The advantages of our way of life

• Freedom of schedule

Of course Fred needs to dedicate time to his business so that it generates more and more income and of course I need to meet deadlines for my clients. But we don’t have to work standard hours: if one day we want to work from 8 to 5 it’s fine but we can also decide to start working at 2 p.m. or to take a break on a weekday and work on the weekend instead or to work only 3 hours per day, etc.

Also, if we are tired for some reason or sick, we can enjoy our freedom of schedule to oversleep or to postpone what we had planned to do. As long as we organize our activities in a responsible manner, we can do pretty much what we want. Nobody expects us to be in front of our computers 40 hours per week at office hours.

How does this translate into our everyday life? Well, we can take two weeks off to go visit our families or to move to another country and we don’t need to ask the permission to do so nor to plan it in advance. We can be pretty spontaneous. We can go out during the day (grocery shopping, to the gym, etc.) to enjoy daylight and work at home later, when the sun is already set. If we need to do some paperwork somewhere that only opens during office hours (it’s more than often the case), it’s no problem, we don’t need to worry or ask for the day off, we just work later or don’t work at all that day if our schedule makes it possible. Also, if one of us is sick and needs to go to the doctor, the other one can assist, go to the pharmacy, etc. Nobody prevents us from spending this quality time together. At a normal job, we would have to ask for a day off and therefore lose one day of vacation. Maybe we wouldn’t even be granted the day off since you usually get one for your husband only in case of serious health problems.

I want to insist on the fact that we do work and we are certainly not lazy persons but nobody imposes office hours on us. We have the possibility to organize our work in a very flexible manner so that we can adapt to special situations or simply enjoy our time without having to report to anybody.

• Freedom of location

Both Fred and I work from home and all we really need is our computers (laptops made it very easy!) and an Internet connection. Nobody expects us to be anywhere: Fred’s collaborators don’t care where he is as long as he can be reached by email and my clients don’t care either as long as they see I get the job done.

This is great because we have the possibility to move a lot. I think that many people would love to do the same thing but cannot just because they have to be at an office Monday to Friday or because their work depends on them being at a specific location. I am very happy to be able to do that and share it with my husband; those are great experiences and will be great memories to remember.

Now is the right time. When we have children we will have to provide them with stability. Also, there might be a point where we are physically tired of moving around so it’s great to be able to do it when we are still young enough to feel like it. When we are older and look back, we won’t complain “I would have loved travelling around but I couldn’t back then and now I don’t have the energy or health to do it”.

• A comfortable financial situation

If we had a mortgage (and worse than a mortgage is a variable-rate mortgage), we would probably be struggling right now. If we were working at a company hit by the crisis, we would be worried about being made redundant or maybe we would have lost our job already.

We are not rich (not yet!!!) and we sure are careful with our spending but it’s nice to go through life without worrying about being short of money for indispensable (and sometimes less indispensable) expenses. The way of life we chose still makes it possible for us to afford the things we need, to travel every three months on average, to buy presents to our relatives and friends on special occasions, to eat out regularly (in reasonable-priced places but still…), to pay for any necessary health care (I recently had an unexpected gum problem that health insurance didn’t cover and I was happy to be able to heel my gums so my teeth won’t fall off within 10 years), to buy DVDs that we like, etc.

At that point, you are probably thinking that I am completely biased and you can name many disadvantages that our way of life entails. To be honest, I don’t see any serious disadvantage but I do feel frustrated sometimes, so I will post about the downside of our lifestyle next time.