Episode Transcript
My family and I have been traveling since 2022. And I want to talk to you guys about something that’s been hugely impactful in the way that we experienced worldschooling. Now, all of this came about shortly after my wife and I started taking a financial course.
They sent us home and told us we had to have a conversation about what we wanted our lives to look like 20 years from now. Now, I was dreading this conversation because I had some things that had been rolling around in my head for many, many years, going all the way back to high school, that I wasn’t quite sure would be received well by my new wife of only nine months.
I knew what the right answer was when it comes to what your future should look like. But then there was my answer. So she asked me. And so I decided to be truthful. And I told her I don’t want to work anymore.
I would much prefer to travel for the rest of my life. I had no idea what she was going to say. I’d never heard anybody doing something like this in my life. But to my surprise, she said, OK, how do we do that?
And that set us down this path. I am tremendously thankful for my wife. She is absolutely amazing. What I want to tell you about is a recommendation that we got from somebody. Read this book. It’s called “The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo.
The Minimalism Revelation
And this book is about minimalism. But we read it and the light bulbs went off for us. Talk about three areas of impact in our lives. But the impact has been much more profound, which I hope you’ll hear as we kind of go through this. Now, if you’re going to be a minimalist, you’re going to have to get rid of some stuff. All right. We live in a consumer culture. It’s crazy.
But don’t do it in the way that people typically would do, which is go room by room, find a few things, storm in a box, have a garage sale. She’s like, no, no, no, no. I need you to go through every type of thing that you’ve got. I don’t care if it’s spread across 15 rooms, pull all of them together. They’re the same type of thing. And you’re going to go through each one and decide which of them truly brings value, truly brings joy to your life.
And so it seems a little crazy to have a conversation about what brings you joy. If the things that you’re looking at are like steak knives, we pulled out all of our steak knives into my shock. We had like 50 of them. We don’t eat that much steak. And so that was a pretty easy one. I put a lot of those in the donate and sell bag. Right. But the same process goes through all of your stuff.
And so like my work clothes, I don’t need 30 work shirts. And we’ve all got the shirts. We’re like, well, let’s keep this one in case I decide to do something different. But we all know we all go to the exact same shirts every time. And so when you go through this process, you know, you’ve got the handful of shirts that you actually are your go to shirts and the rest.
Meh. Right. So put the Meh shirts in the donate bag. And we did that. Pretty much everything in the house and bags and bags and bags of stuff are going to our church. We’re going to Salvation Army. We’re selling. And every one of those bags felt like a burden that we didn’t realize we had. They came right off. It really felt good. Simple things like having a clear counter are amazing for your psyche in ways that you have no idea.
And what’s crazy is the more you start doing this, the more energy you get from it. And so you start to do things like, no, wait a minute. For the last few weeks, every time we watch a movie, we all pile in the master bedroom and we watch a movie together as a family. So why do we need the TV that’s upstairs? Oh, that’s right. We have that TV because it’s a game room. And if it’s a game room, you got to have a TV.
But we don’t need it. So we donated it. And then a couple of weeks later, you go, duh, why do we have the couches in the game room where there’s no TV?
You get rid of the couches and you go through this process and so much gets lifted and things start to get really cleared out. People start to look at you funny like, why is your house so empty? But it feels good. And here’s the thing. It aligns with our future lifestyle. Our plan at that time would be to travel the world full time. We’re not going to have a lot of stuff. Right. And so why do we need a lot of stuff now?
We started to also get really creative. So we had a third kid around that time and people started saying, you’re going to have to get a bigger car, you become a bigger family, and we’re dreading it. We’re like, we don’t want to get a bigger car, but we have this four-door car and our car seats don’t fit. We’re not going to sacrifice safety.
But we talked about it with more people and I met someone at work that was like, oh, Diono makes this car seat called the Diono Radian RXT that fits three car seats abreast. And it’s super safe. Problem solved. So they’re expensive. So we probably spent 900 bucks on three car seats, but we didn’t have to buy a brand new car.
And so many things can change your life if you have this new paradigm about things that you actually need, that you actually get value out of, and having those in your life and all the other stuff. Just let it go. Now, some of you are starting to get nervous, twitches, you know, this may seem a little too much like deprivation. In fact, one lady in the Bahamas told us, oh, no, I could never do that because “I’m a tingsy girl. Like I need my tings.” And if that’s you, that’s fine because you don’t have to apply it in the way that we applied it. You can do this in a way that is beneficial to you and to your family.
Minimalism with Kids
So I want to talk about a little bit of what we did with the kids. You know, we never really bought them a lot of toys. They use their own money.
And what we told them was you can buy something new as long as you can fit it in this little toy bin. And what that caused them to do is really evaluate, you know, is this thing something that I really want? And if it is, what do I have that I don’t use that I could sell or give to someone who’s disadvantaged or donate?
And if we sold or donated it, then we give them the money for it and they could use that on something else. But it really caused them to be introspective and thoughtful when they bought things, which is again in alignment with our future lifestyle. You know, we don’t put every little piece of art on every surface of our refrigerator.
