Becoming Domestic

Almost two years ago to the week we did the simple sums which led us to believe that we could leave our London home and move to idyllic rural surroundings nearer to our families in Bristol, have me be a full-time mum instead of working full-time in a City investment bank and still be no worse off at the end of each month. As I was earning a handsome City salary at the time we had surely done our maths wrong to come up with the radical idea that we could manage without my income. It appeared to be a ridiculous notion.

We were, however in April 2006, spending a small fortune (and generally more each month than our combined net income) on two full time day nursery places for our three year old twins, on the mortgage for our three bedroomed terraced house, on a twice weekly cleaner, on monthly tube passes, on daily Pret a Manger sandwiches, on smart clothing, on dry cleaning, on Marks and Spencer ready meals, frequent take away meals and trips to restaurants (with associated babysitting and taxi fare costs thrown in), on beauty treatments, on foreign holidays, on Christmas and birthdays and on all the ad-hoc daily spending on random items we didn’t particularly need but made us feel momentarily satisfied. It didn’t feel like we had a luxurious existence. It seemed normal. We were, we realised, working hard to pay for a lifestyle we had outgrown and no longer desired.

Within just a few days we were both pretty sure that we had the option of ‘downshifting’, a term which we’d not come across before this revelation but had been coined in the US.

The house we owned in East London was rented out to four individual young professional tennants, a friend was hired as a trustworthy property manager, I was granted 13 weeks unpaid parental leave for both kids which amounted to a 6 month sabatical from the bank in which I’d worked for six years, Darren said goodbye to his partner in the London internet software agency he’d built up from scratch, started a new venture similar to the previous and we found a lovely four bedroomed unfurnished Victorian house to rent in Worcestershire surrounded by fields. We began our downshifting adventure which essentially meant living within our means by setting budgets and sticking to them

The theory was that if we hated rural life, if Darren’s new business didn’t thrive, if I wasn’t keen on being a full-time mother and homemaker (another American phrase we became familer with during our brief period of research) we could move back to London, I could resume employment at JPMorgan and life would continue much as it had been before.

We still live in the rented Worcestershire home (and have planted a willow den for the children and have a huge vegetable garden in operation), the web development business Bealers created is successful enough to have local offices, four full time employees and myself working as a very part-time, homeworking bookeeper/office manager and has plenty of satisfied clients. The London house was sold last Autumn and our new baby daughter was born at the beginning of this year. We remain delighted and amazed that we were able to downshift in the way that we did.

It was a very nice surprise to find out that this humble blog at time of writing comes up 5th in the list on Google when people search on the word ‘Downshifting‘. With that in mind I’ve thought about how people can set about downshifting without having to quit their jobs or homes and move out to isolated countryside to raise livestock, make yoghurt and cheese from their own goat’s milk. By doing a small downshift a large amount of simplification can happen and that in itself can lead to huge satisfaction.

Downshifting (in my mind) means changing your lifestyle either minutely or hugely so that you gain access to more of the two vital yet scarce resources in your life TIME by freeing up or requiring less MONEY.

We are all guarranteed to have a finite time on this planet, a finite amount of time when we have a good health, high energy levels and those of us offspring have only a small period while the children are young.

Many people today living in our modern developed societies find themselves in jobs which they swap huge amounts of their own time, skills and energy for income yet at the end of the week/month/year a sense of ‘Where has the time gone?’ and ‘What do we have to show for all that money we earned?’ prevails as well as ‘Why do I feel so unsatisfied despite all the lovely clothes, the smart house, nice car and luxury holidays I have?’

A chronic sense of disatisfaction with modern existence can be found throughout the population but with very little clues as to how to do it differently This seems to be especially true with many women of a certain age who having started and gained success in their careers are finding themselves with small kids’ needs to fit in.

Downshifting enables you to simplify the way you live in order to spend less money on wasteful things and therefore have more to spend on the important things to you. Often people who are open to downshifting find that by finding low-cost alternatives to the things they previously bought they are then in a position to work fewer hours which obviously frees up more time. If you aren’t able to reduce your spending or time at work it may be that just by changing the way you conduct your life will bring about a sense of downshifting and satisfaction through simplification.

For more ideas see post ‘Top 10 ways to begin to downshift‘

Posted on April 27th, 2008 under Downshifting • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback