Hi all!
I love this personal journal idea. Almost like a blog within a forum. I have so many things over the years that I've wanted to share but they just don't deserve a whole thread so they go unshared.
Anyway! I came to SL through YMOYL. I believe I saw a newspaper article or something similar, got the book, and it spoke to me - like the celestial beacon of light slicing through the clouds.
The idea of money = time was always a natural one for me as even in my teenage years I would think of a certain expenditure and think, wow, I had to work xxx amount of hours to earn this. However, it wasn't until I found YMOYL that I found a procedure to actually channel this thinking into positive results in my life.
From starting the steps of YMOYL I began to attack my debt. Four years later I (and later, my DH with me) had paid off all $30,000 of my car, undergraduate and graduate student loans. When I first started to float this idea to close friends and family, all good people, I found zero support. They just couldn't conceive of it even being possible. Debt was just a way of life and why worry about it? It was only here in the forums and on the "get out of debt" goal on 43things that I began to find support for the idea of paying off all debt.
Through the course of accomplishing several of the YMOYL steps I also inventoried my stuff. The watershed "stuff" moment came when I counted up my socks - 82 pairs! What a dumb item to shift my thinking, but that's what happened. From there I started to purge like mad. I have a conflicted relationship with "stuff" since my childhood home always was super cluttered and now is a full-out hoarding situation.
My DH and I are both teachers and we both enjoy the security that hanging on to our money gives us - the mental peace. While I am sure we are not pulling down the money that others are, we feel we have enough for our needs. It helps that we are both naturally inclined to self-sufficiency activities like trying our hand at home repair, or sewing, or cooking. We enjoy learning those new skills. We question what we spend on - if we really need it or if it is just another piece of junk to waste our money on, store, and wreck the planet with.
Just some of my simple living thoughts! Looking forward to sharing more of this journey with all of you.