Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” was very possibly my favorite book that I read in college. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend doing so! The Holocaust-era philosopher really hits home the reason we humans need a strong “why” in order to exist and to thrive. One of his most famous quotes is: “He who has a Why to live can bear almost any How.”
When adjusting our life to fit our goals of attaining FI, this quote rang in my ears. When we have a strong enough why, the how seems far less significant. I’m not trying to compare frugal living to death camps, by any means. I would even argue that frugal living is not a sacrifice. But making changes and going against the status quo can be difficult. During those times of opposition, you need to a have strong enough why to continue.
For our family, we have three main “whys” for our financial independence journey. They are as follows:
1. We want to change our family tree. This is the generation. As explained in prior blog posts, my husband and I have a family history of debt and poverty. That needs to stop. We are thankful that our families were able to provide us with basic food, clothing, and shelter. They have worked their tails off their whole lives, but they are still living hand to mouth and their working lifespan is drawing to its end with very little to show for it. We want our kids to know a different way of living. We want them to see how “stuff” is not what they should be striving for, but freedom.
We want them to have a wealth of memories with their mom and dad spending quality time with them and traveling. We don’t want them to ever go into debt, but to find creative solutions to the problems they encounter. We don’t want them to have the emotional and psychological burden of worrying about taking care of us. We always want to maintain the relationship of parent and child, not caregiver and patient. This is a tall order, but every day we are making small steps to accomplish this goal!
2. We want to leave a legacy. While we may decide to leave each of our children a small inheritance, we hope that the lessons we teach them will enable them to make their own way in the world. Instead, we hope to build a money-making-machine that will allow us to pursue self-funded work at charitable organizations around the US and the world. Mr. Sim is fabulous at his work in IT. He would love to be able to send out a message to various organizations asking if they have need for him to set up computer systems for them at no cost and have our family travel around with him while he does.
We also have a heart for at-risk and vulnerable children. We are currently waiting for a placement from our county foster care agency and have been houseparents at a children’s home in the past, and we would love to be able to spend a year or more overseas working in similar situations once our children have grown. We have a dream of setting up a scholarship program for youth who have aged out of the foster care system and mentoring our scholarship recipients. We want our future wealth to be a blessing to others.
3. We have a strong desire to travel with our family. While we plan on going on multiple trips utilizing travel hacking on our journey to FI, our first “big audacious goal” is to purchase a school bus, convert it into a tiny home (skoolie or schoolie), and travel to all of the US National Parks while homeschooling our kids. That is our 5-year-goal. We will not be at FI in 5 years, but Mr. Sim is working to structure his current position to being location independent so he could work on the road. We’ve been slightly obsessed with national parks for awhile, and watching Ken Burns’ documentary on them is only fueling this obsession (see the link at the end of the blog if you want to watch for yourself for free on Amazon Prime!).
Once our children are older, we would like to travel to Israel (I speak Hebrew), Italy, the UK, Thailand, and the list keeps growing. When I say travel, I don’t mean spending a week hitting all of the major tourist spots. I mean spending at least a month in each location, soaking in the richness of the culture and exploring slowly.
What is your why? You can have multiple! Feel free to share in the comments or tweet me.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Scripture-of-Nature-1851-1890/dp/B002Q83F3S/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1541608355&sr=1-1&keywords=ken+burns+national+parks
