Go Simple. Go Small. Go Now.
February 03, 2014A lot of people have asked me how my wife and I are able to live together and travel around on a small, simple boat only 25 feet long. It’s true that it’s not a lot of space and doesn’t have many creature comforts. And when it comes to boats, there’s always something bigger and fancier with more complex systems to tempt you.
But there’s an expression in the boating community, coined by a couple who have sailed around the world on a shoestring budget since the 1970s, that goes, “Go simple. Go small. Go now.” The thinking is that because a smaller, simpler boat is cheaper to buy and maintain, it allows you to travel to places you want to go now, instead of spending years working to afford something larger or months stuck fixing complex systems that break down. And whether you’re out there on a larger boat or a smaller one, you enjoy the same fresh air, the same sunsets, and the same new cities to visit. In other words, getting to where you’re going in “style” is not nearly as important as why you’re going at all.
In our daily lives, we are constantly encouraged to choose bigger, more complex systems to fulfill our basic needs for food, housing, transportation, and leisure in supposedly greater comfort. But are these basic life needs our main reason for living or do they just keep us going as we reach for other life goals? Your life goals might include retirement, starting a business, spending more time with your family, saving for something that has real value for you, or learning new skills. Yet the more we believe that simply sustaining our needs demands big ticket items that are expensive to buy and time consuming to maintain, the more we are trapped working just to live, rather than on focusing what we’re really working toward. We become so focused on living in style that we’ve forgotten what we’re living for.
I think a great example of this is when it comes to planning for retirement. A lot of people dream about retiring from the rigid schedule of their job and taking back more control over how they spend their time. Yet they siphon off so much of their money while working to support the way they’re living that there’s less dollars available to save for the goal they’re trying to achieve. Even worse, they’ve bought into our collective assumption that retirement should only be a period filled with expensive vacations and otherwise living it up, which means they never feel like they have enough saved to get there. They’ve lost sight of the fact that the reason they wanted to retire in the first place was simply to have more control over their lives and relief from the daily grind.
And we’re not just obstructed from our life goals by paying for more expensive things with money. We’re also paying for them with our time. We’re paying with the free time we have after work or on weekends to fix, repair, and maintain the things that are supposed to make our lives easier or more comfortable.
We use bad words like “downsizing” to describe people who’ve opted out of spending money and time on things like bigger houses, bigger cars, and gourmet meals to save more. Many people might even say that they couldn’t live the good life without a lot of these things that they believe make their lifestyles more comfortable. But after all is said and done, isn’t “upgrading” your lifestyle truly what downsizes your life? You spread yourself so thin working to pay for and maintain what you’ve bought that you no longer have the money, choices, or flexibility needed to reach true life goals.
By focusing on things I wanted to do in life and choosing a cheaper, simpler method for getting there, I’ve been able to reach those goals much more quickly. I’d urge you to go over the choices you make and think about changes that can help you do the same. Years from now, I believe you’ll find yourself more richly rewarded by making progress toward the things that really matter to you rather than by trying to be a little more “comfortable” along the way.