WE’RE SELLING OUR HOUSE
CHANGE
2019 was our year of growth! We finally called “BS” on ourselves, put our big boy and girl pants on, and made things happen! Making the big decisions was one thing, but actually executing on them was an entirely different scenario we naively entered into.
This is the third blog post in a series of how our journey began. If you’re not quite caught up on all things New Zealand and Australia, you can catch up here.
We last left you with a taste of our phenomenal sabbatical to New Zealand and Australia. It was that trip that really gave us the cojones to start creating a path to living an intentional life on our terms. It certainly wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but we got to the root of our goals and held ourselves accountable to take the necessary steps needed.
PLAN AND PRAY
The first step was to identify all the things that were holding us back from living an intentional life. We did this by scheduling planning meetings (mostly at night) to brain dump our thoughts on paper… flip chart paper to be exact. Some of the things on our list might surprise you but ultimately, we needed time back in our days, weeks, and months. Our list consisted of things like work, commute time, laundry, cleaning, and grocery shopping amongst other things. While we couldn’t make changes all at once we created plans to modify or eliminate them over time.
Right when we needed it, there was a Knock, Knock! Did you hear it? That was God knocking on our doors with new employment opportunities for both Spencer and me. We prayed and HE answered! Spencer was in a corporate career with a fantastic salary, but the commute was an hour each way and he didn’t love, or even like, the work he was doing. A recruiter had contacted him regarding a short term, contracted corporate position with decent pay, similar commute but was PART TIME and much more enjoyable! We talked through our finances to make sure it would work, and he took the job. Meanwhile, I too stepped away from my long-time corporate career to pursue my own businesses. Over the past few years, I have grown a lifestyle brand/blog and started consulting for small businesses.
While we did experience a bit of an adjustment to our new career paths, we also found glimmers of freedom. This freedom equated to unplanned and unobligated time that we could spend as a family. An example of how we utilized this time would be picking Kade up early from school to take him to the playground. Spencer would meet us at the playground on his way home. A previous typical evening would be picking Kade up at the very last minute his school was open, rushing home, Spencer would cook, I would clean, and then we would have to do the bedtime stuff and spend very little quality time together. The extra time was a huge win, but we were just getting started.
LISTING OUR HOUSE FOR SALE
We were hungry for change; we were hungry for more family time, so we kept talking and planning. High on our list of plans was possibly moving to Raleigh, NC. Why Raleigh? Spencer’s family lives in Raleigh and SC, we have a bunch of friends around the Raleigh area and the cost of living is MUCH better than Maryland. Through these conversations we talked about building our forever home there. But something kept creeping in my mind… How do we really know we want that to be our forever home? Spencer has only lived in MD, and I have lived in a few other places, but there is a whole world out there to see. We toyed with the ideas of renting Airbnb’s in different places or living out west for a few years.
While we didn’t have a definitive plan, we surely weren’t going to get anywhere quickly with a 4100 sq ft. home packed with eight years of stuff. So, our second step was deciding to SELL OUR HOUSE!
Some of you will call us dream chasers, others will call us risk takers and many of you might just call us crazy!
WHY? Because on a whim we called a realtor I knew and made an appointment for them to visit our house. Prior to said meeting, I prepped our home to sell… changing some of the décor and depersonalizing the house. When the realtors saw our home, they said we could list the next day! We waited about a week, maybe two, and listed it. But holy smokes we didn’t have all the next steps planned out! If our house sold quick, we had no idea where we were going!
Over time we have learned that we are really good at talking about what we want out of life. And we are also really good at over-analyzing those thoughts, ideas, and plans to the point of not taking any action on them. But sometimes you just have to jump. So there we were taking a leap of faith to put our family in the best position to succeed in reaching our goals. Scary? Yes. Exhilarating at the same time? Absolutely!
TAKING STEPS TOWARD YOUR GOALS
This has been a learning process for us. Heck we are still learning! There are a couple of things that got us actually doing as opposed to just talking. Maybe they could help you start taking steps towards a goal that always seems too far away to reach.
1. Write your hopes, dreams and goals down! Even if you don’t think you are working toward them, your subconscious might be preparing you to take action when the time is right.
2. Remind yourself Faith is stronger than Fear. Fear tells you it isn’t the right time. Fear makes you question your decision. Fear makes you worry. Fear stops you from growing. But Faith empowers you. Faith gives you the freedom to be secure in your decision. Faith gives you the runway to grow. While Faith doesn’t give you the plan, it does allow you to know a plan will develop. When making big decisions, facing change or dealing with the unknown hold onto your Faith and fight the Fear with everything you have!
I’ll leave you with the most impactful question we asked ourselves “If you had everything you needed to make a change today, would you?” If the answer is no, what’s holding you back? Get honest with yourself. The first step is to understand your hurdles and fears. The next step is to actively work to overcome them!
Ready to Read More? Up next we have a change of plans.
