The Path Less Traveled: Lessons from our Quest for Financial Independence
Hey! It’s Garrett here and I’m so excited for my Grit and Polish post debut! Cathy asked if I would like to take some longer dives into bigger topics that we’ve been talking about, so let’s jump into this first one…
Whenever Cathy and I get a chance to hike our favorite local trail together we often have a great conversation as we’re huffing up the hill. There’s nothing like a little exercise in nature to get your mind going. At least that’s the case for me. I can definitely see the merits of the walking meeting! So a couple months ago, we got to chatting about our financial independence path and what, if anything, is a key take away. Out in the middle of a brisk fall workday with no jobs in site, on our own schedules, chatting about how we want to spend our time and energies, could we share an idea or core principle that propelled us from under-water homeowners teetering on the brink of financial ruin to this quiet, hardpacked mountain trail a decade later?
From the trailhead you can see your destination. A softly rounded tan hump high enough above the parking lot to illustrate the hard work ahead but not intimidating enough to preclude starting out. The trail to the ridgetop is well trod. A deep furrow cutting through sagebrush, grass and pine trees. It’s almost impossible to lose your way. If you just keep your head down, place one shoe in front of the other, and breathe, you’ll arrive, sooner or later, at the rocky cairn that marks the highest point on the trail. Your reward—a pumping heart and a sweeping vista of the valley below. The craggy granite peaks of the Stuart range guarding the west entrance while windmills spin gently in the distance. Lovely, right?!
Life is so not like this. We often can’t see where we’re going when we start. We have no idea of the challenges and hard work ahead. If we put our heads down and follow the same path as everyone else chances are we don’t get a full spirit and a beautiful view. Instead we probably work too much at a job we don’t like to pay for a lifestyle that’s shiny but fragile.
Sometimes there are obvious inflection points in life that send you in one direction or another. The big ones like getting married, starting a new job, going back to school, having a baby, etc. A huge one for Cathy and I was when she was laid off in the recession after we had just bought our first house. If you’ve been following for long you might know this story. The crux of it is we had a massive mortgage and no way to pay for it. There was no obvious way forward. Cathy’s crazy and brilliant solution was to rent out the house and move into a little 400sqft cottage in the backyard. But first we figured we needed to renovate the basement and kitchen to generate enough rent to cover the mortgage. So with a little vision and a hand full of credit cards we poured sweat equity late into the nights and weekends until we landed tenants in our now 4 bed, 2 bath house. Over the next three years in the cottage we slowly got our financial feet back under us. Cathy eventually found a new job and we paid off the ~$15K in credit card debt from the renos and managed to build up some savings. We were ready to get back on the path.
After the tenants moved out, we moved back into the main house. We had space for guests and a nice new kitchen. We could finally entertain friends and family. And we were expecting our first kid! We could cover maternity leave by dipping into savings. Life was good. Queue screeching record music stop sound! I don’t know if that translated but we were on the doorstep of our next big inflection point. And actually, I think this one turned out more important to our journey than moving to the cottage and renting the house.
The seductive comfort of the well trod path beckoned. Maybe we should use some of our savings for a master suite? With a baby on the way, how nice would it be to have an oasis away from the impending bustle of grannies, papas, cousins and friends! Plus it’s a good investment since the house will be worth more. Or a newer, safer, car? Or a luxury vacation on the other side of the world? Afterall we deserved some beach time after years of living small! We could see our lives unfolding in that house. Our kids would grow-up running up and down our quiet side street. The park at the top of the block serving as both epic capture the flag battleground and evening soccer practice venue. All we had to do was keep our heads down, put one foot in front of the other. Build our careers, take our vacations, save for retirement and kids’ college, buy stuff. Keep the course that society tells us to take. It’s a wonderful acceptable life.
Our next move wasn’t motivated by immanent financial calamity. Rather it was the specter of financial purgatory that sent us running from our charming 4-bed/2-bath 1700sqft home and into a 780sqft fixer (which we call the Bryant House)! A 30 year desk job fueling an endless cycle of spending and saving for a retirement always just out of reach was staring us in the mirror. But the recession and its lessons had given us a new map and more resources. We had saved enough for a down payment on another house—something that seemed impossible just a couple years earlier. We resisted the siren’s song of the wonderful acceptable life and chose a path less traveled. A path with more work, but also more freedom. Again we sacrificed our evenings and weekends to remodeling for the prospect of a more secure future. The move to the little (but newly renovated) bungalow was easier knowing we had transformed our first mortgage into an income and we liked the feeling of control we were gaining over our financial trajectory even as we veered farther from the accepted course.
So what exactly is that nugget of wisdom we came up with on our hike? It’s summed up so elegantly in the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” The willingness to look up, take stock of where we were heading and then to try something different, even if the way was hard, less straightforward, less traveled, is why we were outside together, on a hillside trail, in the middle of a beautiful fall workday with not a 9-5 job in site.