug deeper into the specs of the FI community, I was enamored by this idea of financial freedom, and the one thing holding me back from said freedom, is an already previously mentioned and endlessly bemoaned massive student loan debt hovering above our heads. Now we’ve done a great job controlling this student loan debt, decreasing it from our original 25 year plan, to 10 years, and currently, we are on track for 8 years of pay back. Not bad for something double the amount of a mortgage for a five bedroom mansion in other parts of the United States. But I digress. In the past few weeks, this student loan debt had the upper hand and did an equally great job controlling me.

I came upon the realization that we could save a year and a half of freedom by downsizing our current home. When Mike and I first talked about moving in together, we dreamed about living in a loft. When we started to look after I graduated from dental school, we miraculously found a space immediately, located in Orange County approximately equidistant from our two jobs. (“Approximately” because he will adamantly insist that his is a few miles farther than mine. Fair enough.) We fell in love with it immediately, and there was no going back. I don’t even think I thought through the pros and cons. The heart knows what it wants, I guess, and there were no doubts in our minds that we could be happy here. We happened to be the first people to respond to the advertisement and even though there were other applicants, we were given the first opportunity to snag the space. Snag we did.

We’ve been living in this loft for almost a year and a half, and it has been our dream space. 1600 square feet of space and 3 floors for a couple seem excessive, but it’s what we love. We are introverted and usually spend our time on different floors of the house, chasing our own interests and hobbies. We come together on the second floor to watch football or play board games, and we love to host parties and dinners for close friends and family. We often joke that we are so lucky to come home to a vacation home every night. So we’ve been practicing minimalism, a perfect example to show that even though a massive loft is a thing, and it may seem excessive for two, there is forgiveness in the practice because it allows you to keep those that you love. It’s not about getting rid of as much stuff as humanly possible, because it is inhumane and impossible to lead a happy life with deprivation from the actual components that make you happy.

But a life of deprivation is what I started to consider. I found that we could save about $1000/month if we downsized our home, which multiplied by twelve months per year, then extrapolated out to five years, and we are free at age thirty-four instead of thirty-six. I became obsessed about searching for a space that would fit our needs and cut the costs. I would wake up every morning and refresh the Zillow page that was left open on my computer screen from the night before. I was prowling the internet for deals, and killing myself slowly with the stress. I eventually found two contenders that I liked, given the circumstances. One was a vaulted ceiling loft with a deck situated right on a lake. You walk out of a sliding door that spans one wall of the space onto a wooden deck where you can hang your feet into the lake filled with minnows and ducks. All it required was cutting the size of our space by more than half, demoting Mike’s Lotus from a garage to a covered parking spot, and moving farther away from both our jobs to a neighborhood that is old and less ideally situated and more un-kept. But the space itself was nice (so long as you didn’t step outside), and I could live in the smaller square footage. The appliances were all new and the internal was completely renovated and we would be the first people to live in it after the renovations. The second consideration was a beautiful studio apartment, albeit quite small, less than one third the size of our current home (I think it was listed at 478 square feet), and steps away from the beach. In fact, the only thing separating our apartment from the sand was PCH, and a row of homes. Like the other, it was beautiful on the inside, but also stripped the Lotus of a garage and now stripped my Scion of any parking spot at all. It increased my commute to both offices, while keeping Mike’s the same, and we had no laundry unit, nor did we have much closet space. There was also the tiny problem that our furniture did not fit in this studio, and we would have to hang our guitars on the walls to save enough floor space for the couch. I think our bed literally has to sit next to half of our dining table (because the other half of it won’t fit either). Part of me was actually looking forward to sizing down this much, since I have been talking to Mike about tiny homes for a while, and I wanted the challenge of really practicing resourcefulness and mindful living. I don’t know what it is about tiny apartment living that seems so glamorous to me, perhaps because Reading My Tea Leaves makes it looks so easy and fun. We went so far as to look at both places and submitting our applications.

It wasn’t until we got the offer for the first space (the beach apartment), and then the second space (the loft), that I started to get cold feet. Maybe I was already over-stressed to the point that I could not make a decision. The poor real estate agents, we gave them a run around with our “yes, no, yes, no” answers to their offers. I must have seemed like a crazy lady, not making up my mind like that, and poor Mike had to be dragged down with me. Mike was my saving grace throughout this whole process. His only requirement was a garage for his car and motorcycles, and I got him two places without garages and hardly space for both vehicles. But he was on board with trying either space, if it meant making me happy, or otherwise, stopping me from my stressful constant obsessive search for the ideal house. All he wanted for me was inner peace. But when it came to decision time, the stress got worse. He coaxed me into trying to figure out what I liked about each space, and what I did not like. I had a lot of fear that once I moved into the tiny apartment, I would learn that space is more valuable to us than I thought, and it would put a strain on our relationship (introverts unite!). Or that moving into a (possibly) less safe neighborhood could put his other love-of-his-life, Elise (car), in danger. He helped me realize that my fear of regretting the move is an indication that the move is just not right. Compromise was needed if we moved into either home. A hundred percent happiness could be achieved by staying. My mind was continually telling me to move, but something deep down in my chest (my heart perhaps?) was pounding on the walls and screaming no. On the inside, I felt like a two year old toddler throwing a fit, wanting one thing but resisting. Like I said, Mike was my saving grace. He said, “I will move for you, if it means you will have internal peace.” It was then that I realized that Mike did not want to move, and perhaps, neither did I. Maybe it was life’s way of reminding me that sometimes, you just have to let it go. Control freak as I am, I get carried away trying to shape my life course towards one direction, instead of just letting it tread its course the way it was meant to. So, we decided to stay. Giving up happiness was not worth gaining a year and a half of financial freedom. And back I go towards practicing minimalism. And practicing letting go.

The problem with financial independence is that money is at the forefront of the conversation. And as I started to state at the beginning of this post, money is a tricky thing. But minimalism, I can do. Instead of money, it puts happiness at the forefront of the conversation. It focuses on what brings your life meaning and joy. It may not give you financial freedom as early as you would like, but it frees you from being tied to money, even if you are still tied to money. And that type of freedom, money just can’t buy. Call me a failure at being financially independent. Mister Money Mustache will laugh at my face if he ever gets the chance to. Call me fearful of trying tiny living, though I may accept the challenge one day, for it still has a little glamour in my eyes. Call me a faux minimalist, call me whatever label you want, including happy and content to live here another six months more.

So here we are, one step forward and two steps back. Letting go of financial freedom for a few more years, and letting go of trying to control life. Trying to pursue love and happiness. Onwards.

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Finances: My money egg

I was not always debt averse. Like so many millions of Americans, I used to embrace the idea of debt as a given, a necessary evil. Only recently did I realize that only half of that term “necessary evil” was true. I graduated dental school about a year ago, with a staggering debt of over $550,000. Many of my classmates graduated with a similar debt and the common concensus was, “God this sucks, but this had to have happened for us to be here today.” While part of that may be true, because none of us had half a million dollars lying around at age 22, or whenever it was that we started dental school, it did not have to be such an overwhelming total sum. There was a voice in my head telling me that this was just not right. I must have messed up somewhere (and I did) but I did not know where. This unsettling feeling in my stomach prompted me to get my financial story straight. I hired a financial planner even before I started work to start understanding why being in so much debt was bothering me.

