In spring of 2014 we quit our jobs, sold our house, and packed everything we owned into our car in order to travel. It wasn't easy downsizing from a 1200 square foot home but we did it after months of decluttering. You can also read more about our retirement story. The above picture shows everything that we own (less some family heirlooms + pictures stored at Kara's Mom's house). Surprisingly, all this plus a 55 pound dog and two people fit into our car. It helps that it's a Honda Element and that the ...
Archives for January 2015
Seven Reasons to Go Paperless
I cringe every time I see a blog post about how to organize your life. Much of the time, they focus on how to store the vast amounts of paper we have in our lives. I have a much easier way of dealing with all the paper in my life. I get rid of it. Seriously, I am ruthless about it. Paper in, paper out, that’s it. I keep my to do lists and on the fly notes in a couple notebooks, and that’s about all the paper I need. There are a number of reasons I decided to go paperless, and I’d like to share those with ...
How We Sold Our House
One of the last things on our early retirement to do list was selling our house. We had a cute little bungalow built in 1937, and there were always maintenance issues. Although the housing market had bounced back quite a bit, especially where we lived in San Jose, we were still worried about the amount of time it might take to sell it and whether we would get any more than we paid for it. We thought we might be extremely lucky if we got $50,000 to $75,000 more than the $625,000 we paid. ...