We're Moving! - Ashley and Josiah

We’re moving.

Shocking, right? Why would we move from this gorgeous house (that’s plenty big enough for us btw) just three years after moving in?

That’s basically what Ashley asked me when I first floated the idea to her as well…

It all started with a candid conversation I had with a close friend a few weeks ago and a simple question he asked me;

“So how much money would you need per month to leave your job and work on another start up again?”

I hadn’t really thought about that question as of late but I knew the answer right away and I wasn’t too proud about what came out of my mouth next.

During the time I ran my previous business, Ashley and had I sold our house, moved into an RV, and I went from making a decent salary as a web developer to making just the bare minimum in order to pursue our visions of entrepreneurship. Ashley‘s income with her blog kept us afloat and occasionally paid for some nice meals out, but as a general rule, we lived for many years with our expenses as low as possible while trying not to max out our credit cards.

Eventually, those efforts paid off when we were able to sell both of our businesses for a nice profit, allowing us to treat ourselves to some nice things, pay off all the debt we had racked up, and buy a beautiful house.

More recently, though, Ashley and I have been cutting all our extraneous expenses and looking pretty carefully at our budget so when my friend asked me that question I knew the number instantly. But when I said it out loud I really didn’t feel good about it.

Our expenses had quietly risen to the level of our income. We weren’t saving nearly as much as we could be. And after a couple of unexpected hospital stays last year, I was all too aware that if I suddenly lost my job or some large unexpected expense came up our financial situation could change very quickly. Furthermore, our relatively high expenses meant that I was really not in the position to take another risk by starting another company again… something I definitely want to do at some point.

On a bit of a whim, I floated the idea of downsizing our house to Ashley and shared with her some examples of the type of house we might be able to live in. As expected, she expressed that if we had to she’d understand, but if we didn’t have to move, she’d rather not. She had invested a lot of time and energy in making this house a home and it would be difficult to not be able to see the fruits of her labor as all the trees we’d planted and the beautiful back yard she had been working so hard on mature over the next few years.

We agreed and decided to look at other means of reducing our expenses and increasing our income and I let it go. After a couple of weeks though, I found myself continuing to think about the number I had finally voiced aloud and really just not feeling good about it. Without downsizing our house I just didn’t see any other way to lower our expenses to a level I felt comfortable with. I felt a little apprehensive about bringing it up to Ashley again but, in the interest of expressing my feeling I shared with her that I still felt like we should really consider this and that I really didn’t feel good internally about how high our expenses were.

To my surprise, she was extremely open to the discussion. She told me that while she didn’t want to make a spur of the moment decision about such a big transaction, she knew how important it was that both of us honor our deeper feelings – our soul speaking to us – and that if I didn’t feel good about the number that was an important thing that we needed to take seriously. What a wonderfully refreshing response, I thought.

I won’t bother you with the details, but here we are today, a month later, and we’re getting ready to close on our new house as we prepare to list our house for sale.

We built a beautiful flagstone patio to maximize the sale value of the house and we’re having a photographer out later this week to take professional photos.