Some people can have financial debt up the wazoo and not bat an eyelid. Apparently, I am of a different breed. In the past five years, I experienced an ever-growing discomfort with my ever-increasing debt. They came hand in hand. In order to tackle the debt, I had to first see where it all started and what led me to this moment. One of the first things our financial advisor did when he met us, even before he hatched a plan or gave us any insight on how to regain control of our finances, was give us an assignment. He had us draw our money eggs. The money egg was supposed to include every experience we have had regarding finances from birth until now. We could also only draw pictures of those experiences, with our non-dominant hands. At this point, Mike was rolling his eyes to the back of his head. I had convinced him that a financial planner was what we needed but this was turning into a sort of psych therapy situation for him. I, on the other hand, practically jumped up and down with excitement and worked on the assignment as soon as I could. It ended up being a very smart way to begin approaching our finances.

My money egg totally explained my progression toward debt aversion and ironically, my progression towards a minimalist lifestyle. This is my money egg. Warning: it’s basically my financial life story and then some, and I’ve been alive twenty seven years, so yeah, it’s long.

I was born in the Philippines, a third world country, to parents who came from opposite social classes. My mom was from what was considered to be a well-off family, had seven brothers and sisters, all of whom got what they wanted and more growing up. My dad came from a small province near Manila which my mom called the ghetto and from my dad’s childhood stories, I can believe that it was true. By the time I was born, my parents were what you would consider successful folk in Manila. My dad and mom were both engineers and when I was born, they were both working. We were well–off enough that my mom was able to quit her job, and they were still able to provide a personal nanny (or yaya) for me, my sister, and my brother. We had three yayas living with us in our home. I remember having two dogs, pet fish, two doves. My sister and I went to private schools and enjoyed privileges that our neighbors could not. But it was still a third world country. Definition of privilege there was like, as cute as a little girl wearing her mother’s heels.

When I was eight, my dad was offered a job in the States. In hopes to provide his children with better access to, well, everything, my dad accepted and we moved to California. We went from having three nannies to living in a single bedroom of a home of one of my dad’s friends (coworkers?), who I didn’t even know. I remember the single bed my parents shared with my two year old brother, and my sister and I were squished sleeping on the floor in the space between the bed and the desk. I vaguely remember having to step over each other to move around in that space. It was summer, all the kids were out of school, so we were stuck in that one bedroom all day long. We were rarely allowed out because my parents did not want us to bother the owner, but the few moments we were allowed to sit on the couch in the living room were the best. We were growing kids and we had to stretch our legs. I remember it always being hot, hot, hot. That’s what I remember most. The terrible heat.

Eventually, my parents moved us to a townhouse in Milpitas, CA. I know that my parents were determined to give us kids a wonderful life, and they worked hard to do that. We started to get our bearings and move up the social ladder. My dad moved jobs frequently, always in search for a better life for his kids. I really appreciated his hard work, motivation, and pretty much, for just biting the bullet and doing what he had to in order to do what he thought was right. My mom was doing the same thing at home. One of the things that I really appreciated about my parents was that they worked. They worked their butts off.

After a few more years, my parents bought a beautiful four bedroom home in Pleasanton, CA. Each of us had our own rooms again! My dad also at this time was working three jobs. I hardly saw my dad during this time period. I remember begging my mom to wake me up at 6am so that I could go with her to the train station so I could drop him off and wave goodbye as the train took him off to work, not to return until midnight. Sometimes I’d try to hide silent tears rolling down my cheeks as he zoomed by. He worked a 9-5 job as an engineer, and then worked afterwards as a janitor for Blockbuster when it still existed (or was it Hollywood Video?), and later on as a janitor at Staples. At one point, he also was a retail salesperson at Robinsons-May (also when it still existed). He was in the lingerie department, and he hated it. But he did it anyway because he did what had to be done. It was also at this time that my brother started kindergarten and my mom started volunteering at school. Eventually, she started to work part-time for the school district. They were climbing up that social ladder real fast. We hosted parties nearly every weekend. We were the kids that always got the newest gaming console the night it was released. What I didn’t realize was that while I was getting every Disney sweater I wanted, my parents were working harder and we were eating mac and cheese and spam once a week. It was the most interesting paradox. We got every console that was released for Christmas, but I ate more beans from a can with rice and Vienna sausages on toast than my classmates. After two years, my parents decided to move yet again to Irvine in SoCal. They sold the house and my dad took an “even better job” in Orange County. All for the sake of searching for a better, more improved life.

This is where I stop and say, as kids, we hated the moves. I moved 10 times before I got into high school, including moves from house to apartment to apartment to motel to house etc. We lost a lot of friends along the way, and growing up, that was a pretty big deal. I was thirteen when we moved to SoCal, which in my head, the most “CRUCIAL” time in my life, aka the most dramatic time in my life. I think my sister took it harder than I did. I have never seen anyone resist my parents as much as she did. She fought until she got out. But I couldn’t blame my parents for trying to give us what they thought was a better life. In retrospect, I think if we just grew up in the same spot and established roots somewhere, (anywhere!), we would have probably had an improved life at home during our teen years. Less rebellion, less discontent, and more stability in general.

But on with the story about the continual search for more. We moved to Irvine and my dad started his new job and my mom started working at Irvine Unified School District. It only lasted one year before we moved into an extended stay motel, preparing to move yet again to Ladera Ranch. My parents bought another four bedroom home because my mom couldn’t stand living in a tiny apartment any more. My parents were ecstatic at finally owning a house again. A house located in a very affluent neighborhood, with well-paved streets and maintained parks, doggie bags included. 8 pools within a 3 mile radius, it was glorious. And off course, with each move, the accumulation of more stuff.

My dad continued to work for Robinsons-May even after it turned into Macy’s until he set his foot down in December when he said he did not want to work on Christmas Eve because he was going to put his family and kids first over money. I really admired him for making that move. He never went back to retail after that point. It was a wonderful Christmas, except I think my sister rebelled on the night of Christmas Eve and it actually turned into a tear-stained Christmas. Nothing short of usual family drama. Not shortly after, my mom took a second job in the afternoons at a tutoring company, Mathnasium. It is from here that she will eventually launch her own tutoring side business a few years down the road.

Up until this point, my parents have been trying to achieve an improved life for us. I would argue that they already achieved that in Pleasanton. We had what we needed and much more, and we kids were very happy kids. There’s a line between need and want. And then there is want-for-no-reason-at-all-just-because-you-can. The page turns, and that is where life took us. This is where I (slowly) started to learn that money cannot buy happiness. It can, but only up to a certain extent. Once you cover your basic needs, as well as ensure a stable income to the point where you don’t have to constantly worry if you will be supported next week or next month, money does not buy more happiness. Sometimes, I think the opposite could be true. It was the constant moving that got to my sister and I. Most of our arguments with our parents stemmed from that. Most of the blame and the resentment. My sister was never the same after our final move to Ladera Ranch. Granted, those were also the teen years and maybe it would have happened anyway, her turning rogue on us like that. But then again, maybe not.

At age sixteen, I started to work at Jamba Juice. My parents raised me to be a hard-worker too, and I liked the money I was making. I remember my mom telling me that, now that I was making money, I could start buying my own clothes, with the implication that I needed more clothes. When I started work, I opened my first debit card and my first credit card. My mom had her name assigned to my debit card so she could “help me monitor it”. What that also allowed her to do was to withdraw money from the account whenever she needed to borrow extra. By 18 years old, she had convinced me to open up 2 more general credit cards, which she later used to buy groceries and to buy other things that she “needed”. She also convinced me to open a credit card at Banana Republic, which I was working at during that time, so that I could “make use of the discounts”. I bought into it and spent paycheck after paycheck on clothes, saving very little for myself. It was a reward, she justified. I also bought clothes for her when sales were happening, and she paid me back, albeit a few days or weeks later. And I was okay with it.

