Simplifying Life - Mark II

katep23

What a lovely thread and nice to get different perspectives on a "simpler" life.

I am taking a few weeks out after finishing up in my job which made me incredibly unhappy and depressed. Ironically I took this job for less money because a. I didn't want to be a man-manager any more and b. my old company (where I had worked for 11 years) was getting too political and I was getting caught up in it through no fault of own. As it turns out the manager I went to work for was awful and the company I went to work for was even more political and resistant to change than the old one!

My OH has just started his own company up so for a few weeks I will be helping him put processes in place, doing admin and accounts etc.

In my ideal world I would combine this with being a home-maker as we have a large garden and ducks and we would dearly love a small-holding so it would be good practice but I think I need to find another reasonably-paid job so we can afford to save towards living the dream in the future. The alternative is I re-train and become a consultant in OH's company.

I should be feeling really scared about the lack of income at the moment but I have savings and I really need some time out to decide what I want to do next.

My job until I get a paid job is to try and minimise our expenses and provide as much as possible by way of growing vegetables and finding free wood (two open fires, ineffective oil fired central heating and leaky single-glazed plate-glass, alumnium-framed windows!)

[Deleted User]

So glad this thread is running again, I love the good feeling that oozes from it.

I have been working hard to reduce my debts and simplify my life.

The debts are slowly being reduced - its going to be a long haul but it doesn't have to be miserable. I will have to work full-time for a while yet but am grateful to have a permanent job that I enjoy.

After many years of trying to keep up with the Joneses I have have realised that this is a miserable and pointless task. We have put the house up for sale to downsize to a cheaper property, I no longer care what people think, its me and DH that have lost sleep over debts not the Joneses we got into debt trying to keep up with.

Keeping up with others is just one reason we got into debt, redundancy and depression hasn't helped. I thought I could 'buy' happiness and a perfect life - unfortunately it took many years and much stress and unhappiness to find out I couldn't.

I have so enjoyed de-cluttering and simplifying my life. We still get to each payday by the skin of our teeth but we are making good repayments on our debts and aren't running up cc's just to get through the month.

So I am grateful that DH and myself are working fulltime at present to clear the debts but still use quiet times to dream of a quieter life working less and spending more time at home.

Plus I have more time than ever now I'm not spending weekends shopping and having expensive meals out.

Sorry for waffling, looking forward to following this thread.

GLx

mineallmine

I feel the need to formulate a plan with lots of little steps along the way. A key priority is to get our gas and electric bills down as much as we can. They've both doubled. So I'm going to be the standby queen now, switching things off.
If you look at this simpler life in the same way as a business, its about getting your overheads to be as economical as possible. So that's one area.

Need to think about some others

Cottage_Economy

I used to have a very different idea of what a simple life was 10 years ago...even five years ago...compared to what I have now.

Back then I thought growing my own and having chickens and ducks was a key component to it, but after being at home for a few years I realised just how much work was involved in doing both. I loved my big open garden, but not the two hours it took to mow and strim. I loved all the flower beds, but not the back-breaking weeding every week or two. Then there was the chicken damage to all the plants and the time spent nursing the ex-battery chickens with all their various ailments. I lost count of the number of them I tried to save for days in my bathroom only to lose them eventually along with a lot of sleep as I fretted about them.

I purchased the Simple Living book by Janet Luhrs and read a lot of her newsletters and found my definition of what was simple changing. Although I worked from home we were not earning enough to get ahead or retire with any kind of decent income, despite being very frugal people. What was looming was the necessity to work beyond 70 and watch dwindling resources dwindle further. I made the decision to return to work full time in a well paid job, but to do so consciously with a plan about when to stop so first hubby and then I can retire early.

Being naturally frugal is accelerating the amount of money we've been able to put aside, and allowed us to do some projects we were hanging on to do in 'retirement', although how we thought we'd do them I don't know because we never thought through the finance side of things properly.

I still keep the chickens and the ducks, but have scaled down the number I have drastically to minimise the care and cost of them and have picked strong heritage breeds from a good supplier. They are now a small part of our lives and not a key component. I do grow some veg, but usually only mange tout (I have a major fetish), lettuce and spinach and winter brassicas. I then open up the beds bit by bit for the poultry to forage for themselves over the winter months. They seem to find that very exciting, and once the initial labour planting things in the summer/autumn, everything is done I have very little work afterwards.

I've tried over the years to grow as much of my own fruit and veg and have had variable results. With a large garden that had been sprayed within an inch of its life by the former owners, I've watched as huge armies of predators attack and destroy everything due to the whole ecosystem being out of balance. The level of diseases was overwhelming the first year I moved in as refused to use sprays. Now 7 years later I've been practising permaculture techniques with varying levels of success to cut down on the amount of work in the garden.

I no longer grow tomatoes due to the overwhelming blight every year and the effort involved in saving the plants and fruits.

I no longer grow roses or clematis due to persistent fungus that kills the foliage every year. I could dig up all the soil and replace it with fresh and then new plants, but at the end of the day I'm forcing the garden to do what I want it to do, instead of being a custodian of it.

My ideal is to have a forest garden with different interacting levels of trees, shrubs and herbs with little grass apart from the paths, but it's slow work that is sometimes successful, sometimes not. Two steps forward, one step back.

