We’re pleased to share the following guest post by Heather from Want What You Have.

On my blog, Want What You Have, I often write about the pleasures of the simple life. However, my life has not always been simple. In fact, there was a time, not so long ago, when it was so complicated that I was constantly frazzled and totally miserable. The cause of this misery is very easy to define.

It was stuff.

I’ve always been a person who likes neatness and order. When I was in elementary school, my desk was always neat as a pin. In high school, a boy who liked me left a note in my locker, to tell me that it was the cleanest locker he’d ever seen. (How romantic…apparently he couldn’t think of anything else to compliment me on!) When I moved into the work world as a young adult, I kept my cubicle so sparse and tidy that I think my co-workers secretly thought that I was just a teensy bit obsessive-compulsive. The point is that I’ve always tried to regularly purge unwanted items, because less stuff is easier to manage and keep neat. Then, I married a pack rat.

When I met my husband, he owned his own business, as well as four rental houses and three apartment buildings. He had storage garages filled to bursting with stuff…cars, collectibles, a motorcycle, a boat, a snowmobile. He was $500,000 in debt, and completely miserable. How ironic — he purchased all of the stuff because he thought it would make him happy. Sometimes it did, but the happiness was always fleeting. When the high of owning something new faded, he felt exactly the same as he did before. So, he would buy something else to get the feeling back. It was a vicious, neverending cycle.

My husband had so much stuff that he couldn’t even face trying to sell any of it. He didn’t know where to start! The very idea was so daunting and overwhelming that he preferred to just shut everything in a storage garage and pretend it wasn’t there. However, after our first child was born, we soon realized that storing, cleaning, insuring, managing, and working to pay for all that stuff was robbing us of precious time we could be spending together. We had to make some serious changes. We’d had enough.

We began by making a plan. Our ultimate goal was to have a comfortable home on a small acreage, in a good school district for our children, with absolutely NO DEBT. We made a list of all of our debts, from the highest interest rate to the lowest. I taught myself to use eBay, and little by little we began to pare down. We sold the small stuff, like collectibles, first and worked our way up to the real estate. My husband is a real estate broker, so he listed all of our property himself. All of the money we made went to pay off debt. We paid off the loans with the highest interest first and worked our way down, until there was no more debt left. It took 7 years, and a lot of hard work, but it was definitely worth it. In November, 2004, we purchased our acreage. On July 4th, 2007, we realized our goal of 100% debt freedom — no more mortgages, no more car or credit card payments, nothing! It was truly Independence Day for us!

There has not been a single day when we’ve missed anything we sold, because all of our stuff had become a terrible burden. I believe that the financial crisis in this country has made many people wake up and realize, like we did, that borrowing and buying and accumulating more and more stuff has gotten them nowhere. Stuff will not feed their families, or sustain them during times of crisis. Faith and family are what really matter…stuff means nothing at all.

When we began this journey toward voluntary simplicity and financial freedom, we were considered an anomaly. In a culture of wild spending and borrowing, we were scaling back, and people simply could not understand this. Some people, even a few of our family members, thought we were crazy to part with all of that “precious” stuff. They have not yet realized that stuff is not the key to happiness. We’ve found peace and contentment in our simple life and our faith. Everything we own belongs to us, and we are working for ourselves - not to pay creditors. We are no longer running to achieve success as society defines it. We are free.

Visit Biblical Womanhood for more Frugal Friday tips.

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