When I was 18, my mom insisted on throwing me a traditional debutant ball. I told her that was not necessary. A debutant is kind of like a Quincenera, but for Filipinos. I dreaded the thought of going up in front of everyone and perform dances and speeches and whatever else. But she insisted and like a good daughter I went along with it. It was a $10,000 birthday party. With photographers, videographers, two gowns, everything. It wasn’t for me, and I don’t even want to say it was for her. It was for our friends and relatives, to show them how well-off we were. So well-off that she could flippantly throw a $10k birthday party for an 18 year old. The following year, my mom insisted my sister had one too, and despite my sister’s much stronger resistance to the thing, she got one whether she wanted to or not. After my sister’s debutante ball, my credit cards were maxed out because my mom had used her account holder abilities to pay both parties with my cards, and they would stay maxed out until I was 25. One was maxed at $2500 and the other $8500. Where was all the money going? I did not know it then, but I know now that all that money went to buy social status symbols. Symbols such as debutante balls and Banana Republic clothes and gaming consoles, random dinners and social events, everything a regular American typically spends money on. Well, minus the debutant parties. But that’s where a lot of the money was going to. In fact, I started receiving letters in the mail addressed to me saying that the payments on my credit cards were not being made. They were overdue, consistently, month after month. There were threatening emails saying the cards would be suspended if minimum balances weren’t met. I kept asking my mom about it and she kept brushing it off and saying, “Don’t worry about it.” But I WAS worrying about it. Eventually, at age 20, I got the cards back and closed both accounts. I forced my mom to open her own Banana Republic credit card. And I removed her from my debit card account. Today, only the $2500 credit card is paid off. The other one still has money unpaid. But I give them props, because they are at least working on paying that down now, after repeated, heavy arguing over the last five years.

Let me pause here (again) and say that I am not an ungrateful child. My parents were doing what they were taught to be the right thing to do and I don’t hate them for that. They are good people. But they were misled by an American Dream. I am very appreciative of their efforts. They bought my sister and I brand new cars for our first car, which I am so grateful for! Even though compared to other kids I went to school with, these weren’t crazy expensive cars like theirs were, but these were still brand new. That’s amazing and sweet and generous and kind. But as I look back on it now, I can’t help but think that that was also soooooo unnecessary.

Maybe in the back of my mind, I always knew we were short on money. I worried about money all the time. I worried about it enough that I felt the need to get a job at 16 years old. I even knew it enough that I chose my college based on how much money I would save living at home. I got into UCLA, which is where my boyfriend at the time decided to go, and which was viewed as a higher ranking college than UCI, but I chose UCI because I knew that I was the one who had to pay for my college education and I needed to save every bit that I could. My high school teachers and friends all thought I was crazy and tried to convince me to go to UCLA. But some part of me knew that I shouldn’t. I was slowly starting to become debt averse. However, even though I was smart enough to realize all of that, I was wrongly convinced that I could reward myself every time I got a paycheck with clothes and dinners and events and stuff in general. My parents sure supported that kind of lifestyle. “You can never have too many shoes. And you need more professional clothes, even at 18!” But I always had this feeling…

I graduated undergrad in three years and an extra quarter. I worked hard to pull that off so that I wouldn’t have to pay more money for the last two quarters. People asked why I did not just stay in school and take fun classes, and my answer what that I honestly did not want to spend more money. By this time, at age 20, I was working three jobs, just like my ole man. I was working as a dental assistant every day the dental office was open, averaging 33 hours a week. It was an emotionally taxing job, serving a community of people who had very high expectations and demands in an environment that caused a lot of fear in patients. On the days the dental office was closed, I was working at Banana Republic (still!) on Tuesday and Thursday mornings before the stores would open. I lifted mannequins above my head and climbed ladders twice my height, nearly breaking my back every day to set up the shop windows before the customers came in. If it was a Sunday, I would work the floor, following consumers as they dropped piles of clothes on the floor and I folded it back for them into perfectly neat stacks. I saw customers throw clothes at sales people when they were displeased, complaining of the heat in the store when there were too many other customers walking around, and slamming dressing room doors because they waited so long in the lines. Retail was a place where I learned how NOT to treat people. And it was where I saw the first glimpse of how “things” could turn people into such monsters. After a long physical day at BR, I would have a few hours to myself before I would drive to Irvine to tutor high school kids from Corona Del Mar. Not exactly mentally draining, these sessions did provide me further insight into lives of very very rich people. Back then, I wanted that lifestyle. These kids were driving Mercedes and Maseratis like it was nothing. Their parents owned boats and they went on international vacations by themselves every holiday. Who didn’t want money when they saw that? What I didn’t internalize was that many of these kids were taking anti-anxiety pills. ADD pills. Disliked their parents, or never even saw them. They were stressed more than I was, because of the high expectations that were set upon them by their parents and their peers. They know of more people their age who committed suicide than I did from watching television. I mean, these kids were paying $80/hour to talk to me about their problems at school and at home. All I could see was the prestige, their beautiful clothes, their lavish vacations, their lack of concern for money. And I was blinded to believe that that was what I was working towards.

In between graduating undergrad and getting into dental school, I made a lot of dumb mistakes. I was making good money working three jobs, but I didn’t tackle my student loans. Instead, I went out frequently. Spent money on clothes, food, alcohol and more alcohol. I even did a celebratory trip to Hawaii with Mike to celebrate getting into dental school. My loans sat there and I paid the bare minimum which didn’t even cover interest. And so my loans grew. I was working my butt off, but my debt continued to grow. I was working so damn hard that I was sick for months at a time, because my body could not keep up with the stress. I couldn’t wait until I got into dental school so that the payments could be delayed another four years.

I didn’t apply to many dental schools, but I did get into two schools right away, as early as December the year before. Ohio State University and University of Southern California. I wanted to stay in California to be with Mike and be close to home, so I decided to choose USC, which happens to be voted THE most expensive dental school in the United States. I swear I wasn’t getting any smarter with the finances thing. I mean, I KNEW it was the most expensive. I got an apartment to myself across the street from campus, which also meant I was spending A LOT of money on housing alone. Two weeks after dental school started at USC, I got an offer to go to dental school at UCLA, which started a week later. I denied it! You want to know why? It wasn’t because I liked USC better. It was because of sheer laziness! I was already set up in my apartment, moved in, and I already met a few people at school. I did not want to start all over or commute across the city. That’s it! That is the reason I said no. It was probably the worst financial move in the entirety of my life. And I hope never to make a mistake like that ever again.

Debt is never a good thing. More debt in exchange for a supposedly more prestigious school does not make the debt valuable. It’s not worth it. End of story. Yes, in order for me to achieve my dream of becoming a dentist, I had to go into debt. But I had a choice to take less debt, and I was a moron.

It was also around this time that my parents lost their house to the bank. This was the same year they had to take money out of their retirement fund to pay for something or other and were slashed with a big tax fee at the end of the year. But who was I to judge them? I stayed at USC. That single decision put me more in debt than my parents. So I cannot judge them for their financial decisions. I should be focused on working on my own spending habits rather than over-analyzing theirs. Plus, it turns out, I was growing up to be just like them.

