I'm in the less junk camp. I'm very much in your shoes right now. I have a job that (mostly) I love. It pays terribly, but I'm doing something I am passionate about. The Staff and boss are great, but the board is poopy. But the nice thing is, I have set up a life that is simple enough that I can more or less quit and not worry for a while where the money comes from. I realize, I'm coming from a different perspective: No wife, no kids, no car loan, no nothing.
I bought a dirt-cheap house that I don't mind selling for par if I want. Everything in the house is cheap, free, or stolen. My entertainment center is from Target. If I move out, it goes to the curb for free. The couch was a freebie from a friend. I insisted on buying a good mattress, but that can transfer. Coffee table and end tables are $19.99 Ikea specials. Heck, even my lawnmower was free and all I spent was $1 on a spark plug and 20 minutes cleaning the carb. Most of the decorations around the house are goodwill or CL things that I really don't care about.
Simplicity is really the big key.
In reply to AngryCorvair :
We do the same thing but with four kids. We don't have "good" stuff aside from cars and tools to maintain them. The house itself cost far less than the expensive cars. Part of that is that we've owned two houses for the past decade+ and we constantly live with the knowledge that we're moving from on to the other and when that happens over half of our possessions have to be jetissoned. When you know you're going to throw it away, you don't put a lot of stock in buying heirloom quality anything.
In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :
True, I move across country ever 3-4 years it seems. We usually just throw stuff away. I keep our expensive furniture but throw out most the other stuff. It's way easier that way.
pheller
PowerDork
6/5/18 12:42 p.m.
My wife was really set on us having nice couches, so we bought a 3-cushion and a 2-cushion loveseat. She thought we needed more seating when people come to visit (which isn't often).
Now with a child, a simple Ikea Poang rocker chair gets the most use, followed by our 3-cushion. The love seat was moved into a bonus room where it gets virtually no use.
These sofas will not move with us unless its just across town. We both agreed we'd rather have more chairs and less sofas.
We also realized that furniture can dictate the size of the house, and what you do in it. We have a bonus room with a massive TV (that I trashed picked and fixed for a few cents) that we thought we'd watch movies on, but in reality it's more of an office.
One of the most useful pieces of furniture in our house is a nice wooden fold-up table. It gets used as an office desk, as a temporary work space, to fold laundry, etc, but whenever it gets in the way we can slide it behind a couch. I want more stuff like that.
pheller
PowerDork
6/7/18 12:53 p.m.
A new wrench thrown into my thoughts on moving within town is the fact that our daycare provider/sitter decided to stop watching our 4-month old.
So now we're desperately trying to find a new sitter, all the while Mom is wanting to quit her job to become stay-at-home because this is all pretty stressful.
If we could halve our mortgage, it might be do-able.
