Living Behind the Curve

Accomplishing the bare necessities of life is stressful. Just getting through every day so you can wake up tomorrow and do it again is a lot. Then, you’re expected to keep up with the Joneses, stay fit, lose weight, maintain hobbies, advance your career, buy bigger houses, keep up on reality TV and world affairs, have the latest gadgets, have a family, go out on weekends, stay abreast of the local gossip, remember to change the air filter, drink 8 glasses of water a day, save for retirement, keep up the yard, stay hip to the latest fashions, and keep the houseplants alive — all just so you can say “I have a life“. It’s no wonder that everyone is stressed out and broke.

We used to be like that — a couple of twenty-something college dropouts with a whole lot of debt, no time, and no real direction in life. Now, a year or two later, our debts are nearly paid off, we’re both going back to school, and we’ve both discovered that, more than anything, what we want to be when we grow up is retired. By examining our motivations and priorities, we figured out how to simplify our day-to-day, how to hack our budget to live more frugally, and still maintain the fabulous quality of life we’d come to enjoy. We stopped fighting to stay ahead of the curve.

Living Behind the Curve is our attempt to document and share our experiences with the world. Maybe we’ll help a few people along the way, too, with our unique blend of lowbrow frugality, simple living tips, and radical re-envisioning of what success in this day and age actually means.

Dani
In addition to my full-time job herding cats (I supervise techies) as an executive admin (you can read about my recent career change here), I am a full-time student pursuing my bachelor’s degree in management, with a double-major or minor in marketing if I can find the time. Writing and editing this blog will hopefully serve as a means of letting go of my control-freak-ness, turning off my internal editor while writing, and learning to write on command. My goal used to be to leave the rat race at 50 and work at WaWa — I’m now looking at a much simpler future, where I work for enjoyment and not for money (and not waiting until 50 to start). My mom “retired” at 50 from a high-stress 60 hr week job to a customer service position much lower down the ladder, which is where the magic number comes from. I occasionally (read: rarely) ramble about non-LBtC things on my personal blog, I have a recipes and cooking blog at Catch the Spoon, and love making jewelry, which you can view (and purchase!) at Sweet Tarragon. My new favorite hobby is proofing OCR’d texts destined for Project Gutenberg at Distributed Proofreaders. I can be contacted directly here.

Meredith

By day, I’m a mild-mannered archivist. By night, I fiddle around with the internet here and elsewhere as well as work on my own podcast of experimental music and other audio nonsense at Braindouche.net.  I am the household zen master, a fabulous balance to Dani’s high-strung, “please hassle me - I thrive on stress” attitude. I love my current job, but I secretly dream of becoming a corporate archiving consultant, overcharging enormous international corporations to tell them how to fix their filing disasters, preferably over the phone from home while wearing my jammies. I keep the world updated on my latest trains of thought on my personal blog, Around The Bend, and if you like, you can email me about whatever strikes your fancy.