Truckin'

I'm lucky not to have seasonal affective disorder, but I'm nonetheless amazed at how much mental energy and motivation I have in the spring as compared to during the winter, when, in hindsight, I can see that I'm a total slug. One of the things I've been very motivated to do this spring is work on a budget and start keeping closer tabs on where our money is going to see if there's any fat we can trim. We already live a pretty frugal lifestyle, partially out of need and partially out of philosophy, but there's undoubtedly more we can do. Having a child has really made me think more and differently about money, especially saving and preparing for our eventual retirement. We're at a bit of a disadvantage on that last point, since I've been too ill to work much over the last 10 years or so. I do have a couple small 401k plans that I paid into during a couple periods of work, and I have been looking into rolling those over into a single Roth IRA. The fact that I have actually been doing research on IRAs, investing, and the like is a powerful indicator of my motivation, since finance is usually one of the few things that bores me to the point that I want to stick something really sharp in my eyes just to make it stop.

I've also read about a group of people who are doing a "2010 in 2010" decluttering and simplifying pledge. I love this idea - that you would get rid of 2010 things during this year (ideally without replacing them), but since we purged our posessions so deeply last summer before our daughter was born, I don't know that we have quite that many things we still could get rid of. I'm sure, though, that things still remain which we can pack out, and hopefully staying in the "purge" frame of mind will prevent us from just turning around and filling our closets up again with stuff we don't need. I got rid of a lot of things last summer that I thought I would really miss, and I've been quite surprised that I haven't. In fact, I feel a lot lighter, a lot less attached to the stuff I still have because I know that I can survive just fine if it's gone. And that really gives me pause to consider how materialistic we humans can be, especially in the West, when the thought of having to go without our things drives us to hoard and so excessively accumulate, often just for the sake of accumulating. From now on, I'm going to try and ask myself about each object I own (and contemplate owning) "what purpose will it serve?" and really thinking about the answer.