Tag: Davidson

Location Independence: Six Month Report

When Mr. ThreeYear, our boys and I moved to North Carolina this June, we realized a dream at least a year and a half in the making.

So how does location independence feel six months in? How have our decisions turned out? I thought I’d give you an update on how we’re feeling about our move now that we’ve had some time to settle in.

First of all, just as a review, our family publicly announced on this blog, just over two years ago, that by the time I turned 40 (in July 2019), we wanted to sell our house and move abroad. I put it like this:

Continue reading “Location Independence: Six Month Report”

Why We Bought a Smaller, More Expensive House

When Mr. ThreeYear and I moved from New Hampshire to North Carolina, we bought a house that was about 1000 square feet smaller. It was also significantly more expensive than the house we sold. So why did we buy a house that was more expensive and smaller? Well, there are a couple of reasons.

Why We Bought a Smaller, More Expensive House www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

It all started a year ago, when we visited Santiago. We stayed in the apartment we own there, which is about 550 square feet in total, with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms (they know how to pack things in in the big cities). Despite its small footprint, we had a wonderful time together. Little ThreeYear really enjoyed being so close to us, and just being able to call out to find us in one of the bedrooms.

When we got back to New Hampshire, we had several talks about selling our house and moving into a smaller condo to speed up our journey to location independence. We looked into several smaller condos at the beach, and I even wrote a post about it.  In the end, we moved to North Carolina and bypassed the condo altogether.

But the seed had been planted. A smaller space was something that we not only could live with, we wanted  to live with.  Continue reading “Why We Bought a Smaller, More Expensive House”

What’s Next for the Three Year Experiment?

In July of 2016, I turned 37. My husband and I lived in New England, far from both sides of our family, because of his job. I longed to be able to live in a place with milder winters, see my family more, and travel for extended periods of time. I longed to be able to visit Chile and see his side of the family, more than once every three years.

So when he asked me what I wished for on that birthday, I voiced my crazy wish, “I want to be able to spend half the year in Chile with your family and half in the Carolinas with mine.” At the time, it was impossible. His job kept him in New Hampshire, our kids were in school there, and we were far from financial independence. Yes, we’d spent the last eight years growing our net worth, first by paying off our $38,000 of consumer debt in 2008 and then slowly growing our net worth from there, but we were no where near the amount needed to quit work. Continue reading “What’s Next for the Three Year Experiment?”

The Big News

Mr. ThreeYear and I have some news to share. I’ve been waiting to tell you for awhile, but I wanted to wait until everything was finalized first.

The Big News www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

This summer, we’re going to be location independent!

That’s right, we’re doing it a full year and a half earlier than our plan. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited.

No, we haven’t reached our goal of doubling our net worth (we’ll keep working on that). And no, we aren’t going to take off on an around-the-world trip (yet!). But we are going to be able to move wherever we’d like.

We’ve sold our house in New Hampshire. We’re just waiting until the end of the month to close and move. I’ll be sure to write about all the details of our house sale and move later this summer.

And, we’ve found a place to live in a small community in a lake town of North Carolina.

How Did This Happen?

We felt very good about our timeline of becoming location independent by the end of 2019, and were working hard to save up and make decisions about how we’d make our location independent lifestyle look (if you read earlier posts, you’ll see we’ve changed our minds on that a lot over this past year and a half). But, this January, I had a fateful conversation. Continue reading “The Big News”