I still cook and bake from scratch, although the odd bit of ready prepped scampi and chips does creep in (hubby does love his scampi!), but I focus on simple recipes that are loaded with good nutrition and quick to prepare. I've stashed my cook books in the loft as I can't part with them just yet, but the majority are so far removed from the simple ethos that I don't want to give them shelf space downstairs anymore. Sorry Nigella, Jamie, Gordon and friends...you're just too damn complicated for me now. No more sitting on a shelf imploring me to buy miso and nigella seeds and juniper leaves.

For me simple living is focusing on what is important to us and stripping back all the extra padding around it that doesn't directly contribute to our goals in life. It's constantly evaluating what we are doing and why, and not being afraid to admit when something isn't working and change course.

Being able to ignore those persistent naysayers (although I have had to be rude to one or two to get them to shut up and go away) is also very helpful.

Phew, sorry about the long post. Once I started it all came tumbling out!

mardatha

Brilliant post - thank you!

flowertotmum

Cottage Economy..great post..thats what i want to say..but mine ends up a mess...
ftm

Pinkdebster

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

I purchased the Simple Living book by Janet Luhrs and read a lot of her newsletters and found my definition of what was simple changing.

I'm really enjoying this thread and really want to make a start on simplifying my own life. Can you recommend this book as a good read on the subject or can anyone else recommend some reading?

Thanks :j

Cottage_Economy

There's so many books out there that i started off reading all the general simplicity books I could find, including the more philosophical ones even though i didn't understand bits of them. I also found lots of articles and websites on the net.

I found Janet Luhrs Simple Living very good, written a while ago so the costs for things are out of date and obviously it's american in flavour, but it is crammed with information. Quite a spiritual book as well. The book evolved from her newsletters which I'm lucky to have about 50 or so of.

Many of the simplicity books are overtly aimed at the practical side of simplicity, like decluttering. In fact some of them are stuffed so full of practical suggestions I used to feel exhausted just flicking through them. The trouble is decluttering is a major part.

One book I found an easy practical read that helped was called How to Simplify Your Life by Tiki Kustenmacher. It made decluttering everything from cupboards to relationships seem less onerous than other books and I could see how everything fitted into an overall scheme.

John December's website has some nice ideas too. I haven't read his Ebook though but it is on my list to do so.
http://www.december.com/simple/live/

After this I started being more specific about bits I wanted to change in my life and reading books and researching around those areas, such as simplifying cooking and gardening. I also read other people's accounts of downshifting, self-sufficiency, trying to figure out what parts I wanted and the bits I didn't. A lot of it just boiled down to having a go at what I could do within my budget and abilities at the time.

CurlyTop

Cottage Economy what a great post that is so spot on with what you say. Its all about tailoring your life to suit you.

We gave up the car 5 years ago, mainly because at the time DH worked from home and it wasn't getting used and I don't drive. Everything we do is around public transport and whilst you may meet some quirky characters along the way, you also meet some nice ones too but on the whole, the journey is just that, a method of getting from a to b.

I still have a square screen telly :rotfl: with a whopping overhanging box on the back. This so makes me laugh because I still don't like to look at widescreen tellys so I will continue with my little war horse until the bottom drops out of its world. My relatives think its amusing, I ain't bothered. Its only a contraption for watching sometimes rubbish tv programmes on.

I cook from scratch - no ready meals for me for over 7/8 years when I went to hospital with a mini stroke. I still can't make proper gravy so whilst its high in salt (as advised by a stroke nurse), I just have a little bit of it now and again. After all, a little of what you fancy, does you good (which I could say the same about the chocolate, I have little but at lots of times ! ). My baking has lapsed but I've gotten back into it with a vengence lately and am gonna try and bake something different each Sunday.

I meal plan for the month and although its a bit of a faff, it takes about an hour to write out my meals, reconcile it against whats in the cupboards, fridge and freezer and write my shopping list from.

I have two small(ish) gardens. I'm no green fingers so will be planting plants that need little time and attention other than a trim. My DH helps me tackle it, even though he hates gardening, cos with my m.e. I'd take forever some days to do it. It also gives us some time together and now that we work the same days and have the same days off, we're enjoying the time, which after nearly 17 years of having mis-matched diaries, is a pleasure.

Compromises and simplicity, bring it on.

VJsmum

It is mostly about attitude, though, isn't it? I really don't have a simple life - my MIL does and she hates it. All she does is go swimming once or twice a week, an occasional lunch out. I, on the other hand, dash from here to there, carrier bag in one hand, briefcase in the other. Picking kids up from all over and depositing them somewhere else. 200 mile trips to spend a few hours with my elderly dad and 2 part time jobs. In amongst all that I try to grow a few veggies, do a bit of knitting etc.

but, whilst I would like to slow my life down a little, I don't want my MIL's. She could be doing so much more - she is reasonably fit and healthy and has no money worries and yet spends most of her time alone and miserable. I think I will always be a "busy" person, but hope it is more doing what I want rather than what I have to be paid to do!!

A couple of years ago I was stressed beyond belief at work, partly because I felt I was fighting a management system I wasn't happy with and partly because I was overworked. A message went out to the staff asking for voluntary redundancy applications and I decided to apply. i was turned down but it was still a turning point for me as I made the decision to stay, I had looked around and seen that no other job was as flexible or as relatively well paid for the hours as mine was. I decided I couldn't fight the management system so I now keep my head down and my mouth shut, and, whilst I am still as busy as ever with work, I am nowhere near as stressed. it makes a huge difference.

So I am not giving up the things that make my life easier and more tolerable - the car, the holidays for example. I'd also rather be gardening than shopping, having a chat in the pub rather than clubbing, taking time out to walk in the hills or go cycling than, well, almost anything.