Since I was living by myself in an apartment across the street from USC, I was dwindling down the few extra bucks I saved working three jobs during my one and a half years off. I was taking out the maximum loans possible (over $100k a year!) and still, by the end of my first year, I had no extra money in my bank account. I decided to move in with a roommate a little further away from school, but still in downtown LA. It made rent $100 cheaper per month. But it still wasn’t enough. In my second year of dental school, to the shock of my dental classmates, I took on a job as a librarian on campus and worked 20 hours a week, on top of being at the dental campus over 40 hours a week. I was exhausted, sickly, hardly spoke to my roommate and released all of my stress on Mike at the end of the day. After all the money financial aid was handing me, and the extra hours I was working, I was still going into further debt. Mikey had to lend me $1000-3000 at the end of every trimester to make ends meet. I would pay him back the minute I got my funds for the following trimester, which meant that at the end of the next trimester, I would need to borrow even more from him. How was this possible?!

It’s all those little things that you don’t even think about when you buy them. It’s that one shopping spree that you went on just because you were feeling down. It’s the new picture frame your apartment needed. It’s the chips and ice cream that you had to add to your grocery bill. It’s the second pair of Nikes you have because the last one has a mark on it. It’s the wedding dress you had to buy to attend your friend’s wedding, because she has seen you wear all the other dresses you owned. It’s the fifty books you have yet to read but buy impulsively because the cover calls to you. It’s that one time you were too lazy to cook so you went out to dinner with your friends. It’s when you got hammered at your friend’s party and offered to buy everyone a round of drinks. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. One bad financial decision after another. And these were just the little things. The big things were worse. The choice of housing for the sake of convenience. The choice of school due to laziness. The choice to borrow money from someone else for lack of discipline. It’s not consumption that’s the problem. We are human, and we need things. But it’s compulsive consumption that is the issue. The failure to see the difference between need and want.

By the summer after my second year of dental school, I was drowning in debt and I couldn’t take it anymore. I told my roommate I was moving out by the end of the week. A bitch move, and I can’t believe we are still close friends after that. I moved to Torrance to live with my boyfriend and his two guy friends, where my rent changed from $1200/month to $345/month. I quit my librarian job and paid Mike back every single penny. I committed to cooking meals at home with Mike as much as possible, and started budgeting our grocery bill to $50/week. I still follow this budget until today. I was taking a step towards debt aversion. But I continued to be a bad spender, or rather, a spender period. After all the money I saved, I spent any excess loan amount I had to travel or to dine out! Oy vey. I was so excited that I had “extra money” that I could not wait until the end of the trimesters to see how much I had left in order to live the good life. The truth that we all know is that, I have never had any extra money. As long as you are in debt, you don’t have money. I have been in debt since the day I opened my first credit card. But I spent the “extra money” anyway instead of paying back my loans. I continued this toxic cycle up until the day I graduated.

I wish I could say all of this ended after graduating dental school. After the loans stopped coming in and I was left with whatever debt’s version of a black hole is. Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. The summer after I graduated, I had to borrow money from Mikey. I was out of loans. In our entire relationship, I was very adamant about splitting everything in half. Down to the last penny. So any money I borrowed from Mikey, I kept tabs on. Until I graduated from dental school, Mikey and I were Even Stevens. I owed him over $16,000 by the time I started work. $16,000! That’s a lot of money I didn’t have. That summer, I was even more obsessed with spending. I had to have a nice loft apartment and I had to buy new furniture for it. I spent his money to take classes and workshops. I was in denial that I had to face a burdensome monstrous debt. I knew I had a problem, then.

Here is my issue with money. You might not have this issue but I did. And it all started with things.

The more things I wanted to buy, the less money I had.

The less money I had, the harder I had to work.

The harder I had to work,

The more stressed I was.

The less time I had with my friends.

The more sick I became.

The faster I tired.

The less personal growth I had.

And if I wasn’t growing,

Then I was dying.

And that had to change. ASAP.

I was just like my parents. Just like so many other Americans. We have too many choices and that was a problem for me. I thought I needed to have every choice offered to me. When I had to present my money egg, I knew all of this. I was aware of the entire story as it was unfolding, as I was living it day to day. In fact, I was hyper-aware, and that’s what made me worry so often since I was a young teenager. I knew this because I watched my parents go through it.  But I was also in denial. I deserve this. I worked hard for this. This is my reward. If they can have it, so can I. I am in less debt than they are. This is worth the money. All of these are excuses and lies that I fed myself. When I finished presenting my money egg, I couldn’t help but think to myself, that for once in my life, I made the right financial move. I hired myself a financial planner who did not tell me what to do with my money, but had me change my whole perspective of life in general. After presenting my money egg, he had me and Mike discuss our priorities, our future goals, and our dreams. He asked us questions like, what brought us happiness, what projects we wanted to start, when we saw ourselves retiring, what retirement looked like for us. He asked us what we wish we could had done in life if we were told that we had an incurable disease and we were to die by the end of the year. Then he asked us what we wish we could have done if we were told we were going to die tomorrow. If you were to die and had a million dollars in assets, how would you divvy that up? By asking us these questions, and writing down all our answers, he came back at us and said, look. From all the answers that were provided, there were a few things that mattered to Mike and I. Family seems to be the most important thing. Next came travel, hobbies, and self-improvement. After that was contributing beyond ourselves. There was no mention of a house or stuff. So we had to approach our financial situation in a way that allowed us those things not only in the future, but more importantly in the present. It was like a switch flipped in me. I radically altered my lifestyle. It was around this time that I started to embrace what I would consider the simple life and the concept of minimalism.

Minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things so we can focus on life’s more important things, which aren’t really things, at all.

-The Minimalists

In the last year throughout this process of gaining more and more control over my financial life, this is what I learned.

The less stuff I bought, the more money I had.

The more money I had, the more focused I was on paying down my debt.

The smaller the debt got, the less I worried about my finances.

The less I worried about finances, the less time I had to work.

The less time I had to work, the more time I had to learn about myself.

The more I learned about myself, the more focused I was.

The more focused I was, the more clear my priorities became.

The more clear my priorities became, the better my relationships got.

The better my relationships got, the more meaningful my life got.

As I discovered what was meaningful to me,

I realized that it never had anything to do with stuff after all.

 

 

 

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Living Slow: Disconnecting from the internet, once in a while.

My relationship with the internet is a love-hate type of relationship. The love part is easy to see. Googly eyes, slobbery drool, drunken teenage stupor kind of puppy love. If you ask my husband, he would likely tell you that I am obsessed with Instagram. And it’s true. I am OBSESSED with Instagram, in a very unhealthy way. If you have me added as a friend on Instagram, you likely already know that in the past, I used to post once a day. Until I added a second account, which then made it twice a day. Some of you scoff, because the truth of the matter is that I actually have three accounts. THREE. Not including the other accounts I couldn’t keep up with and had to delete. And on one of those accounts, I have admittedly posted 4-5 times a day. I am seriously obsessed with social media, and have been for a very long time. Before I had Instagram, it was Facebook. And before Facebook, Myspace. And before Myspace, Xanga and Melodramatic. It was something that my generation grew up with, which is hardly an excuse, and something which affects the younger generations more profoundly than me.

