Hopping off the treadmill

How much does it cost to live here?  Yes, there is a monetary cost.  The mortgages, the cars and the gas to drive them. And let's not forget utilities; heat, air conditioning, water, electricity.  Then there is the food.  Even if you eat at home and never, ever go to a restaurant, eating organic and healthy is not cheap.   The kids' activities are a pretty penny too.  Dance, soccer and school.  Between their hot lunch program, books, uniforms and school supplies, I need another part time job.

Do you really know how much it costs to live where you are?

And we really shouldn't stop there. There is another cost, the cost of being absent.  We run our children to one thing and then the next. I go to work as my husband gets home.  A woman I talked to today said that her husband has two jobs and works seven days a week.  That's a cost to a family.  When you are home, are you really present?  Are you absorbing every moment?

Are the goals you and your family set for yourselves the ones that you truly want?  Or are they the ones you've been told are necessary to succeed?

Well, we figured it out.  We actually do know what the monetary cost is to live here.  By tracking our spending on a simple web site (we used Mint.com), we watched our money come in and go out.   Over a 30 month sample, we have a pretty accurate idea of what it costs to live here.  And it was stunning.  Shocking, even.  Who knew that car maintenance could add up this way or that heating an older home could be so formidably expensive?

What we hadn't quite figured out was the cost to our family.  We knew something was wrong. We knew we weren't happy on the treadmill, and we knew that we didn't spend enough time together.

So we have decided to make a drastic, some might even say crazy, change.  We are not the first ones to do this and don't even feel very creative.  But the decision has been made.  We'll sell off our possessions, quit our jobs and sail into the sunset.  Sorta.  A lot has to happen between now and the Fall of 2016.  But our timeline is set and we are ready to take the steps necessary to live differently.

It is costing too much.