I'm doing 36 things
YMOYL has gone far from my daily life. At one point, I was working with a high degree of dedication on several of the steps. Slowly and one-by-one, I have stopped. That doesn’t mean I’m not intuitively doing them, because the exercise of doing them for as long as I did transformed my thinking completely.
But I think it might be time to revisit . . . when I put up this goal, I was single with no inkling I’d ever be with anyone and no plans to be. Now I am married and together, we are still working on paying off my debt (it will happen so soon!). Two factors have brought YMOYL back into my mind. One is the marriage. It’s not just my future I’m planning for. The second is the fact that if all goes according to plan, we will be out of debt except for the mortgage within six months. Then what? We have some direction from Dave Ramsey, so we will be making a 3-6 month EF, but what about the bigger vision? If each asked our own life purpose, could we answer?
We are both teachers and as far as I know, pretty happy in our jobs. So we are not feeling a desperation to exit the workplace anytime soon, but I also do not feel that this is my life’s calling. I mean, I do not feel I will be doing it for my entire life, at least in this exact form. Maybe I’ll be involved in education for a long time – it is fulfilling, challenging, and you can make a living at it. I know he doesn’t want to work the whole way to the grave, either, but we are having a hard time articulating what our actual goals are. It’s like neither of us actually believes we could leave paid employment earlier than the requisite 55 or 62 or whatever the magic number is. See, it’s so far off I don’t even know! But I think we could, and if we don’t work toward that, then we never will. We’ll just fritter our money away on other stuff and never make it happen because we won’t be trying to make it happen.
And then there’s our house . . . even paying the payment amount only, we could be paid off in 8 years. That’s an amazing feeling and would get us that much closer to Financial Independence. But I am feeling kind of tempted to look at other places right now, especially since this tax credit was offered to already-homeowners. A few months ago, DH was the one into looking at other houses, so this isn’t just my nagging thing – his is just laying more dormant at the moment :) There are definitely some things we aren’t in love with about our house, but none that make us hate living here. There are lots of things we like, too, and my husband has put a lot of money and sweat into the home over the years (he’s owned it for 8). So the questions maybe should come into play . . . is a different house worth the life energy it would take to buy it? Is buying a different house just getting us further from our (undefined) goals? Or is it making an investment in a place we truly want to be, where we truly feel at home, is truly all the things we want it to be for the long haul?
Big time soul-searching update! As always, the 43T perspective is appreciated.
