Since this is an introduction, I guess we should start at the beginning. My name is Caleb and I decided to start this blog with my girlfriend Jho. I'm a 29 year old American, a Registered Nurse and I own my own house. School was easier for me than for most people, but throughout my life I've found that to be as great of a disadvantage as an advantage, maybe even a bigger disadvantage. Traveling was always important for my family while I was growing up, and it shaped me in a lot of ways, some of which have only recently become apparent.
Like so many others, I decided to start this blog because I feel like I've got something important to share with others, but I've never had a great idea of how to connect with enough people that I could actually make some kind of a positive impact in people's lives. Then the question arose 'How do you expect to actually help people, exactly?' It's a good question, and one that I've given quite a bit of thought in the last few months. No matter how good a piece of advice may be for you, there will be countless others for whom it will simply be useless. Everyone's lives are different, and everyone has different goals they wish to accomplish.
With this in mind, rather than assuming myself capable of reaching virtually any and everybody who reads or hears my words and attempting to be the second coming of Zig Ziglar, I thought I'd take a little more targeted approach. I think of people like Ziglar or even past political leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan as being (forgive the crude term) ICBM's in their efficacy: all you have to do is stand somewhere in the general target area and you'll have little choice but to seriously consider their real or potential impact, . I've got to be a bit more like a smart bomb, and only pick those few subjects with which I am thoroughly familiar, if I'm to have any hope of being more than a mosquito bite in your reading day. And I'm sure my subject matter (let alone my personality!) will be appreciated by some, scoffed at by others, and generally dismissed for whatever reason. If you've read this far, you may already be beyond hope, in which case you might as well pull up a chair and get comfortable ;) So without further ado, let's get down to it.
This first article should be simple and to the point, so I'll only talk about one major subject.
Money. It's one of the driving issues in all of our lives, and there's no reason to try explaining it away. Money represents many different things to each of us. It can represent security, comfort, status, our individual value (or more importantly, our individual worth), opportunity (both positive and negative) or a plethora of alternatives. Most of us take great pride in our ability to go into the world and force our way into the life we want for ourselves, using our talents, our creativity and our determination. Each of us also spends sleepless nights pondering what potential calamities might befall us while we lie in our beds waiting for the next day to arrive. Am I going to somehow suggest a solution to the issues that money presents to our lives? Not really, no. Those problems will always be there, like a teenager's extra loud music pulsating through the sheetrock of their bedroom, but I might be able to make a suggestion or two which can turn the volume down a few notches, if you're anything like me.
One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that there can never be 'enough' money. It's impossible to get 'enough,' no matter what mental acrobatics you've gone through to arrive at whatever number is firmly lodged in your head. I've seen people with jobs paying barely above the minimum wage living happier, fuller lives than people raking in $250k/year with the beautiful imported cars, huge houses and expensive toys. Having seen multiple examples of this in my own life, I feared that there simply wasn't a viable way to get where I wanted to go. Everywhere I turned, I saw another reason why my newest plan would fail. First I thought I'd go to medical school and become a doctor, but then I saw how much liability and downside there is to being a doctor in the current climate of the USA's healthcare system and threw that idea in the roundfile. Next I thought I'd just work double-hard as a nurse, banking double-time shifts once or twice a week and ratcheting up my total earnings to roughly equivalent of a lower/middle-tier doctor's. Then I saw a few examples of people who'd had the same idea fifteen or twenty years ago and decided I didn't want the stress-lines, either. I thought about starting up a small business, a restaurant or maybe even an import/export company, but found the regulations were becoming absurd for pretty much every idea I could come up with. Heck, I've even been involved in some online business ventures that produced pretty well, but liability reared its ugly head again, causing me to exit stage left. Every door I peeked through, there were another ten reasons why I couldn't do it.
Now please understand, I'm not a negative person by nature. I've always believed that with the proper application of time and leverage, you could accomplish what you wanted to in life, within reason. That's why it was such a shock that whenever I would come up with a new idea, it would get shot down before it got out of the box. I once read in a magazine that the entrepreneurs make up between three and seven percent of a given society's population. That sounds right to me, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, I've always considered myself a part of that group.
So, after slowly coming to the realization that increasing my earning power would be quite a bit more difficult than I had originally suspected, I decided to look at the other end of the scale: expenses. My dad always used to say that there are two ways to generate more money for yourself; you either earn more, or you spend less. Made sense to me when I was five, and it still makes sense to me today. I had a pretty reasonable mortgage with a total payment including taxes and insurance of less than $1,000/month, and the ability to work a $25/hour job whenever I wanted to work as a nurse. Not a bad situation to be in, truth be told. I might have even stuck with it if I hadn't taken a left turn when I was supposed to take a right, and the world opened up to me in ways I'd never thought were possible.
That's what this blog is about. I took a turn at a point in my life that led me to where I am today, and I almost can't believe that it's possible to live as I do. I'm not some get-rick-quick salesman. I'm not selling snake oil, or trying to convince people that my way is the only way. A philosopher once said “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” When you're right, you're right, and Fred had it nailed with that one.
So, if you're still here and reading this, you probably want some sort of a payoff for your sore eyes. To that end, I will say that for almost two years I've lived in a two story house on almost an acre of land, with fifty coconut trees and about forty feet of beach frontage, and the total cost has been about $1,000/month. That's rent, food (for two and a half people, plus two big dogs), power, water, trips to town for watching movies, whatever. That covers a trip I took to a great hospital (remember, I'm a nurse!) to get some pre-cancerous crap examined, biospied and cut off my toe. It even includes paying for a full-time groundskeeper to take care of the trees and house maintenance. And believe me when I say that I've eaten better in the last two years than at any other point in my life, as my waistline will confirm. It hasn't been all Ramen noodles and canned pasta, but rather fresh fruit more days than not and local meat dishes for dinner every day. It also helps that I was able to plant enough bananas to keep them on the kitchen table indefinitely.
The real kicker? I didn't even have to learn a foreign language! If you're interested in learning if this life is for you, favorite the page/subscribe to the blog and see the updates as they come. I'll be doing a step-by-step breakdown of the process as I understand it, including how to avoid a few of the minor stumbles I've experienced along the way. That's it, no strings attached. I'm not trying to get rich here, I'm just trying to illuminate a poorly understood option which is far more available to each and every one of us than we've been led to believe. And if you've read this whole thing, you deserve to learn how you can do it, too.
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