Guest post: Our reverse retirement

By Missy Fecas Fillion

Simplifying your life can mean many things.  For us, simplicity is the awareness that we pay for the things we consume or use in life with our time and energy, which is represented by money. By shifting our focus to where we spend our energy and questioning if it is worth the outlay, we begin to look at life very differently. Energy we expend is really our life that we offer to the world.  It is all we have to offer, those precious seconds and minutes and years.

As a result, we chose to reduce what we consume: houses, entertainment, expensive food. We changed what we expend: saying no to certain activities, paying off debt and saving, and being able to shift to a life without the need for full-time paid work. We have chosen to offer the majority of our time, our life energy, to our family life while our children are young.

We jokingly call it reverse retirement.  We want to be with the kids now while they are little, not working until after they are grown and gone.  We wanted family to be at the center of our family, not my husband barely remembering the early years of my son’s life because he was always at work.  We wanted time together.  We married not just because of love, but also because we loved spending time together.

We changed our life.  We decided to spend our life learning and living in freedom.  We accomplished this by paying off all debt (house, car, student loans) and saving.  Our ability to live simply allows us to make decisions we never would have been able to see as possible.  Our actions gave us the freedom to have my husband at home with us.  I was already a SAHM.  When the real estate market is ready, we will sell and move to a smaller town, and possibly build a natural house or buy a small older home and grow organic vegetables.

It was in consciously choosing how to spend the seconds and minutes and years of my life that I realized I was finally a grown up.  Following the regularly spotted sign posts of life did not magically turn me into a grown up.  But every time I made my decision about where to spend my money, my time, my energy, I felt more and more like I was entering a world I had not been a part of before.  Many times I had to say no to friends and family about joining in activities that cost more than I was willing to spend.  It was not that I did not have the money or time to spend.  The activity did not coincide with my priorities.  I had prioritized where I wanted my energy to be spent.

By looking at our lives as something that we were able to choose how to spend, we became the creators of our lives.  We brought freedom into our life by saying, “We choose this, but not this.  We want this, but not that.”  We applied this to every area of our life.

We want freedom for our children as well. We homeschool, and our children, too, are creating their lives.  They learn because it is the natural state of all children to be curious about the world and their place in it.  Right now that curiosity consists of building mummies, learning to read, continuous love of math, and interests in Mandarin Chinese and new card games.  Freedom and learning will take all of us into new and exciting realms in the future. We believe that this freedom will make us spiritually, emotionally and physically happier.

I believe that most people have yet to understand that they, too, have a choice in how they spend their precious time and energy.  Until we realize that we are the masters and creators of our personal universe, I don’t know if people are really in control of their life.  Simplicity gives you the framework to understand this choice. That’s what we have chosen; to be simple and free.

Missy Fecas Fillion lives in Atlanta, Georgia  with her husband and two children.  She is working on her first novel.

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