Time vs. Money, and Our “Budget Lockdown" Challenge

Boy, do I love budgets!

Since getting married, Chris & I have set aside an hour or two at the end of every month to go over our budgets and spending.  We have a really boring name for this, our Monthly Budget Reconciliation Meetings, and it's like Chris's worst nightmare.  As someone who's back-burner-dreamed of becoming an accountant/book-keeper, these meetings are about 5,000 times more exciting for me than for poor Chris!  Still, since all the time we've known each other (2007), there's only been 8 months that we've overlapped and BOTH had full-time paid employment, so this balancing act of supporting each other has become pretty much routine for us.

Get serious here!

In leaving the DC area, one of the motivating factors was that we hoped to live in a lower cost-of-living area where we could both have some time to pursue unpaid activities while simultaneously not going into debt.  To do this, we've instituted the dreaded Budget Lockdown!

The Budget Lockdown logic goes, we have set categories of required expenses each month and we set our categorical limits so that our minimal income covers these expenses.  Then anything that we spend outside of these preset categories comes directly out of our savings, which should motivate us to stop unbudgeted spending, excepting emergencies.  [Side note: Mint.com is an awesome free tool for managing all this -- Mint automatically syncs expenses/income from an unlimited # of accounts so you just have to categorize, don't have to do any data entry!]

Sometime back in college while working on a living wage campaign, the idea that my life is worth at least $10/hour made me think about purchases in a way that has stuck with me: is this item going to be worth exchanging x hours of my life for?

When I was getting paid my max wage of $17/hour, it was a lot easier to say “OK, I can pretty easily buy this $10 item because it only took me half an hour to earn it, that's like no time at all!"  But those small items really add up and you end up with a bunch of STUFF that you don't necessarily need or feel great about owning.  However, later down the road when you can't justify spending really any money on discretionary items like this, at least you can reuse/reinvent all the stuff you already own in order to get by!

Q:  So what happens to this equation when your wage is $0/hour?

A:  You do a whole lot more things yourself!

Coming from someone who's always tried to live from a DIY standpoint, this earning $0/hour is sort of like an adventure in challenging myself to live true to my ideals.  No alcohol budget?  Homebrew!  No entertainment budget?  Go on a walk!  Or, get movies at the library, or convert your old home movies from when you were a kid, plus then you can finally get rid of that VCR!  No restaurants budget?  Plan menus better!  No snacks budget?  Make your own!  No fast food budget?  Make food ahead & freeze it!  No clothing budget?  Mend what you got!  Limited grocery budget?  Grow your own food!  And in winter?  Build a hoophouse or eat foodstuffs you've preserved!

Root Juice!

All of these pieces of advice are things I found totally impractical to do on the scale that could actually make an economic impact for our family while also holding a full-time job, and Chris was less interested in being the one to head up any of these projects (although he's a fantastic sous chef!).  I know very few people who are able to both work full-time AND do everything at home, and once you have kids you're trying to support, priorities all change because really spending your free time playing with your kid vs darning socks is no real contest.

Chillaxin'!

So what Chris & I are doing right now is sort of like a bucket-list fantasy of mine -- something that may end up a total disaster, but that I would always regret if I died without having tried, & something that only seems possible if we get in the DIY habit before we have children: Try to live with as little an economic impact as possible.  We're not really doing this anywhere close to the scale of self-sufficiency that some people do -- we're on the electrical grid & can't currently afford solar panels.  Obamacare kicked in just in time for us, which is miraculously saving us almost $700/month from what we paid before in health insurance, & basically makes this all possible!  We buy gas for Chris to get to his job 2 days a week, and to visit family & friends, near & far.  We have some internet, and drive to the library for more when we run out or need to transfer large files.  We had a chest freezer-full of very random, mostly expired foods when we moved here, plus a fair number of root veggies from our DC garden, so we have been creatively trying to use up whatever we already have on hand rather than using a grocery store as our primary source of ingredients.  But for day-to-day decisions, we are getting good at trying to figure out if there's a way to meet our needs without spending any money.

So after 3 months of Budget Lockdown, how's it going?  

Visiting the lake

As it turns out, we're fairly good about sticking to our spending for budgeted expenses, but a bit worse about spending when it comes to unbudgeted items.

Budget Lockdown means each unbudgeted purchase becomes more than just a snap decision -- something like buying a $20-40 item becomes an evening project to pore over all the reviews of different models to be certain to make the best selection.  For example, some of our recent unbudgeted expenses include: a Brush Grubber, a carbon monoxide detector, and a woodstove thermometer.  Pretty practical stuff that will improve our lives, but stuff that we didn't know we really “needed".

I'm usually fairly impatient and if I think I need a certain product in order to accomplish a task, I'd way rather just choose one that looks decent enough and hope for the best.  In the past, our Time vs Money graph settled on my side of the fence, where it actually realistically (financially) wouldn't be worth putting that much thought/effort/time into trying to save $20, but now since most of our time isn't paid anyway, Chris is in product-ordering-heaven being able to really deliberate over each item and not having any pushback from me about what a waste of time that could be.

