Downsizing

One of my favorite design bloggers recently announced that she is downsizing from her current large family home and moving to a much cheaper and smaller home. It's not because they're hurting for money, on the contrary, they both have professional jobs and make enough to live well with a 15 year mortgage left on their lovely house. They're downsizing because they actually want to pay off their house in 4-5 years and live absolutely, completely debt-free.

It really got me thinking about how lovely it would be to also be completely debt-free. I want it more than I want a big house or a designer handbag or a fancy car. I never really count mortgage debt as debt until now but now I see all the possibilities of being completely debt-free! So what is our plan? I love to plan. This is our plan.

Neither of us have ever had consumer debt. However, I still have student loans and we have our house mortgage. We'll do our best to pay off my student loans in 2-3 years and then we'll both combine our efforts to pay off the mortgage. Imagine how liberating it'd be to never pay mortgage again! We could save up, quit our jobs, and travel abroad for a year. Then we can come back home, find jobs again, and save up for our next adventure.

The traveling abroad idea is from another design blog that I read--the family of 8 (yes, 8. They are Mormon) relocated from Denver to Normandy for a year. They have portable jobs and they're just renting in France rather than Denver at the same rate of rent. The kids are attending the village school and it sounds like an amazing experience for the family. Obviously this will take a lot of planning because we'll still need jobs while abroad for income to survive during that time--but it's just an example of how free one's live can be without the anvil of debt dragging one down.

Someday soon...if we continue doing what we're doing...we can get there.