Twenty-thirteen was good to us. Here’s a quick review:
- We bought a dump truck in preparation for owning property
- We had a small but moderately successful balcony garden
- We helped clean up the property of some friends—good practice!
- We continued saving for a down payment and started looking at properties
- We started drawing up initial house plans
- Ari worked toward starting her wedding planning business
- Perhaps most exciting of all, we spent three weeks in Europe in December!
Twenty-thirteen was good to us, but we have a lot to look forward to…
In twenty-fourteen, we plan on continuing to live well within our means, doubling down on savings, and eating as healthy as possible. We got permission to use the small yard in front of our apartment for a garden this year. I plan on getting more clients for my freelance business, and simultaneously working my way up the ladder at my day job. Ari will be finishing up her bachelor degree and then focusing more on her wedding business. And perhaps the biggest change will be moving out of our apartment into my parents’ home in autumn. (Yes, you read that right.)
It will certainly be a challenge for our marriage, and will put a strain on all of our relationships, but we’re trusting that God will bring us all through and better for it. And we’re looking forward to living in community with family.
This is something we had talked about before our trip to Europe, but our trip certainly helped confirm it for us. In Europe, extended families tend to live together, passing houses down through generations—especially in smaller towns. Houses are also a lot smaller there, and people have less stuff.
The biggest challenge for us as we approach the move, I think, is our stuff. Just the two of us, in our little two-bedroom apartment, we have so much stuff. We inherited a lot of furniture, and we both brought a lot of boxes to our marriage. We’re not hoarders, but we’ve become disillusioned with materialism, and weary of consumerism. So we’ve already been weeding through things trying to get rid of anything and everything we don’t need, and we’ll be spending a lot of time in this new year doing the same. Some things are hard to part with, but throwing stuff away just feels so good! And in the end, it will be for the best: easier to move into a small place on our future property while we build our house if we’re free of stuff.
Also, staying with my parents will save us a lot of money. I mean a significant percentage of our income. Which means we’ll be able to save even faster and hopefully—just hopefully—be ready to buy property in two or three years from now.
It’s really hard to live with timelines like that. There is so much I want to be able to do now, that we just don’t have the freedom to do in an apartment. But God is teaching us patience through it all, and I’m really truly excited to see where He takes us this year.
It’s going to be a good one.