We have one designated area. You want to put something new up, find something that you can pull down. We’ll take a picture of the old drawing, so we’ll keep it in our memories. But we’re not going to keep it forever. You can just go ahead and put that in the trash. And guess what? The little feelings weren’t hurt. They were happy to put their new thing up. Right. And this became part of their psyche and part of the way that we work as a family.
Aligning with Our Future
Now, this is going to really help them, as it has helped us, to really have a deep sense of what they value and what we value as a family. You know, we had two guest rooms available, but the kids preferred to be together because they enjoyed having conversations at night.
And so, but that’s also in alignment with our future lifestyle. We’re going to be in places where sometimes there’ll be extra rooms, but other times we’re all going to be in one big room.
And we have to be okay with that as a family. Some people will start to say, why do it now? Like, if you’re going to go to world school in the future, why don’t you wait until then to make the change?
We have become big believers in this idea that if it is valuable for you in the future, it’s valuable for you now. If it’s going to bring value to your life, then if you incorporate it now, there’ll be a couple of things that will do for you. One, you’ll be more content with the life that you’re living.
But two, you won’t be in the situation that I hear so many people go through that when they go into the world school lifestyle, they’re not having to give up everything at once. The tears won’t be there because they’re not giving up all their stuff. They’ve kind of lived in a minimal way the whole time. They’re not suddenly coming out of public school and going to world school because they’ve been homeschooling all the time.
And the more of these things you can pull forward, the easier that transition is going to be for you. And we’re not ogres. We definitely told them they can put all the things that they can’t carry into a carry-on in a treasure chest and have that at the grandparents’ house. But it’s one treasure chest. And so as they pick up new trinkets and cool things around the world, they’re coming back and having the same conversation about what do I value and what do I not.
You know, we weren’t just putting this on the kids. For us, it was really about getting rid of the things in our lives that we didn’t value. But one thing that we never compromised on was travel and vacations because we value those experiences. We value the time with family. And so while we cut back on everything else, we spent money on those things every year.
Two trips to grandparents each year, vacations and the like. So that’s how we value things. This may look completely different for you, but you want to have those conversations and start making those changes in your lives. Also, when it came down to it, like we ended up selling everything that we owned and we basically burned the ships, right?
So the only thing we have are these handful of carry-ons. We realized also we didn’t want to have to carry all this homeschool stuff. And so I started looking for a service that I could use to digitize all of our school books and workbooks and super expensive everywhere I looked. But I finally found this amazing service called $1 Scan that will basically scan 100 pages for just a dollar.
Digitizing Our Life
And we stacked up pounds and pounds of books, sent them off to $1 Scan, and for 40 bucks, they digitized our entire world school library. And now we have access to all of that stuff in the form of PDFs that each of the kids can have on their personal computer.
So now they can do their homeschool stuff as world schoolers on the go. In the same way, we digitized all of our stuff. So we have access to all of our financial documents and passports and all the stuff that helps us with the logistics of travel available offline when we need it, from our phones when we need it.
And that’s probably a whole other podcast that we could talk about in the future. But we’re super happy with our setup. It’s not perfect. In fact, we made a big overhaul when we went to Vietnam. We got some funny looks as we were getting out of the bus to get onto a boat. Everybody else has got the little backpack, but we’ve got these three huge carry-on suitcases. I say they’re huge relative to what we’re using now.
But from a carry-on standpoint, they’re standard American size. They were just stuffed like ticks. Right. So we hobbled those things out of the boat, floated an hour across the river, and then we got to a point where the host hops out and he’s like, all right, everybody, let’s go.
So there’s me grabbing three overly stuffed American-size carry-on bags, carrying them up this muddy embankment, down this huge field, up the side of a mountain to get to our home stay for the day. It was ridiculous. I mean, I was sweating bullets by the time we got to the top of that and I swore we were going to get rid of those bags and do something better.
Continuous Improvement
And so a couple of weeks later, we got to Thailand, we went to a local market there, got a couple of Asian-size carry-ons, one for each of us, color-coded, super cute. And everybody’s able to put their stuff in there. We downsized a bunch of stuff, gave it to the local church, and we’ve been using those ever since. And we use the same thing that we used with the kids’ toy boxes. You can bring anything you want, as long as you can fit it within that bag.
And then we use opportunities where we come back to the States to swap out things that are wearing out and optimize them a little bit further. So we can have a whole episode on how we optimize the things that we pack, but we do things like, you know, make sure that all our clothes are dark. So we only have to wash in one load as opposed to two, or making sure that our clothes are dual-purpose, like my pants and my shorts that are zip-off pants.
But all this comes together in a way that has us with complete flexibility to travel the world with no bills, kids that are super content, no more Vietnam situations, hyper-flexibility for things like traveling in taxis. We’re normally with five people in five suitcases, you’re at a two-taxi situation, but we fit. It works.
And so the key thing here is trying to figure out what aspects of your future lifestyle you can pull forward so that you’re not taking such a huge leap when you actually jump into that worldschooling down the line. You can get a jumpstart by taking a look at the tools page we have on https://worldschooltools.com/tools. Take a look at all the education and travel tools that we found most helpful.
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