Journey to Future Freedom

Category: Blogs

  • Better Off!

    Wow what a read this was. It really challenged my thoughts around what I would be prepared to live and live without. I often think that Technology is both a curse and a blessing at various different times and so it was an enjoyable read. You could really feel the growth that happened as the couple worked their way through the 18 months that they lived without.

    The conveniences that we live with; running water, instant heat, light at the flick of the switch, refrigeration. The ability to boil the jug, use the oven within minutes of turning it on, dry my clothes in the drier on a rainy day, search google for a recipe or information. Pop to the supermarket when short on an ingredient.

    I am sure that I could live without some of them. I would just need to be more organised or perhaps have a lot more time on my hands. Which I guess is where the convenience of it all comes in.

    I think it would be fun to rent an off grid home for a weekend and take the family away to see how we all cope with it. Probably be a great way of torturing the teens and probably ourselves in the process.

    Is it something you could do?

  • What a bust!

    Turns out that NZ prices a way too expensive for my challenge. Yesterday we needed butter, bread, eggs, milk and coffee. I guess coffee would be a want but I needed it!

    Butter and a dozen eggs alone were over $20!

    So my $10 a day year has just changed into a very low spend year. I will still be tracking my spending so it will be fun to see how low we can keep it.

  • 2/365

    Well I forgot my entire handbag today. Good to know I don’t feel quite so tethered to it, I guess. So that meant no spend. I really didn’t factor in the school holidays though.

    I came home from work to an extra child for the night which meant changing up dinner to a meal that would fill the stomachs of teen boys that had been out biking all day so Mac and Cheese it was.

    Thought i’d throw a cake together for snack and morning tea for tomorrow and got half. way through it only to discover said teens had used all the eggs. So off I sent them to the supermarket with $10 and the don’t buy anything else spiel. Well they came back with the smallest pack of eggs ever and a bottle of soda water. Oh well. $7.50 spent.

    This is going to be so much harder than I thought. I spent some time today browsing the supermarket sites and man NZ food prices are horrendous. I know we are in desperate need of butter but $8.29 was the cheapest 500g block I could find. So we will be using it very sparingly from now on.

    Feel free to through suggestions on butter alternatives at me. For now I’m just using up the very large container of coconut oil I found in the pantry.

  • 1/365

    Day One of 365 saw me spend $4 on a loaf of bread. I managed to throw together a bento bowl using what we already had at home. In my rush I had grabbed chicken thigh fillets with the bone in for the meal so I got to work deboning the chicken so we could use it, thank goodness there was only one bone in each.

    The dogs sure were happy to munch away on the raw chicken bones. I looked at the price of these only and was shocked to see that buying the thigh this was is $10 cheaper per kilogram so for the extra few minutes we will definitely be doing this again.

    Crunchy coating was made using a Skinny Mixers recipe- I had no idea I actually had tapioca flour in the cupboard. I can’t recall the recipe it was purchased for either. It will be good to use up some of the stored items that we have. Not sure what will happen after that?

    One child was away for the night so there was plenty of chicken left over for todays sandwiches.

  • Low Spend Year!

    Today marks the first official day of our low spend year. I have been inspired by a couple of books that I have read lately to see if we can spend less. This is actually something that I am quite excited about and I am looking forward to seeing just how far I can stretch the budget.

    I am only focusing on household expenses. So food, cleaning products, animal food, etc. The goal for the next 365 days is to spend less than $10 a day. So $3650 over the year.

    The only rule I have set for myself is that I can’t use the $10 from days in advance but I can save leftover money for days that come in under $10 to use in the future.

    To give an idea on what we would normally spend I roughly worked out it would be around $18,000 if we were to include coffees and alcohol in the budget. Though lately we have been using the coffee machine at home and not purchasing coffees. We have both cut down the alcohol consumption too and we are kicking the year off with dry July .

    How do I feel about this? Excited, daunted, looking forward to seeing where our creativity takes us.

    Feel free to share your cheap meal ideas….

  • Slowing Down

    I have found myself slowly slowing down lately. Rushing syndrome! I don’t know if it’s a thing but, I have suffered in a big way for a long time. I will be driving home from say Hockey and my mind is literally going 15 mins to get home 5 to light the fire, 5 to get the washing in. Dinner needs to be done by 6.45. Every morning I tell my kids they will make me late for work. I work for myself FFS I set my own start time. Why don’t I just make it 15 minutes later. Will we all fall over if dinner is 20 minutes later that my again self imposed time? I doubt it. Do I need to jump when someone says they can’t find something as though I need to set a world record .

    So I have been pushing myself to slow down, take more time, not feel as though I am rushing.

