Thursday, April 18, 2013

Writing Your Own Future

After writing about old journals, my next thought involved future journals. What do I want to happen next in my life? I like to write so I'm forced to look at this from that angle. Where should the story go from here? My life story that is. I'm a married 34 year old with a couple of kids. Is all the wild and crazy adventure over? Am I too old for a few more "out of the box" decisions?  An adventure maybe? Well of course I say YES to excitement and adventure...Dave, not so much. He's more practical, sometimes overly practical. Yin and yang, right?

Here is my proposed plan. I want to sell the palace. I want to simplify. By that I mean, buy a much smaller, much less expensive home and free up some "living money". Dave basically agrees with me up to this point. He would love to take a few great vacations every year. There's nothing better than getting up every morning and mentally doing the count down to your next vacation. Two or three trips a year would be so much fun to look forward to. Lots of adventure, lots of great journal worthy memories made, especially for the kids.

All that sounds amazing, but something inside me wants to take it a huge step further. I want to move for a year of two. I want to sell the house and most of the stuff in it, get a storage unit and roll out. I want to move our family to Hawaii for a while. Rent an apartment, get mediocre part time jobs there and just live in paradise for a bit.

 It's expensive to live there though. Rent isn't out of control (I've spent lots of time on the internet figuring it out), but everything else like gas and groceries are very expensive. We wouldn't get ahead financially, but we could break even, so why not? I think I need to move out of Utah for a bit. Not forever, just long enough to figure out what I appreciate about Utah.  So far I think the best thing about Utah is my proximity to my family and the cheaper living expenses.  I already know that I love living near family, but temporarily it would be fun to try something new. I think it would be great for my kids especially. What an amazing chapter that would make!

It would be a lot of work to get to the point where it would really happen. There are a lot of road blocks and question marks standing in the way, but I still long to do it. Who knows if I'll ever convince Dave. I want to do all this stuff while we're young, versus waiting until retirement and hoping it all works out then.  Lately especially, I've been reminded that you never know how much time you've got. Maybe your investment portfolio would be massive by the time you're 65 (I dount it) and you'd have the means to move to an island, but what good will all that cash be if you aren't healthy enough (or alive) to do it? What if we're too tired then? To set in our ways? I want to share an adventure with my girls, while they're young and excited about spending time with their parents.

It's good to dream. Maybe I'll win this battle, probably not, but isn't this a good one? Who wouldn't want to do this? I'll just keep watching Hawaii Life and House Hunters International until I convince Dave that we just have to take a risk and do it.

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