Cheap date

The main positive thing that Budget Lockdown has done for us is it feels like there is no such thing as wasted time anymore!  By driving a wedge between these two aspects so intertwined in the “time is money" attitude, we're now able to do a lot of the random things we have “never had time for," or at least certainly never made time for.  There's no-one but ourselves to judge what a “good use of time" is!

Another aspect of how Budget Lockdown is playing out positively is in how it's affected some of our old patterns (ruts) we got into addressing ADHD in our relationship -- particularly as it pertains to the amount of time it takes to accomplish any concrete objectives.  Before learning anything about ADHD (and sometimes even after!), the typical pattern is something like:

1. Both partners agree on some course of action to reach a mutually desired outcome & decide how soon they want to accomplish it.
2. The non-ADHD partner spends considerable time & effort breaking the ultimate goal into smaller achievable pieces, setting deadlines and a logical order in which these should be done in order to meet the overall goal in the agreed-upon timetable.
3. These smaller benchmarks/subtasks are divided up, usually with more of the “harder" or less concrete tasks taken on by the non-ADHD partner (at least, if they've learned anything about working together).
4. The non-ADHD partner focuses and achieves all assigned tasks by stated deadlines, maybe even sooner because they probably knew to build a buffer into the timeline.
5. When they check in with each other, the ADHD partner has either lost track of the tasks, hyperfocused on one minute aspect of a task, or has forgotten why they are doing any of this stuff in the first place.
6. The non-ADHD partner gently (at first) reminds the ADHD partner of the ultimate goal they had both committed to, and points out how close they are, maybe even offers to take on more of the remaining incomplete subtasks if needed.
7. ADHD partner decides they no longer need to pursue the original goal, wants to change the “totally arbitrary" order of the subtasks, or wasn't listening while the non-ADHD partner was talking so asks again why they're doing any of this stuff.
8. Non-ADHD partner gets upset and starts blaming the ADHD partner for not paying attention and not caring about their shared life together & melodramatically ranting about how they will never get anything done as a team because “nothing ever gets done if I don't just do it myself!" and “what's the point of being in a relationship if I can't count on you to do your half?"
9. ADHD partner gets defensive and blames non-ADHD partner for being so focused on deadlines and checking things off that they never get to have any fun & why are they so single-minded/controlling/nagging/boring/etc, what is their problem anyway?!?
10. Neither partner feels especially heard, understood, or loved, and therefore neither feels like compromising or working together any more, and so the shared goal remains unachieved, and the time the non-ADHD partner put into getting them 80% of the way there is just lost & unrecognized.  The ADHD partner promptly forgets this episode ever happened but the non-ADHD partner begins to hold a grudge after this scenario repeats several times over.

Hours of amusement

So now, with Budget Lockdown (aka when there's no perception of time a-wasting), I can largely let go of tasks, goals, & deadlines and it is much easier to adopt Chris's concept of time where the days blend into each other and what doesn't get done today might possibly get done next week or maybe next month, without resenting the time slipping by.  Instead of thinking like a single-minded linear robot, “It is now 2:34pm on Tuesday January 7th, we only have however many hours left to accomplish this huge list of stuff today," I can now think simply “It's Winter."

For me, someone who as a kid always dreamed of living in a tree with wolves and squirrels as my only companions and only the sun & passing seasons to tell time by, this is a lot closer to living by my actual values, not what I've been socialized to want to accomplish.  This new attitude toward time & living with a lack of to-do lists has led much more often to the sort of interactions I always hoped to have with my partner:

1. Hey baby, how's that project coming along?
2. Well, I was working on that thing we talked about doing, but then I was cold so I went out to get some wood for the fire, and when I was outside I went to go check the mail, and a friend sent us this CD, and I saw a bird fly by that dropped this feather, isn't it big?  Whoa, I love this song!  Wanna dance?



Why not?!

3. Definitely!

So far at least, our Budget Lockdown experiment is going pretty darn well!  We don't expect to be able to make it last more than a few months before we get jobs or decide to have children, but meanwhile we'll be doing our best to make the most of every day, in our own way!

What are we doing?!

To those who know me and Chris, you'll know that this past year has been one full of numerous transitions for us, each of us personally making a 180 shift in our daily activities, and then also managing that major shift of responsibilities between us as a couple.  From us both changing careers, number of paid hours worked (0->50, and 50->0), amount of free time (about the inverse), household duties, priorities, discovering how ADHD plays out in a partnership, and managing all of the tenants and housemates that've been needed to maintain an income level that gets us barely squeaking by within $50 of our monthly expenses, it has been a fairly rough year all around!

Being married is hard enough
work to cause calluses!

We've both learned a whole lot about better communication, better listening, having more patience, better anger management, being clearer with our expectations, when it makes sense to spend a lot of energy & when to just let go, and oh of course, we learned lots about compromise.  While all those are great things & our lives are better for it, for two really stubborn people all of that is pretty exhausting and it wasn't how we planned to spend our 2nd year of marriage!

