Aspiring To Adventure

Let’s be honest.  We have four kids under 10, 2 of which are under 4.  We are tired.

And when you miss out on sleep for 3 or 4 days in a row (a routine occurrence in our world) you start to feel beat up and burned out.

I am already considering reasons why I ought to stick with my job a bit longer, to make a more “prudent” transition into the working world.

Is this actually prudent, or is it just fear?  

In the last 30 days, we have just spent $30k on a new Septic system (because it couldn’t be placed in a convenient place that would have been about half as much), $3200 on a new transmission (how does a manual transmission even break anyway? Yet 5th gear was definitely just gone), have to replace a shower (at $6000) and lost our tenants in our little ADU.  

Things feel tight.  Our savings have been beaten up a bit, and the end of the year is probably a bad time to start a business as everyone starts getting into Holiday mode.

Honestly, there are lots of reasons to delay.

And it looks a bit like I won’t be able to do all 3 coaching calls in November, which gives me another reason to delay, as the cost of those calls is high, and the idea that I might only get 1 or 2 greatly offends my sense of justice, and my desire to not waste money.

And maybe the company won’t do the awful thing they planned to do.  I’m speaking out against it  and perhaps having an effect?  Maybe things aren’t so bad?

But is “not so bad” what I want the next decade of my life to look like?

It feels like the years are slipping away, and I am not building anything.

What’s the end goal?  What are the constraints?

Our vision for the next year is a fully paid off life, embedded in our community, with the time and money freedom needed to be active contributors in the place where we live.

Our goal, over the next year, to help make that happen, is to pay off all our “debts”, where debts are things like mortgages, construction loans, and unfinished projects or disorganized things (i.e. things we are putting off).   The analogy of tech debt is sort of an inspiration here, but we’re applying it the rest of our life.

We want to build a platform for engaging with our community through hospitality (and going out and doing things) as well as build a strong family life.

We also came up with some constraints that can be part of our vision along the way.

1. Live with integrity (keep our values in order, reflected on calendar and bank account)
2. Keep up our spiritual practices (or strengthen them) “What does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul?” – we’re not even talking about the whole world here.
3. Major decisions involve both spouses
4. Time for family and marriage takes priority
5. Honor friendships (do not neglect friends, even though you have less time for them)
6. Don’t go broke
7. Stay here (i.e. selling everything doesn’t count as “getting out of debt”)

This is going to require some rethinking of assumptions, since I assume starting a business requires about 200 hours per week and putting on your grindset.

So this is more or less the level of definition that we have.  End of year we have about 1M in debt paid off, and we haven’t burnt our lives to the ground.

“How should we start this?”

“ I don’t know, I’m tired.”

“You’re going to be tired.  You have 5,000 children.“

We actually only have 4 kids.

We’ve been living what might look like on the surface the American Dream.  We own our own home, and we live in Southern California (the amazing weather and beautiful landscapes help you forget the high cost of living and a government that can’t seem to keep the power on consistently).  We even built a second house on our property to bring in some income to lower the cost of living.  And we’ve got a high-paying job in technology, that more than covers all these monthly payments, leaving us with some money for doing fun things with our family.  And we (more or less most of the time) really like each other.

By most accounts, we’re doing quite well.

But in the last few months, the job has been feeling like a prison.  Finding something that pays as well would be difficult.  The house needs work that we don’t have time to do, or enough money to pay for (at least not any time soon).  And we just keep feeling like something is not quite working.

Should we really be in over 900k of debt (for the house and the construction loan)?  How stable is this situation actually?  3-6 months without work would be a major problem.

The debt is something we’ve come to accept to the point of just forgetting about.  It hangs over us like a specter, any time we think about radically changing our life, or doing something more exciting or interesting.  “But how are we going to pay the mortgage?  What if our renters move out and we have to pay both loans with no income?”

In short, debt, which is a future obligation, is driving a lot of our decisions about what we should do with ourselves and our family. 

And invisibly and subtly draining our energy for doing something new, or trying something new.

 In short, despite everything looking great on paper, and having many things we are incredibly grateful for, we just aren’t quite living.

We could probably sell everything.  But we are very invested in the community we have here.  

So, rather than tap out, downsize, and quit, we decided to try a different experiment.

Let’s pay off ALL of our debt.  In just one year.  

“That seems like a lot”

Yes, yes it does.

And there is no amount of scrimping, saving, scrambling, cutting corners, checking the couch cushions, or skipping coffees that would get us anywhere even remotely close to that goal in a year.

It’s basically impossible.

And that’s what we are going to try to do over the next 12 months.  

How exactly?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Recently, at work, I had decided to pull out all the stops, and try to get to the next level.  It has been a bit of a struggle, and I decided to take more ownership of my situation.  I had asked for and gotten approval to get some executive coaching to help me be more effective.  

And then, in between scheduling some exploratory calls and having them, my employer announced some initiatives I didn’t feel comfortable being involved with.  And I decided that maybe it was time to start thinking about what’s next.

Coaching

In the first two calls, we worked on fleshing out a compelling vision of the future.  Something that would inspire and direct the next year of effort.  Coaching is not about self-improvement, in this context, but about getting a result you really want but don’t see how to get.  

But what was my compelling vision?  I thought about a life with a short work week, lots of income, time for my family, contributing and volunteering within my community.  

That all sounded great, but after a few days, it didn’t really stick.  It wasn’t that interesting.  Something was missing, and something still didn’t feel right.

My Difficult Wife

Just kidding, not difficult, just a bit stubborn, but in a helpful way.

I was about to start a 3 month engagement to figure out what the compelling future would be, and she kept saying something like “Didn’t he say you should have something you want, before you spend all this time and money on coaching?  Seems like you’re not ready.”

After arguing back and forth, and for some reason feeling an intense level of stress about this, she mentioned something like “We need to get our house in order.  Successful people have their stuff in order.  They take care of their stuff.  How can we go out there if everything here is a mess?”

In our haze of sleep deprivation, somehow the subject of all of our mortgage debt and the construction loan came up later that evening, possibly as a reason we shouldn’t spend thousands of dollars for me to come up with “my dream goal”.  Nobody really remembers this conversation.  We don’t sleep.

Debt.  

Debt means you are promising someone else to constrain your life into certain parameters for however long it takes to pay them.  You want to keep that house?  Don’t stop having an income that can pay for it.

The problem is that most things that are really interesting require a lot of startup time.  Time of exploration, experimentation, and meandering.  Those bets don’t always pay off.  Exploring in this way requires some time freedom.

And the debt was the reason I felt trapped in my 300k/year job, which on paper was great.  I was grateful for it, but also felt like I wanted to try some new things, and couldn’t imagine taking the steps.

Debt, like all the things in our house that needed to be repaired or replaced, was another demand on our time in the future, and it was stifling our creativity and sense of exploration.

It is a compelling, meaningful, and seemingly impossible goal – to pay off all of our debts in the next 12 months.