You don’t have to be a millionaire to live the life that you dream of. To succeed and fulfill our goals just takes passion, love, courage, vision and some hard work, it’s with that recipe anything becomes possible.
As life seems to flow by ever so fast, as another year comes to an end, it’s time for me to reflect on what got us to this point and what we plan to achieve for 2012. Our plan is simple really, to save money. To save so we can explore Australia with our children. As we move into our 30’s this decade, where we really get to know our children, where we really get to spend some amazing moments with them before they move on to live independently, I think it’s a decade we will cherish in our lives. I know one thing for certain, it’s a decade I’m not willing to let pass by in a blur of fitting in with social standards.
It occurs to me that for many years we’ve wanted to travel and explore, but while many things stopped us, the overwhelming reason was affordability. I mean, who can afford just to leave everything behind and travel right? WRONG! I’ve learned a lot about both myself and my little family, and the world at large over the past few months: Unless you are truly ready for something, it’s not going to happen. Unless you TRULY want to achieve something, then you’ll always find an excuse!
I honestly believe that ANYONE can achieve their dreams, but you have to be willing and ready for hard work and sacrifice to get there, and that’s the point we are at right now!
How We’re Saving to Travel Australia
When you have a goal and you’ve thought about it for long enough, if you really want it, there comes a time when you realise there’s no way it will happen if you don’t make it. That’s where we’re at. So in order to travel Australia we need to save money. We need to be smart with our lives, we need to remain focused. We need to cut spending. In order to do that we are:
- Moving House – Cheaper rent in an old house close to work means saving an estimated $8000 a year on rent and petrol bills!
- Cutting off Pay TV – Saving ourselves a grand total of $1350
- Selling off all our “things” we don’t need
- Menu planning to reduce food wastage and allocate for packed lunches instead of buying them during the week
- Not buying by impulse – There’s lots we’ll want but truly little we will need!
Where we’ve come from:
It’s amazing how we change and grow as people. Not just myself and Matt, but everyone, generally. If you talk to most people, their ideals and goals in life are a continually changing and evolving. Different passions come and go, and are replaced by new passions, new vision and new exciting forecasts for the future. It’s what makes life so interesting and what keeps things exciting.
I’m not sure if we’ve changed as people, or we’ve become more confident, allowing ourselves to be true to who we really are regardless of how different that may be to what society accepts. We’ve spent the last decade of our lives trying to break away from our past, carve new destinies and try and figure out how best to raise a young family and provide our children with a wonderful childhood, and opportunities that we perhaps didn’t have due to financial constraints.
We’ve spent the last decade faced with the mortality of close family members, left behind holding onto nothing more than memories of those we loved dearly. It was those losses that led us to an appreciation of cherishing moments over material posessions.
We’ve started and grown businesses, successful ones! Made and lost friends, had great parenting successes and many failures too! Been tortured from lack of sleep, but most of all we’ve taken as much time as we could to explore nature, explore this amazing country and allow our children to wallow in mud and experience amazing sunsets and everything in between.
How We’re Looking Forward for 2012
We’ve realised what we want. It’s that simple. We want to spend as much time as we can experiencing Australia with our kids. We want others to know that they can achieve their goals too, and we’re going to prove that anything is possible! Succeeding with our dreams is something that’s going to take both sacrifice, hard work and passion, but we’re signing on whole hearted for the journey and we’re looking forward to sharing the ride with everyone we know and all the amazing people we’ve been busy meeting online too.
Congratulations!
I can’t tell you how much of what you have written here takes me back to where we were a year ago. You are dead on with everything. Just stick with it and stay focused and it will happen.
I love what you guys are doing and what is motivating you. All the best and we will be saving right there with you.
Thanks Justin! Lucky for me, I have connected with some AMAZING families such as yourselves over the past few months and discovered a new strength to move forward to live our dream. So I feel blessed I now have some great peers to share the journey with. Really what is the sacrifice of living in an old run down house vs a “pretty” home for a little while? It’s all a matter of perspective and priorities as you would well know 🙂
This is great. Your strategies for saving are all things we’ve done as well. Getting rid of pay-TV was such a no brainer for us. Not only does it take away resources we’d rather spend on travel, but it sucks us in and we end up spending too much time watching it. I mean even when I am not traveling do I really want to spend my evenings in front of a TV?
Reading this post makes me realize how similar our life journey’s have been. When I was deep into my career I felt like I was really very good at setting and achieving specific goals. The past few years while I’ve set goals at the end of the year what I’ve achieved has been mixed and I’ve realized that some of the things I listed I did not really want. As we move into 2012 I feel like I really know what I want in life. I’m excited to go on the journey with you in 2012.
Clark I’m SO glad to have found people with such similarities as us to share this journey with! It’s been nice to reflect back on where we’ve come from, and I appreciate that every path we’ve walked until this point has lead us to this new journey in our lives. It seems we’re all struggling to find ourselves aren’t we? I truly feel that where we are heading right now is the right direction, I just have a great feeling, and meeting wonderful families who are on the same journey as us has helped me believe in our dreams even more. I’m not sure exactly where and how everything will unfold but I just know it will, as strange as that sounds!
As for pay TV, what a waste huh! In all honesty I hardly even look at the TV, but the kids watch way too much 🙁 The house we’ve been living in had really bad “free to air” TV reception so we used that as an excuse to keep it for the last 12 months, but now we’re moving, no more excuses, it’s not coming with us, and you’re right there are so many more great things to be doing than watching TV!!
We got the keys to our new rental house today, really old place, but I’ll turn it into a home, who cares about a bit of peeling wall paper when it gives us such a great chance to save, and the long term looks so exciting 🙂