My mom recently came home from a party and told me about a conversation she had with an old family friend. In response to this friend’s question about what Neal and I are up to, my mom said, “Well, they’re kind of living an alternative lifestyle.” Of course, my mom simply meant that we are trying to make a living without “real jobs” or full-time work. But this was a funny way of putting it to this friend who has a child that changed her name to something like Earth Mother Lee, joined a commune, and cast off virtually all ties to her former life. Now that’s an alternative lifestyle.
We’re more like two cheap people that would rather keep more of our time and energy in exchange for having less money and “stuff” than most people aspire to. (But that was way too long to fit as the page title.) I meant to start this chronicle at the beginning of what we initially considered a year-long experiment to see what flexible income streams we could create, but now is as fitting a time as any since I brought home our first bit of income in about 9 months. We’re $281 closer to the BIG GOAL . . . the BIG GOAL being to make $18,600 per year, enough to comfortably live on in our (future) tiny house.
If you’re a personal finance geek like me, you’ll want to know how that $18,600 breaks down. This represents our future monthly budget, based on the assumption that we have kept enough of our savings intact to buy a tiny house outright (which seems a safe assumption now that we’ve got some money coming in):
Ever since we finished school, dissolved our former business (which, along with my grad school income, provided a $50,000 nest egg to live on while we tried to build this new life), and moved in with my parents in August 2011, I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain exactly what we’re doing — because, well, we get asked that at least once a day. So how am I doing so far? Any questions?
chronically ill finances 
Awesome. I love looking at your budget and I hope you’ll update it if (when?) it changes. I’d love to know more of the WHY, too. I’ll poke around and see if that’s somewhere else.
I will update as the budget changes, which it definitely will considering we are planning to adopt another child (trying to talk Neal into two)! The why is probably not too spelled out yet, but I do plan to write more about that with time.