More than we expected -- up & down, round & round,
but still smiling & still holding hands!

Bea & Chris in Maine

So this past June, Chris & I went on a week-long (too quick!) road-trip vacation to visit some friends & family up in Maine, Vermont, and points in between.  Out of the 5 groups of people we visited, 3 of them had some “non-traditional" kind of idyllic-seeming rural living arrangement/lifestyle worked out where they got to spend most of their time doing activities besides focusing on economic gain.  From raising alpacas to foraging wild edibles & grinding their own acorn flour, changing cloth diapers on a sheep-skin to living in a tiny house (40 sf converted toolshed), we visited a lot of happy people!!!

Somewhere along the trip, the distance between these people who were living the sorts of dreams I had always envisioned myself & my then-hypothetical partner pursuing and where Chris & I currently exist day-to-day became so stark.  I kept thinking, “We have to get ourselves a farmhouse!  We have to get away from the city!"  Chris was not quite so easily convinced.

For a month or two, I kept looking at our city life, trying to figure out if there was a way to make it work without moving away.  I just keep coming back to the same problem -- I want more space, physically, mentally.  I want our income to be more in line with the median of a given area, without compromising our values and without the career-driven, overpriced, hustle bustle and traffic.  Neither Chris or I are career-focused and would far prefer both working part-time and having free-time for hobbies and each other, and our someday future kids, rather than busting our butts just to make ends meet.  I want to co-create a life with Chris as a team, not to try & adopt him into the city life I had before he came into it & vice versa.  Chris originally moved to DC for a job (long-since finished) and to meet someone to settle down with (check!).  I originally bought a house just outside DC in order to support the lifestyle required for me to start up a non-profit urban farm project, but after 4 years & getting married, it was time for me to get regular paid work and rebuild my savings account.  In short, our reasons for living in the city have been a couple years obsolete.

I started day-dreaming about my ideal property in the country.  Chris' folks live near Richmond, so being closer to them was our only geographical constraint.  On a sleepy weekend morning, I got Chris and a notebook in the same place, and we brainstormed this list:

Required	Would be Nice
3+ bedrooms	Pond
2 bathrooms	5 bedrooms
Space for garden	Pre-made garden area
Workshop area	Outbuilding(s)
Modern windows	Solar panels/south-facing roof
Modern roof	Wood-burning stove
Town within 15 minutes	Central A/C
Hobby rooms (craft, computer)	Ceiling fans
Porch (covered)	Gas stove
Big kitchen	Chicken coop
Not a trailer	Town within 5 minutes
Not new construction	Wraparound porch
Flush toilets	Basement/Storage
Good source of water	Large closets
Broadband/cable internet	Wood floors (no carpet)
	Riding mower conveys
	Tall ceilings
	200 amp modern electrical
	Woods
	Shade trees near house
	Paved road
	Progressive neighbors/community

So with this info & Chris somewhat grudgingly on-board with the idea, I went online and started looking at Craigslist home listings.  It led me to a few real-estate websites that were about a thousand times more searchable (and I took advantage, tagging far too many as “possibilities").  Weeks later, we set up a tiny projector, pillows on the office floor, and I got Chris to watch a day's worth of slideshows of real estate photos flash by on the ceiling displayed in 256 colors.  Alt-tab to google maps to make sure each one isn't totally in the middle of nowhere.  We narrowed it from 50+ houses to 10 in all directions around Charlottesville, and we decided to go in person to see what these places really looked like.

We made a last-minute reservation to spend the night in a caboose cabin and headed off to see 10 houses in 2 days, as an information-gathering-only type of trip.  Luckily, the realtor wasn't available to go with us to all 10 on 24-hours' notice so we drove all around by ourselves and managed to get inside & view 3 of the houses.  From the remoteness & lack of reasonably nearby towns, we quickly ruled out 90% of them.

Farm I worked at -- you can just barely see the
barn from the top of the driveway.
Beautiful, but pretty inaccessible.

I mean, I've lived on a farm where you have 1.5 miles of rocky muddy clay and 10% grade to navigate just to the top of the driveway, and from there 15 more miles to get gas or groceries.  If you don't have a 4x4 (and we don't), you're not leaving if it rains.  We'd much rather be able to get out & about whenever we need to!

Anyway, that whole week following, the 2nd house we saw kept playing around in Bea's head.  Not only did it meet all but one of our requirements (we've since decided the original wavy glass windows were way better suited to an 1880s house than modern windows!), but most of our “would be nice" checklist was represented too.  PLUS THERE IS AN ABANDONED GENERAL STORE ZONED COMMERCIALLY!

So many possibilities!  And so the adventure begins...  We'll be moving sometime between October-January, depending on how soon we find new jobs in the Charlottesville area.

We'll update our progress periodically on this site.  We probably won't post with any regular schedule, so please subscribe if you want to keep up with us!  Thanks for following our adventures into the next chapter of our lives!

The soon-to-be Fixettwell Farmhouse!