Hi there! It’s Wednesday and time for another installment of Your Three Year Experiment, featuring people who are sharing their own three year experiments–their plans, goals, and dreams for the next three years.
Today’s post is from Claudia from Two Cup House. Claudia is a personal finance blogger, SEO consultant, and trainer who moved into a tiny house with her husband Garrett in order to get closer to financial independence.
Claudia and her husband paid off six figures in debt in just a few years by downsizing to a tiny house and starting their own business. Now, they’re pursuing FI, but not RE (that’s financial independence, but not retiring early). Read on to find out:
- how they were able to pay off $200,000 in a short time
- how they’ll balance building their business with travel
- the one place in their budget they’re not frugal
If you’d like to be featured in the series, send me a note! My contact info is on the Start Here page.
What’s your background? Early years, education, married, kids, jobs?
We grew up in different parts of Pennsylvania and have spent most of our lives here. Unsurprisingly, we’re Penn State grads.
My husband, Garrett, and I live in a 500 sq ft house in Lancaster County, PA. We don’t have kids (and don’t plan to have kids).
Today, we’re self-employed. We run our own marketing consulting and training business.
How did you come to the realization that something needed to change in your life?
At the end of 2014, we heard a radio program about personal finance. People were talking about getting out of debt, which was unusual to us. After hearing enough episodes, we sat down to take a look at our own debt and found we had more than $200,000 in debt (including a mortgage), which made us both feel quite uneasy.
What will that change look like?
Deciding to downsize and sell our home was the first big step. I found a full-time job. And, we started a side hustle. All of this happened within the first four months of 2015. Once we put a plan in place, we wanted to make all the big changes as fast as possible.
Now, we’re pursuing some level of financial independence. We seek to invest enough to have dividends to cover our basic expenses, so we invest half of our income toward the goal.
How are you employing a three-year experiment to make it happen (i.e., what’s your three-year plan)?
Since we’re doing well with our finances, we decided we don’t have to rush to the finish line. Balancing work and life is the focus this year.
The first year of our three-year plan will be 2019. We will begin traveling the US and invest half of our income. And, we’re launching a new project that will help us grow our business.
The second year of our three-year plan is to bring in a partner of sorts to help us grow your new project (and subsequently our business). Scaling this new project requires more help than we have today, a necessary step to maintaining work-life balance. We’re planning to travel more of the US and then also take a trip to Europe for a few months.
The third year of our three-year plan is to improve our second-year efforts by looking at the data, figuring out what works so we can continue doing more of that, and eliminating what doesn’t work to make us more efficient. We’ll be traveling around our favorite parts of the US and abroad to find a small plot of land we can call “home” in the future.
What have been some challenges you’ve run into?
With respect to our personal finances, we have a tendency to push the “easy” button when it comes to dinner, so we’re not always the most frugal.
What have you found easier than expected?
Living in a small house makes life a lot easier. We don’t spend as much time cleaning or maintaining a home as we used to. We find we’re happier than we were in the big house.
Do you think you’ll reach your goals in three years? Longer? Shorter?
I think it’s going to take us more time than we expect to grow our business, but since we’re on the slow road to financial independence, we’re not all that concerned if it takes another year to get there.
However, I think we’ll find our next patch of grass sooner rather than later. We’ve wanted to relocate for several years and have already identified a few places we like.
What are you looking forward to once you’ve reached your goal(s)?
Having the ability to take our business on the road with us is the goal, so I’m looking forward to the start of our travels 2019. Achieving financial independence will just be the icing on the cake.
Continue reading “Your Three Year Experiment: Claudia from Two Cup House”
