One of the phrases that kept floating around my mind when Elaine and I were debating about me quitting my job was a simple one: “It’s a trap!” Have you seen that Star Wars meme? Go ahead and look it up, I’ll wait.

What’s the trap, and why was this on my mind when we were talking about me quitting?

Consumerism and Luxury

After a terrible week at my new job, we were pushed to look through our budget. This included all of our expenses — the necessary expenses, the luxury expenses, the entertainment, the eating out, and everything in between. We realized our monthly expenses, if we pare down to the necessities, total to somewhere between $3000-$3500 per month. That’s $36,000-$42,000 per year (the magic number we came up with in the original post was to spend no more than $40,000 in a single year).

A few things stood out immediately when we came up with this number:

1. First and foremost — assuming Elaine’s photography continues on its current trajectory, we’ll make more than that amount over the next year. That’s part of the reason we can take this leap.
2. We are lucky enough to be in a place where our expenses are this low. We have no debt, aside from our mortgage. No school debt, no car loans, no medical debt, nothing. I know a lot of people don’t have this privilege.
3. Finally (this is the big one), where was all of our money going??? The fact is, my previous salary and Elaine’s income were roughly equal over the last two years. If we had pared down before this to our base necessities, we could have been saving more than my salary every year. That is nuts!

So what happened over the last few years? Simply put: what a lot of personal finance people call “lifestyle creep.” Elaine’s business grew exponentially, and my income increased over the years. But we weren’t disciplined enough with those income increases. Because we didn’t have debt we needed to tackle, we had the luxury of spending money on “extra” things. This included REALLY nice dinners, a recent trip to Disney World, and buying pretty much whatever we wanted without a second thought.

The problem is we didn’t stop much to re-align ourselves with our life goals over the last couple of years. Because we were saving just a little bit, it was easy to have the feeling of “needing” two jobs to make our lives work. In other words, our thoughtless purchases trapped us into thinking I needed a job I hated, and needed to be away from home to make the money we needed to survive.

Debt

I said before Elaine and I are lucky enough to have no debt. I should say this is due to a combination of being fortunate and working hard to make this a reality. We both received some help with school, but I also took out a small loan in the middle of college. I worked eight years at a university (at a job I didn’t like or want), which helped cover much of the cost of my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. We chose to buy used cars and took out a small loan to pay for each one a few years ago, but we aggressively tackled the debt every time, and paid those loans off in a fraction of the time given to us.

A lot of people are taught to think most kinds of debt are a necessity. Many of us are told it is college that helps us get ahead in life, and taking out loans to do so is an investment in our future. In some cases, this might actually be true. But in many cases, I don’t know that this is the case. We need a reliable car, and we don’t trust Craigslist, so we take out loans for a new car from a dealership. We get caught up in living a certain kind of lifestyle, so we put our expenses on our credit cards.

Debt, in other words, is often a trap. We are taught to value certain things without thinking about what we truly want our lives to be like. Then, because we take on debt for things we don’t need, we get trapped into living the life we don’t want in order to pay for the debt we have.

Who We Really Are

The Year of Plenty project has given us an opportunity to reevaluate who we are and who we want to be. Do we want to be the kind of people who live in (relative) luxury, but have to work jobs we don’t want to do so? Or would we rather simplify our lives so we can be with each other more?

I’m not saying everyone can do this all at once. Not everyone wants to be home most of the time. Some people have dreams of becoming doctors or engineers and need to take out debt to do so. Some people have consumed too much already and have to deal with those consequences.

But my guess is all of us — yes, all of us — can live more simply. We can all buy less things. We can all eat at home more, waste less food, and buy less fancy cars (or walk/ride a bike!). The hard work of living simpler usually comes with the payoff of knowing you are managing yourself well, and becoming the kind of person you want to be.