Let me stop here and briefly say a thing or two about how I perceive social media. In my eyes and in my mind, social media is a platform that many people, including myself, use to portray an image that we want the world to see. It may be a true image, or it may not be a true image. Even if it is your true self, only a select part of your life is posted for the scrollers and their double taps. It is still an image. The surface of a body of water, flat, with no depth. I have spent hours and hours creating the reflection of myself in cyberspace, having wasted probably half of the last decade focusing on this (insert sarcasm) super important aspect of my life. I mean, image is everything, right? (Let that sarcasm drip.)

But let’s not stop at social media. I use the internet for other things too. I am obsessed with checking my email frequently, as well as checking my text messages to see if a red number bubble has popped up on the corner of that green little box. It is important to clarify here that I rarely get texts at all. I could hardly be considered the popular type, preferring being tucked away with my books in odd nooks and crannies. Despite this fact, checking my phone is an instinctual habit that I developed over the years. I am obsessed with looking up new releases of products from brands that I am loyal to. Even though I don’t buy said products, I want to be the first to know what new item other people come up with. I am obsessed with following people’s lives that I don’t know. Not even famous people’s lives! Mostly people who are creative, who throw events that showcase their new avant-garde ideas. And while it is a great source of inspiration, the extent to which I follow these people has become unproductive, at best.

It is safe to say that I love the internet for these aforementioned things.

But God how I hate the internet. Well, I don’t truly hate the internet. But I do hate the way I have interacted with the internet.

In my humble opinion, the internet has become the biggest food source for feeding my ego. And by ego, I mean the Eckhart Tolle definition of the word. Ego as our inner narrator, our sense of “I”, the voice in our head. Ego has it’s signature moves. The ego is never satisfied. No matter how much stuff we buy, how many accomplishments we achieve or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete. The ego is constantly comparing itself to others. It has us measuring our self-worth against the looks, wealth, and social status of our neighbors. The ego thrives on drama. It keeps old resentments and grievances alive through compulsive thought. But most importantly, the ego robs us of life’s present moments. The ego is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the right here, right now. I have primarily used the internet as a tool to try to satiate my forever unsatisfied ego. Vanity at its worst, I have found that my inner self continually tries to see what my friends, family, acquaintances, hell, even random strangers, are up to in their lives. There is a constant nagging voice in my head telling me that somebody MUST “need” me right at this very moment, prompting me to check the screen every few minutes. How egotistic is that? I feel the need to check constantly in case a life or death emergency comes along and somebody needs me. When really, truth be told, in a true emergency, I am pretty sure my friends and family would be calling 911 first, or well I hope they do. Even if they did call me, I would probably tell them, “You should call 911 right now.” Pretty much, if you are reading this, don’t call me in the case of an emergency, okay?

In addition to allowing the internet to feed my vanity, I have allowed the internet to eat up so much of my precious and valuable time. All this talk about decluttering and minimizing in order to live a slow, simple, and meaningful life cannot save me from the single fact that the internet adds so much noise to my every day. My thoughts are constantly fragmented, disconnected from each other, interrupted by every silent whisper telling me to go online to check what I’ve been missing in the last five minutes of everyone else’s life. That’s exactly what it is! I am missing out on so much of my own life because I am continually concerned with everyone else’s life. Anyone else? Don’t get me wrong, the internet adds value to my life too. I mean, you’re reading this ON MY BLOG. And I couldn’t have graduated dental school without Google, let me tell you that. So yes, the internet has its uses. But it has definitely been overused (by me) and has prevented me from creating the particular lifestyle that I am currently working towards. The internet is a wonderful source for, well everything. But that’s just the problem. I don’t want everything anymore.

I am constantly being informed of what new products are out, which trends are popular, where I have yet to vacation and explore. The internet has on blast what my family and friends are up to, who made it to that last party, what so and so just bought, who that one-girl-i-met-once-in-passing just got engaged to, blah blah blah. I wake up every morning and go on automatic scroll mode. My fingers are cramping from double tapping for two hours. I seriously think I’ve cross-eyed myself because of all the fast scrolling I’ve been doing. And the worst part is, I end up despising myself every time I binge on surfing the net. I literally would look forward all day to get home and relax after work, and then come home, and turn on my phone. The next thing I know, it’s 9:30pm and I have to start getting ready for bed.

I have been working pretty hard to minimize the excess unnecessary STUFF and have cut out those which do not add value to my life, only to realize that I am still so far from living a very meaningful life. There is plenty of room for improvement. Where I am succeeding in terms of physical clutter, I am failing in terms of mental clutter. There is so much noise around me, and I want to start focusing on cutting the fat out of that. I use the internet as a pacifier 99% of the time. Like others use Netflix, or TV or weed or chocolate or coffee, I use the internet as a crutch, a drug, a way to pass time, not even for enjoyment, but just to fill a void. Like everything else, it takes up space in my life and currently, it is using up way more space than I want it to. It’s a problem and I’d like to fix it now. My initial thought was naturally the extreme method of cutting out excess noise: Killing the internet at home. Quit cold turkey. Go big or go home. But I live with another person and that is absolutely not (“no way!”) an option. Trust me, I asked. Morals of the story here: What does not add value to your life, may add value to someone else’s, and, it is never a good idea to try and change somebody. So with plan A out of the window, I have plan B, which took shape based on a friend’s internet policy.  I figure I’d start with a 30 day trial run to see if removing internet use at home would add value to my life. Here are some goals I have for reducing wasteful internet use.

  • Upon getting home, separating myself from my phone, by placing the phone in a designated space and then letting it go.
  • Putting the phone on Silent and removing Vibrate.
  • Checking email only once a day.
  • Entering Airplane mode when going to sleep.
  • Not keeping the phone on the bedside table.
  • Allowing only maximum 2 hours of Internet time per week (plenty of fun time!)
  • Making a list of things I want to watch, listen to, or look up, and setting the list aside until the designated time to use the Internet.
  • Removing notifications and phone apps

Even as I am writing this list, I am having second thoughts, doubts, and heart palpitations. I’d imagine this must be what it feels like to abstain from an addicting drug. Because that’s exactly what it is. But I should stop being a baby, quit my whining, and just do it. The worst that could happen is that I hate it, and then revert back. The best that could happen? I could start reading more, writing more, exercising more, trying more, focusing more, dreaming more, healing more, sleeping more, inspiring more, connecting more, loving more, living more.

Worth it.

If you have any suggestions at all as to how to minimize internet use or mental clutter in general, let me know! I am all ears.

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Living slow: Saying No

Life is a whirlwind, and that’s the simple truth. The dogma of western culture states that an individual has increased freedom with increased choice. This unquestioned thinking has led to what some describe as the paradox of choice. It is so embedded in our culture that it is difficult to stop and think that the opposite could also be true (which it is). That is, the abundance of choices may lead to an overwhelm that could rob us of true satisfaction.

I used to be a “Yes Man”. Born with a strong urge to please others and to be the most helpful I could be, I said yes to everything. I said yes to all social events even though I was introverted, I said yes to peer pressure even though I knew the difference between right and wrong, and I said yes to all projects even though I was stressed and extremely overworked. It garnered me a lot of “friendships” and “accomplishments” and many, many people liked me. But I was tired most of the time, sickly at best, and honestly dissatisfied with a lot of my relationships, including my relationship with myself. Most importantly, I did not have a very strong sense of self. I had a very deep understanding of what others wanted me to be. But I did not know what my own goals in life were, what values meant the most to me, which relationships I truly enjoyed, and what it meant to be truly successful.