    It felt ugly and hard and like I was forcing myself to walk around naked to start with but I am slowly getting more into it and actually enjoying the time that things take without a time frame to stick to. This morning I got up and made cheese and bacon scones for breakfast, something that in the past I would have declared there no time for on a weekday. We had plenty of time and it was nice having everyone eat together rather than all at seperate times.

    I’m finding it crazy how tasks seem to take less time when I don’t rush than when I do…a strange parallel universe of time perhaps. Weird but I’ll take it!

  • The Moneyless Man

    Last weeks read in my journey to figuring out what future freedom looks like was The Moneyless Man.

    What a thought provoking read! I can confidently say that following the reading of the book I have no desire to live without money. However, it did prompt me to think about the conveniences that we spend money on.

    We overhauled our spending at the beginning of this year knowing that we would have two children in private school and would probably need some extra pennies. So I considered myself to be a fairly frugal spender already.

    However at the beginning of last week I decided to keep a diary of our household spending. Every single thing that we purchased, lunch when we forgot ours, the kids saying they had a shared lunch, a bottle of water here, sports drink while at Moto, coffee while at Moto, beers & wine. I was blown away by all the little extras that added up and mostly because I was disorganised. An extra 5 minutes in the morning to fill a water bottle or get lunch out of the fridge, fill the thermos would have saved us about $60. I justify this as a small amount but when you add it up over a year it is no longer a small amount.

    So I have decided to continue the habit of tracking the small expenses and see if we can find some patterns and change some habits.

  • Parenting through a crazy lens.

    I remember being pregnant with my first and being so excited. I had all these dreams about the type of parent I was going to be, the opportunities I would ensure my children got, the calm educational activities I would do with them. I even dreamed of durasealing school books and duraseal and I hate each other.

    Then life happened! My Dad got cancer, I worked more than I would have liked, my husband worked more than he would have liked. Day care costs, school costs, sports practices and birthday parties here there and everywhere.

    The thousands of toddler questions turned into negotiating with children and then teen tantrums , things broken by boys and girls and their catty comments.

    Somewhere amongst it all my threads of patience grew thin and I found myself raising my voice more than I would like and forgetting things that shouldn’t be forgotten. Things broken by boys and girls and their catty comments.

    You spend the majority of your parenting life questioning whether you are doing it right, could I have handled it differently, will my teens every like me again and then right when you least expect it you get a text, “I love you, Mum”.

    Maybe just maybe i’m doing something right… but it is certainly the hardest job I have ever had. Sometimes it’s hard to see what is beyond the tunnel you are currently in.

    Photo credit to my son(6) The entrance of a hut made many years ago

  • Ramblings…#1 because there are probably many to come.

    When I started this journey I had no Idea where it would take me or how quickly my thinking would escalate and dart all over the place. 

    There were so many aspects of change that I felt needed to undergo that I really didn’t know what to expect and nor where it would head.  I think that is what I am loving about the journey. 

    I actually don’t know what is ahead of me.  All I know is that I am chasing some version of freedom, yet to be determined or evolving and that each day I want to be a better version of myself.

    At this stage I feel as though I am mostly achieving this with slips ups along the way.  I think the difference is I am not aiming for perfection I am aiming for progress and I am really not concerned about the tiny blips I am just learning from them and continuing to plough forwards.

    I think the greatest aspect of freedom I have found so far is the concept of being at peace with myself.  Not overthinking, beating myself up, feeling as though I am never good enough. 

    Yes I still walked into a knee high washing pile in the laundry this morning and I had kids that couldn’t find this and that…probably because they were yet to be washed but it’s only washing.  And truth be said there are 3 other people in our house capable of doing it.

    In the past I would feel like a failure because I wasn’t running the house the way I felt it should be run but if I am honest they were the expectations I put on myself. So I am finding this new way of kinder thinking towards myself to be much better for my mental health and in many ways very freeing.

  • What a week!

    It’s winter here and certainly been a crazy week filled with Winter sports, grandparents visiting and even vet visits.

    We have three VIPs in our house. The creatures that I like more than my kids some days. They are always happy to see us. Never grumpy and the only thing they consistently nag for is cuddles.

    So here I find myself having a lazy Saturday morning coffee in bed while it rains outside. Not much room for me but everyone is happy.

    This week my in laws had to put their dog down and we were discussing what dog to get for them next. The kids suggested all sorts of large breeds and we had to point out Nana and Grandad are old now and probably need a smaller dog.

    We have had Rottweiler’s for the last 25 years and so it was triggering thinking about a future me too old to have a large dog. Thankfully old age is still many years away.