Pam Marshall calls herself a “nomad in training.” At 65, she’s preparing to sell her home, dramatically reduce her possessions, and start traveling. But the process has led her to a bigger realization: sometimes the biggest barriers to freedom aren’t a lack of money. They’re the things we’re already spending our money, time, and energy maintaining.
See Pam’s Post on Cars:
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Pam is self-employed as a massage therapist and receives about $800 a month in Social Security. At first glance, that doesn’t sound like enough to fund a nomadic life. But her home in New York has appreciated dramatically since she bought it. Once she began looking at the equity trapped in the house, the cost of maintaining it and what could happen if she sold and invested the proceeds, the economics started looking very different. As she puts it, her house has essentially become her IRA.
The financial cost is only part of the equation. Pam loves her home and the extensive gardens she’s created on three-quarters of an acre, but they require constant attention. There are repairs, maintenance, weeds and endless projects. Eventually something she had once loved began to feel like an obligation. Her realization was simple: “My home owns me.”
That’s the larger subject of our conversation. Pam has been writing a series about the trade-offs that can quietly prevent us from doing what we say we want to do. The house is one. Cars are another. Many households have two or more vehicles, often including expensive SUVs, and rarely stop to calculate what those vehicles consume in payments, insurance, fuel, maintenance and depreciation.
Pam has a useful way of thinking about this: every dollar spent is also a life choice. The question isn’t whether you can afford the car. It’s whether you would rather have the car or what that same money could make possible elsewhere.
Then there is all the stuff.
We accumulate so many possessions that millions of us now rent additional buildings simply to store the things that no longer fit inside our homes. Pam sees guilt and fear behind much of it. We keep inherited furniture because it belonged to someone we loved. We keep equipment because we might use it someday. We save things for our children who, as Pam rather bluntly points out, probably don’t want most of them anyway.
For someone considering a midlife recalibration, that’s worth examining. Every possession takes something from you, whether it’s money, space, maintenance, attention or simply the psychological burden of knowing you eventually have to deal with it.
Pam isn’t getting rid of her life because she regrets it. She’s making room for the life she wants next.
She has dreamed about travel since she was a child reading National Geographic. Now she’s looking at turning the equity in her house into freedom, reducing thousands of possessions to what she actually needs, traveling slowly and frugally, and collecting experiences rather than more things.
This conversation isn’t really about minimalism. It’s about trade-offs.
What are you spending money, time and energy maintaining that no longer supports the life you want?
The house? The second car? The storage unit? The garage full of things you haven’t touched in years?
Sometimes recalibration isn’t about figuring out what you need to add to your life.
It’s figuring out what you’re finally willing to let go.
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