Confused about what success truly meant, I said yes to a lot of ideas that were shaping my life to become what others expected of me. I bought a lot of clothes in different styles so that I could be socially accepted by different groups of people. I bought stuff just to shape an image that would be appealing to the public. I bought into the idea of getting married at a young age (at 18, I said I would be married by 21), and buying a home as soon as possible (I was planning my future home as early as 20), and having kids (by 24!). At the same time, I had planned to be a doctor by 26, I had wanted to have a large smattering of friends, and hoped to be working towards a vacation home, a dog, and even more stuff. I never thought of travel. I put my hobbies aside, or rather, discarded them completely. In order to gain this level of “success”, I had three jobs in college, stayed out late partying with random groups of people, said yes to many school events, and studied my ass off. I hardly saw my family, despite the fact that I lived at home during undergrad. I stopped being religious, which isn’t so bad because I still haven’t gone back, but when I was religious, I used to at least thank God every day, and I think a part of me stopped being grateful at that time, so that wasn’t too good. And I never took care of myself. I was sick for months at a time, because I honestly didn’t allow myself enough time to get better. Always saying yes, my life was a mess.

So in 2010, I met a boy who was living slow, and saying no. It was frustrating at first, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around why he would say no to a LOT of ideas, events, and things that a normal person would embrace. Even his movements were slow. He could be described as deliberate. Purposive. Intentional. Calculated. Most importantly, he was someone who was true to himself, and nobody else. He was also the most satisfied human being I had ever met. One day, we were eating breakfast omelettes and potatoes that cost $7 a plate, because we were still living on close to nothing, and out of the blue, I remember him saying, “You know, we are two very lucky people.” He expounded, saying we had everything we need and want, and more, and we had each other. We had things that some people never found in a lifetime. “Life is good.” I married the damn sucker.

It took forever, but he was the first and only person who ever taught me how to live slow and more importantly, say no. Over the years, I learned that time was more important than money. My work goals changed from wanting three jobs to earn money to buy stuff, to working ONE job that I had to love doing so much that it does not feel like work. I quit the librarian position I hated during dental school, which I only had to take in order to make ends meet when I was living at a conveniently located, high rise apartment in the middle of downtown LA. I moved to a small bedroom in Torrance and cut my rent from $1300 a month to $375 a month.  I got rid of clutter and stopped buying junk. I did not go out excessively, except to celebrate important occasions, and I cooked healthier meals at home. The money I saved, I used to travel the world with my partner in crime, and we learned more about ourselves and each other in the process. I started focusing on experiences and hobbies rather than social status symbols. My favorite thing to do in my teens was to hit the mall, scour the sales, and go out with friends. My biggest worries in my teens were the perception of self, and what others will say about me. My favorite thing to do now include taking classes and learning things that improve myself and increase my contribution to society, whether it be art or science. My biggest worry now is whether or not my friends and family will be safe today, whether or not other people in parts of the world are suffering, and whether or not I will do good by my patients through my work.

My relationship goals changed from saying yes to all my acquaintances or people I hardly met, to saying no unless I really, really liked you. I became selective in who I chose to hang out with, and I lost a lot of relationships along the way, but I regained a few that were more important to me anyway, and that was worth it. I learned that you shouldn’t try to change the personalities, beliefs and values of others, that changing the people around you is never a good thing. But you can still change the people around you. I cut out the excess fat. I realized that people who did not share the same values and beliefs as me only take away time from people who do. I don’t mean to say that you should cut out everyone who does not agree with your beliefs, but surround yourself with people who have the same end goal. You and your friend can vote for different presidents, but if both your end goals are to try to improve this world to become the best that it can be, it’s totally okay if the paths you take in order to do that diverge. Diversity is good, but so is working towards a common end. Now if you have a friend whose goal in life is to make someone else’s life miserable by spreading bad rumors about them, then maybe that’s not a friend I would want to keep hanging out with. And that’s just my personal preference, because it does not line up with my values and that’s okay. In return, I see my family more frequently. I built stronger, longer-lasting relationships, rather than transient relationships which last only half a decade. I have surrounded myself with a support system more focused on pushing me to become a BETTER person, rather than a more successful person.

My husband also slowed me down in my ridiculous fast speed chase of buying a home and having kids. Which gave me this opportunity to learn about myself. It gave me a whole new perspective on a way to live life in order to enjoy it most. I now have the time to take care of myself and to grow. He made me question why there is always this constant need for more. Or why there are social norms that we accept to be true. Why is there a timeline that one is expected to follow, a path that people expect you to take. What works for me, may not work for you, and vice versa. In order to live a meaningful life, I had to make room for only the things that matter. And very few things truly matter, in comparison to the abundances of choices we make every day. Some will still argue that with choice, comes freedom. Sure, it does, up to a certain extent. Kind of similar to the idea that money will buy happiness, only until your basic needs are met. Once you have food, shelter, safety, and a stable income, money has little effect on happiness. Likewise, freedom is defined by the ability to choose. However, choosing to say no to a lot of the choices offered to you will arguably give you even more freedom to fill your life with important matters and will lead to a more meaningful life as defined by individual ole you.

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A call for materialism

As a society that is described as being too materialistic, I want to pose the question that maybe we are not being materialistic enough.

It’s true, in one sense of the word I suppose. We are too materialistic in that we are ingrained to habits of compulsive consumption. Too many people are trying to keep up with the Joneses, trying to buy the next “IT” thing, lining up on Black Fridays and at Apple stores. Admittedly, it was not too long ago that I did these exact same things. I remember it was a “family tradition” to go out every Black Friday with all my aunts and uncles and cousins to go on a crazy shopping spree. We would spend the entire Friday shopping until we dropped. Nightmarish at best, it was a “tradition” that we looked forward to every year. As consumers, we are caught in an absurd circle of micro trends, which are not really trends at all. These material goods are, simply put, status symbols. People line up at the Apple store with every new release of the iPhone because once a newer, “better” one is created, they no longer care about the one they have. In fact, the one they have suddenly emits a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense of unhappiness. We are confused about what will make us happy. As if the consumption of products will somehow magically add up to a satisfying life.

The definition of materialistic is as follows:

  1. Excessively concerned with physical comfort or the acquisition of wealth or material possessions rather than the spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values
  2. adhering to the philosophy of materialism, a theory that regards matter as constituting the universe and all its phenomena
Synonyms include: consumerist, acquisitive, greedy, capitalistic, bourgeois
Not exactly words I want to be associated with in general. But if you think about the philosophy of materialism, it is defined as a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental things and consciousness, are results of material interactions.
If matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and if we are truly materialistic, shouldn’t we be more concerned with the quality of our products? I’d like to ask if, maybe, the problem is that we are not being materialistic enough? We need to be true materialists, as in we need to really care about the materiality of goods. I call for an increase in materialism, which requires an invested interest in the true value of the products and materials that we purchase. It seems as if the stars aligned when “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” fell into my lap at about the same time I first saw the trailer for “The True Cost”. I suggest to anybody who wonders just how materialistic our society is to watch this trailer. Or better yet, the entire movie.
Something clicked and I realized, how was it ever possible to be able to buy an article of clothing for the price of $5. Companies must make a profit, materials must be paid for, so where do they cut the cost? The answer is simple and uncomplicated, albeit unfair and inhumane. Production is outsourced to poor countries with the enticing idea of enrichment. Large corporations addict these countries to the idea of uplifting their people out of poverty, which makes them stay, even when the production costs are reduced over time, enslaving their citizens into a dependency in the fashion industry. At the other end of the spectrum, distributors addict consumers such as ourselves to the idea of always faster, cheaper fashion. According to Liva Firth, “Each year across the world, 1.5 billion garments are sewn by an estimated 40 million people, working in 250,000 factories. These are predominantly made in countries described by the UN as the world’s least developed. All in all, the garment and textile industry is estimated to be worth some $3 trillion. And the bulk of that goes into the pockets of the owners of those fast fashion brands.”

