This week I've been watching new properties come up in the coastal town about twenty minutes away from us. Longingly watching. Living in my folks backyard has renewed my desire to move closer to the sea, though I'm not sure we can afford it. Neither of us are working in permanent jobs, for a start, and we have very little savings. We are debt free, and have no mortgage, and a great property on 5 acres. We'd be downsizing considerably if we moved - most houses in the area are on 500 m2 to 700m2 - but, the coast.
Dad insists that money doesn't matter and we can afford it. It bugs us a little. We have that slight resentment the younger generation has toward 'boomers' who had the opportunity to get on the property ladder, buy an investment property or two, and retire well. That's out of sight for many of us, and the younger generation behind us are even begging early inheritances to get a house they probably can't afford.
I get Dad's point. If we got another mortgage, it's just rent we're paying to ourselves. Feasibly, we could rent the house out during holiday season to pay a good chunk off every year.
But we're pretty adverse to risk.
Jamie tells me not to worry about money so much but I can't help it. I see us getting older and less able to make the money we've been making - and more to the point, I don't want to make the money we've been making because to get it, we have to sacrifice a lot. There's no work life balance in teaching. We're both disillusioned with the system and tired of being overworked.
Having less seems an answer to this, but how much less can one survive on in this climate? How do we prepare for being old, or sick?
Jeff Kennet's Surf Team
I wasn't as worried about money back then, which is almost impossible to fathom. Life stretched out with all it's possibilities.
I was perfectly happy to take advantage of the government and receive benefits, which was enough to put petrol in the tank and buy a few groceries and some beers. People who travelled Australia on the dole were jokingly called 'Jeff Kennett's Surf Team' - the state premier at the time.
The system was easy to get around. You had to lodge your form in person every two weeks, but you could post it if you weren't able to (only every other fortnight) but if you left two weeks before lodgment and then got a mate to lodge it, then posted one, you could feasibly be away for six weeks with no one being the wiser. You could also move office, but only from a place of higher unemployment to lower employment or if you got work in that town. That was easy as well - a shift or two at the local bar or some grape picking would do it.
I lapped Australia doing this. Money came when it was needed - for a set of new tyres, for a new surfboard, whatever. I never worried about it. I lived off lentil dahl and vegemite on toast, and this luscious custard and pecan syrup yoghurt I was addicted to, and of course, beers. Hey, I was young, resentful of a society pushing me into conformity, and absolutely little concept of getting older.
Single Parent Pension
And then at 25, I was a mother. Just like that. This year the birth rate in Australia is at it's lowest it's been since the '70's because people worry they can't afford kids. I never thought about the expense of having a child.
I worked in restaurants and bars a little on the weekend whilst my parents babysat, but a lot of my income came from the single parent pension, which in those days seemed to stretch okay. I never thought I had no money - I had enough even to save for a trip to Europe, and you could receive the single parent pension overseas for six months without having to lodge a form.
In Europe I made $3000 AUD last nearly a year, combined with the single parent pension and a little bit of child maintenance occasionally supplied by my ex. We often housesat or stayed with friends we met along the way, or I stayed in dorm rooms in hostels with my boy in the same bed as me. I never ate out - I carried a plastic bag which had some cutlery, crackers, cheese, cucumber and other snackable vegetables, peanut butter, hummus, and tins of tuna. We never felt we didn't have enough.
And having a child wasn't expensive, not really. I don't think I bought clothes for him for years - they were all secondhand or from opshops, and it was never that expensive to feed him. Later on, his schooling was taken care of with a scholarship to a good school. I tell you what though, I was glad to buy the last pair of school shoes when he finished!
Okay, I Better Adult Now
By 29 I thought I'd better do something about 'proper' work, probably because I was keen to actually have a little bit of extra money but also use my intelligence to put toward a career. I'd finished my Bachelor of Arts and at that time you only needed a Diploma of Education over a year, with most of that in schools, so I did that, and then promptly went overseas again, met the love of my life, came home, packed up what little we had, and moved to England.
