Welcome to our fancy new home

Welcome to our fancy new site with it’s very own .com address! This site will inspire, inform and hopefully entertain. In the past five years, we have changed the way we live and we are much happier for it. We still have a long way to go in our quest to get out of the rat race for a more ethical and simple life. We would love to share all of our wins and pitfalls along the way.

We are just a regular family living in the ‘burbs in New Zealand. However, a series of massive earthquakes under our city in 2010 and 2011 jolted us out of the suburban dream to start some soul-searching. Our house was broken, our city centre was flattened and all our friends were moving away. We wanted to find out what was really important to us. If we died next month, what would we regret not doing?

Was it our life’s purpose to buy the latest things? Was it to have the nicest house? Was it working hard to make someone else rich? Well, no. We started thinking about how to have a simple life.

Travel

What was most important to us was learning about the world through travel and teaching that to our offspring. In 2014, we left New Zealand to live in France with the kids for a year. We didn’t know anyone. We didn’t have jobs to go to either. You can find out about our adventures on my French blog. We are back in New Zealand now but are working on plans for our next journey. The French taught us a lot about appreciating the simple things in life, like nature and of course food and wine. Their attitude towards work is very different also, with the 35-hour work week enforced by law and two-hour lunch breaks.

Balanced Life

What was important to us was being able to spend time with our children, while still being able to provide for their needs. We are working on creating passive income streams so that we can work from anywhere and with flexible hours. I have changed careers from finance to writing, fulfilling a long-held dream. We will be keeping our readers up to date with news and information for self-employed people and freelancers.

Sustainability

We would love to be able to achieve these goals while living sustainably. Our dream is to have an efficient home that is powered ‘off the grid’, grow our own crops, minimise waste and collect rainwater. We will be the guinea pigs and post about what works (and doesn’t) when it comes to gardening, building efficiently and generally living in an environmentally friendly way.

So, basically, we want to maximise our free time, have enough money to travel, create a lasting legacy but keep our footprint on the earth to a minimum. Nothing like a challenge!

Watch this space if you are interested in sustainable living, earning passive income or finding writing jobs online.