 

It didn’t take much to convince me that a change has to be made. And it had to start with myself. If we are to be materialistic, then so be it. But I believe we can be materialistic while also being spiritualistic, being an intellectual and having solid cultural values. If I am to embrace the concept that matter is the fundamental substance in nature and that material interactions drive our consciousness, then those materials better be the best materials I can lay my hands on. And by best, I don’t mean coolest or most popular. I want to reach for materials that are sustainable, reusable, ethically made, and produced with care and love, not only for the consumer, but for the planet and the producers as well. I admit, it is a work in progress. It’s complicated, and also foggy at times, and it’s difficult to ask the hard questions. I have found a list of brands and companies that I support, but I am still a work in progress. At least I am progressing. And the hope is that society as a whole is also progressing towards the freedom from this cycle of need, want, now, now, now.

 

I’d like to end this post with a scenario posed by Liva Firth. If you see a car crash happen in front of you, would you stop what you’re doing to help the people involved? My answer is yes. The question is this. How far away from you does that car crash have to be for you not to help. My answer is that it has to be far enough that I cannot get there in time to be of help. Additionally, how far away from you does that car crash have to be for you not to care?

 

We are not far enough away that we are unable to help. Some may be far enough away that they simply do not care.

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The Decision That Will Change Everything

About a year and a half ago, I stumbled upon “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo. What began as a simple process of de-cluttering my life of material goods that served me no purpose turned into a shift in my entire way of thinking about STUFF. I was brought up to believe in the compulsive consumption that defines a majority of the western world today. I was stuck in a state of mind where I felt as if I “NEEDED”  everything. I was fooled by the fashion industry to believe in the “it” thing of the nanosecond, constantly changing from one “it” thing to the next.

The journey began with getting rid of my clothes. I used to stand in front of my closet each morning, and take thirty minutes just to choose what to wear. There was an overwhelming amount of options to choose from, and more often than not, I went back to the same set of clothes I wear every week. I started to realize that I had spent hard-earned money (or worse, money I didn’t even have if not for the massive amount of student loans I took out), on articles of clothing that I didn’t need, or want, or even like for that matter. This realization pushed me to start researching about the fashion industry and I began wondering how I could have ever thought I needed that much clothing. And as I delved deeper, I started asking more and more questions. How could they get away with making our clothes so cheaply? Where were the products coming from? Who made them? And I started turning towards more ethical lines of clothing when purchasing my clothes. Additionally, over time, I began purchasing less and less stuff. After going through so much work purging my closets (it took weeks and weeks!), I did not want to go back to that state of being in excess. I started realizing that I needed less, or that I didn’t need anything at all. I became overly selective, scrutinizing every piece and grilling myself with the question, “Why?” Why do I feel the need to have it? Why do I think it will improve the value of my life?

I then started to extend this de-cluttering to my books, arguably my second largest collection of items at the time. I hoarded books. It was awful. When I was done sorting them, I had filled 6 medium-sized Home Depot boxes with books I had already read. Another 4 boxes with books I will never read, 4 boxes with textbooks, and then I kept another bookshelf of books I wanted to read in the future or wanted to keep. Over time, I realized that half of the books I kept were books I didn’t want to read anyway! I used to think that starting a book meant I had to finish it. I pushed myself to the ending because I thought every book had something to offer. That is generally the truth (with a few exceptions), but it doesn’t mean I enjoyed the reading process throughout its duration. During the de-cluttering process, I started realizing that life is too short for that. Reading should be done for pleasure. Now I pick up a book, and if I do not like it, it immediately gets passed on to someone else.

De-cluttering books and clothes freed up so much of my room, let alone my life. I started to crave the absence of material things. My physical self felt so much lighter, if you can imagine that. I went from wanting to buy a new article of clothing every weekend, to buying less than 10 in the last year. I went from buying all the books I can carry at library sales and used bookstores, to wishing only to borrow books from the library or getting electronic copies on my kindle. Can you even imagine how much space a person frees up if they go from 500 books on the shelf to a single rotating book from the library? Or a single slender kindle by your nightstand? As a follow up question, do you even realize how much money you save? And going past money, look at how much time is freed up. No longer are you reading books just to say you read them. No longer are you standing in front of your closet for thirty minutes trying to choose what to wear. This opened up a lot of time for me, allowing me to explore the world, to learn new crafts, and to spend time with my loved ones.

So I kept on going. I went through everything I owned and re-assessed whether they were of use to me or whether they brought me joy. And when I finished the process, I started all over again. Things that initially were hard to let go, became easier to let go during the second round. And the third round. As I parted with more things, the less I needed. More importantly, I realized the gifts that living a simple life had to offer. Something in my brain clicked. Life became more about the people I spent time with, the hobbies that made me happy, the milestones that made me a stronger person and the achievements that made me grow.  And this is why I named my blog, “The Simple Life”. I would never have had the time to start writing again if I did not go through this change. I realized that I was working to become a minimalist, in order to be a maximalist. I was minimizing the amount of STUFF that surrounded me, which allowed me to maximize reaching my true potential. And just like that, I was hooked.

And then something terrible happened right after I graduated and Mike and I moved in together. I suddenly became obsessed with furnishing our new place. I wanted to buy new furniture. I wanted to have it look a certain way, like warehouse meets bohemian meets mid-century modern and all the other bull crap that they feed you when you look through housing magazines in your average dental office’s waiting room. I bought and bought and bought, even before I started working, with money I didn’t have. I used money that Mike had saved up. Now our home looks amazing, and I love coming home to it every day! It is perfect in my eyes. But as time went by, I realized there were some things that we purchased that really is not the SOURCE of my happiness with this home. I do not love coming home to our loft after a long day of work so I could stare at my furniture. Instead, I love coming home and seeing Mike lying on the couch with his legs swung over to the side watching League of Legends on our projector. The couch and the projector were not the things pulling on my heartstrings. Also, we spent about $1000 on 12 dining chairs from RH. Don’t get me wrong, I love those chairs. They look cool and sleek and are comfortable and fit perfectly around our 12 foot dining table (A 12 FOOT DINING TABLE GUYS! I mean, Jesus!). But that’s not what made me happy. What made me happy is hosting a gathering for friends or family every week and having those chairs so that we could all eat a meal together. What made me happy were the PEOPLE, not the THINGS. We got Mike this beautiful RH computer desk, which is a modular system, meaning we could add more units to it over time (kind of like a sectional couch). We said we were going to buy an extension for myself after I started work and earned money for it. To this day, almost one year later, I have not bought myself the extension. I slowly started to realize that I did not need a desk. We get ourselves into these homes, with so much SPACE. And because there is the space, we feel the need to fill it with STUFF. I realized in the last year that none of this is true.

