The following is an edited extract from ‘The High Maintenance Minimalist’ by Kashlee Kucheran, which will be available from 5th January 2018.
Recently I quit my real estate career, said “F*** It!”, sold my home, 95 per cent of my belongings, all to travel the world for the next 10 years with my husband.
Why would we do such a thing?
Because we were tired of living a life that we didn’t choose.
I’ve always felt this strange feeling, sometimes deep in the pit of my stomach, that I wasn’t doing what I was born to do and I wasn’t living the way I wanted to live.
People say that is a normal feeling and it’s healthy to question our lives from time to time. This wasn’t an occasional feeling. This was an every single day kind of feeling.
But shhhhhh…. Don’t talk about it too much, or the crabs in the bucket will feel compelled to pull you back into the heard.
To sum it up: We’re trapped doing sh*t we hate, surrounded by sh*t we haven’t even paid for yet.
In my humble human opinion, LIFE is not meant to look like this.
My husband and I were faced with a choice recently that changed our lives forever.
We had almost $25,000 in credit card debt, a home (with a six figure mortgage owing) and bills that were piling up. It doesn’t sound unmanageable, but it could have gotten a lot worse.
Travelling four-six months of the year, we were paying bills even when we weren’t home. Pair that up with some bad spending habits and a lust for more travel and you can see how quickly this can turn into a slippery slope.
In fact, I had just gone down that dangerous path a few years prior. A path that led me into a full-fledged melt down and I wasn’t about to repeat it.
We quickly learned we would rather be travelling and spending our money on experiences instead of ‘things’, so we took some major action on turning our finances around to allow WAY more freedom!
That meant making some massive changes, both mentality and physically, like selling our home, most of our stuff and becoming nomadic.
Since becoming completely debt free we have made the transition into full time travel. Every few months we pick a different city/country to live and work in, which has been our dream all along.