I’ve lived in Seattle for almost a year. I bought my ticket from San Jose to Seattle about a year ago for March 1st 2018. It was the start of a new life for me. I remember being extremely stressed because I had to go through ALL of my possessions and decide what to keep and what to sell and donate away. It was surprisingly easy for me to detach from the physical items. I was extremely relieved when it was mostly gone. I ended up keeping about four boxes and two suit cases worth of things and I had some good friends who helped me store those boxes until I could get to them.
Since then I have acquired new stuff. Almost none of the new things I have were copied from my old stuff. I truly didn’t need the things I gave away and I realized there were other things that I have gained so much value from. Yet I find myself spending quite a lot of money and now that it’s been a year I am fed up with my consumerism tendencies and have decided to go on a one year fast.
I will be making a budget to live by and starting on March 1st, 2019 I will not buy anything new until March 1st, 2020. I will budget for things like bills, food and travel. I will not buy any new clothes, shoes or other things that will enable me to have new experiences until March 1st, 2020.
The only exception I will allow is I will be documenting the things that I think I need and allow my friends and/or family to buy things for me as birthday and/or Christmas presents.
Until March 1st, 2019 I am figuring out the things I need and am buying them now.
The goal is to see how much money I could live on. If I lost my job tomorrow then what changes to my life would I need to make to live on the littlest amount of money possible. I will be publishing my budget and keep track of how much I actually spent. I’ll also be allowing rollover cash so if I spend too much money during one month I’ll need to figure out how to save for the next month and vice versa.
2020: Update
This quickly fell off the radar. Ultimately, it’s not about the things. I simply prioritized my relationship more than I prioritized not having things. The things help augment life, and somewhere along the way I pendulumed between things are bad and things are good. It turns out that things are just things and they don’t have an alighment. You simply need to remember that life is ephemeral and not to get too entrenched in one ideology or another.