As I continued to de-clutter in all other aspects of my life, I was momentarily swept away by the idea of starting a beautiful home that I forgot what I was actually working towards. I started to feel like I needed to pick up more work hours, so I could BUY those dining table chairs. Imagine! Feeling the need to tie up your time with work so that you could earn more money to buy more stuff. Less time, more stuff. Therein lies the trap.

And then, two months ago, I decided I wanted a house. Mike and I heard of this amazing program for doctors that would allow us to buy a house, well, now. Right now, we are able to get a loan for a house close to one million dollars. ONE MILLION! That is a really big number. I became obsessed and threw myself into a headlong search for homes in the area, which are crazily spiking in value, by the way. As I looked for more homes, I became more and more grossed out by how large they were. How much excess space they had. There was a living room, AND a family room? A breakfast nook, AND a formal dining room? But why? I started to fall more and more in love with older, single story homes. I became obsessed with Eichler homes down the street. The smaller the better. Homes that nears 1600 square feet seemed extremely large to me. I started to look at homes because of their design, not because of their size. But even buying a house is a concept society tells you you should do in order to be successful. And even now, it’s hard for me to unwrap my mind around it. Yet another THING that I was told should be purchased in order to make me happy. And I am not saying it won’t make me happy. I think living and owning an architectural piece of history like an Eichler would be AMAZING. But who’s to say I am not equally as happy living in my current loft? We all know that the happiness level can only be so high. And I am VERY happy here. Lucky for me, something happened last week that really pushed me to step back, and re-analyze whether buying a house right now is right for us.

When I graduated dental school, I left school with a huge loan. Bigger than any other school loan I have heard of, I graduated with a debt of over $560,000. In order to pay back this debt in the standard 10 years, I would have to commit to 10 years of payments of over $6,500 a month. Think about how your life would be different if you spent $6,500 a month towards paying back a debt. Obviously, that is a huge chunk of change for most people. It was an impossible task. So we had agreed to commit to a 25 year loan forgiveness plan called IBR to get rid of this massive amount of debt. In essence, this program allows you to pay only a percentage of your income and then on the 25th year, the loan is forgiven, but you have to pay the taxes of the left over amount, which would mean that on the 25th year, you would pay over $477,000 in taxes. But it’s a more doable program because you get to raise this money over the course of 25 years and meanwhile, you only pay a small amount per month.  Our financial advisor agreed with us and told us that this is the best way to go.

We started working with a budgeting tool called YNAB to get a better grasp of our finances and to plan out a future of 25 years worth of fun, but also, 25 years worth of saving money for this massive repayment when the loan is forgiven. Last week, I got on a call with my advisor, expecting to discuss with him about the possibility of buying a house. We were going to go over what we have been saving (on average) the last few months since the wedding, and we were going to use that to determine what a good price on a home would be, and also how much we should set aside each month for the loan repayment. And then he proceeded to tell me and Mike something that we never thought we would hear.

He said that we are saving so much money, that we could arguably pay back my student debt in ten years or less WITHOUT changing our lifestyle.

I was floored. And that’s when something in me clicked again. I am in a lot of debt, and here I am, ready to sign up for even more debt, for something that I was taught would define “success”. Mike and I knew how much we were saving a month, but when I heard our financial adviser tell us that we were saving so much money that what we once thought was insanely impossible could be done, I really truly woke up. And it is here that I want to drive in two points.

First, I can attribute the amount of money that Mike and I are successfully saving to the fact that we have significantly decreased our spending since the wedding. Simple as that. Do you keep tabs of where your money goes? Every penny? With YNAB, I now do, and I am able to curate my money-spending decisions and habits based on money-spending mistakes which I made in the previous months (I would be happy to write about the envelope system that we use to help us manage money in a different post). And with this comes power. Imagine if you just stopped buying things. If you just paid for groceries (and when I say groceries, not even an excess of groceries. I am talking about enough food to sustain you but not enough food to make you gluttonous), a roof over your head, and other bare (and I mean BARE) necessities. Do you know exactly how much you would save? Obviously it’s different for every person but I can tell you that it is a lot more than what you are saving now. Minimalism, or at least mindfulness with consumption of goods, has REALLY changed my life. It’s changed my way of thinking so completely that not only do I have more time, I also have more money without me having to work hard to make it that way. And this isn’t to say, live like a hermit and never succumb to any pleasures. I spend a lot of money on things that make me happy, including activities such a yoga, ceramics, and guitar lessons. I have no problem at all with spending money on things that will progress you towards becoming the person you want to be. But if you want to truly save money, don’t buy into the goods and the hype and the CRAP that they spew out at you. I have never, in my life, had excess money. But I have always had excess stuff.

And my second point is this: So many people need stuff so desperately that they are willing to add more debt and give away more of their life and their freedom in exchange for said stuff. How many people reading this have a car payment? A student loan? Credit card debt? A mortgage? I know I do. Did you know that the total debt owed by US consumers is $12.58 trillion as of 2016? 12.58 trillion! The Minimalists Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus put that into perspective really well. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year. 12.58 trillion is 398,909 years worth of seconds. You have no idea how much that stuns me. Did you know that the average household has debt with six figures? I came from a family where debt was always the answer. I will go over my money egg and experience with debt while growing up in a different blog post, but debt is never the answer. I went into debt to invest in myself and to pursue a passion that I dreamt about since I was eight years old. But that STILL doesn’t make it good debt. And I made bad decisions along the way. I took out the maximum amount of debt and spent the money on vacations. I worked three jobs in undergrad only to spend more than what I earned on going out with friends or on new clothes. Like I said, I was fooled. And even though I am getting better at realizing this, I was about to sign even more of my life away for something that I do not NEED. I should have learned my lesson about debt by watching those around me. Debt needs to be paid off ASAP. There IS such a thing as Financial Clutter. And if I truly wanted to minimalize and de-clutter in order to live a more meaningful, passionate life, I realized that I needed to get rid of this debt. I suddenly felt silly for wanting to keep up with the Joneses, for wanting to show the world what I can “afford”, in quotations, because I do not believe people buy homes they can actually afford. They buy homes their future selves would be able to afford, after a lot of work and time and years. I knew right away that buying a house was not the correct answer. Shouldn’t I have seen the warning sign when my dear friend told me that their first house purchase is preventing them from actually buying the house of their dreams. Tying them up like prisoners to the house they chose to live in. Weren’t the ridiculously rising house prices in this area over the past two months enough to make me stop and think if now is the correct time? How could I not realize that buying a house right now would be a mistake, when my co-worker who has been working for over 15 years chooses to wait one more year to buy a home? These were all questions I was asking myself after I realized what I was doing. And there was only one answer.

I truly believed that if I bought a house, it would show the world how adult I’ve become, how successful, how tasteful, how smart.

How silly.

De-cluttering and minimalism was the best journey I ever embarked on, and it was a decision that changed my life forever. And now, we are making another big decision that will also change our lifestyle in the next ten years to come (for the better!). I am choosing to pay back my student loans aggressively, and to channel my energy into being debt-free (more on thoughts about debt to come in a future post). Where people are throwing themselves into work to get more money to buy more stuff, I am going to throw my energy and resources to RID myself of stuff. I want to choose the presence of people, the presence of mind, the presence of everything else but excess consumer goods. And I am most definitely choosing the absence of student debt.

Join me in reading about how this decision, and all other decisions about simple living, shape our life. I have a feeling that it will enrich our lives that much more. I am not a minimalist by any means, but strive to live like one, in order to be a maximalist in other, more important things.

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