I had three suitcases and $3000 bucks, and I still wasn't worried about money. I moved to be with a man that had less - he lived in a truck and had 90 quid to his name.
And we made do. We bought an old Peugot 405 for 1500 bucks, and I got some emergency teaching, and my husband to be worked as a landscaper. We lived paycheck to paycheck and were happy as the summer days were long. We couldn't afford holidays on the continent or fancy restaurants but I tell you what, a picnic after some Aldi cheese and crackers, ginger nuts and dark chocolate after a long walk in the woods was like heaven on earth.
There was always money for Jarrah's school uniform and there was always food on the table and the rent paid.
Travellers site, UK. Ours is the green truck.
To save some proper money, we moved out of our rental down in Dorset and onto a traveller's site in the UK. These were people who lived in vehicles long before van life was a thing, and squatted land and lived in a community together, supporting each other to get by. Jamie had lived like that before and it was easy for me to fit right in as I was no stranger to living in a car and being on the road. We had an old Bedford TK horse lorry and a little caravan for Jarrah. We'd go into the forest to collect firewood to keep warm and dumpster dive with the best of them to supplement our grocery shop. In that way we saved enough to move back to Australia, including Jamie's permanent resident visa and a bit toward a house deposit.
Moving Back to Australia
By this time, we knew we were never going to get ahead in England. We wanted some land to grow vegetables and have chickens. Jamie had finished his teaching degree and we walked straight into teaching jobs whilst living in a bus in a paddock, saving for a deposit for a house.
When all else fails, live in a bus.
We bought one just as the market nudged up after the GFC, and in hindsight, we wished we'd stretched the budget back then to buy a house on the coast but - you know, we weren't risk takers. The bank had offered us more than enough money but we chose to live well within our means. For a good few years, we made do. The holidays we went on were always camping trips. We had cheap cars that Jamie fixed. All our money went on the mortgage and fixing up the house and garden to our standard.
Our holiday in Tassie with a banged up old Econovan. He has a kombucha, btw - not a beer.
The extra money we had from two jobs went on some pretty fantastic holidays - something we'd never been able to afford to do. Trips back to the UK, to SE Asia. We could afford hobbies. We ate well - we even went out to dinner sometimes. We bought nice clothes. For the first time in our lives, we had money.
We never did buy an investment property.
Back to Being Broke Again
It's funny, being mortgage free. You have a house, but it still costs you money - bills, repairs, and so on.
It had enabled us to make decisions about our careers though. We were both desperately unhappy with our jobs and could no longer sustain that level of stress and anxiety. What we saved, we put into a year off, with a vow to never coming back to that way of life again.
Even if we were broke again.
We have a lot of skills we've learnt over the years to help us manage our finances. We don't get into debt. We have a vegetable garden and chickens. We know how to eat well for little expense. We don't eat out - we take picnics. We don't buy take away coffees. I buy a lot of my clothes at charity shops. And goodness - we just had an overseas trip where we shipped an old Landie to the UK and drove it to Morrocco and through Portugal and Spain. I honestly think it was cheaper to do that than fly everywhere and stay in hotels.
Funny how a lot of my 'broke' stories involve living in vehicles.
I do wish we'd taken more risks - we'd have a little more to fall back on now. Perhaps we could have even properly retired. Retirement seems a dream - we don't have enough superannuation for that yet (super is the enforced savings for retirement in Australia, whereby your employer contributes to the fund and you can make voluntary donations if you like).
We think about selling up and letting the money sit there until we find a house on the coast, and going travelling in the meantime. Tasmania is always a dream.
I try not to stress about money so much. I never used to. That financial anxiety seems a side effect of being older, and the financial fuckery of a climate we're in.
But I think my memory fails me a little - we've lived through so many times where we've been down to our last dollar and we've survived.
I try to listen to Jamie. 'We'll be okay, babe' he says. And he's right. We always have been.
This is in response to 
With Love,
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