Four years of car free living

Last Thursday, April 5 marked the fourth anniversary of being a one car family, give or take a couple of months. ;) I look forward to marking the anniversary every year. This is one anniversary that is truly earned and I am proud of. Living in the DC metro region makes it easy, with it's ample public transportation. But it's not without its challenges. Having gone back to school to earn my certificate in Certified Financial Planning, my class meets on Wednesday evenings from 7pm until 10pm. The campus is right off one of the subway stops on my commute, which is convenient, but the class ending so late at night means I miss the last bus that I take from my subway stop to my neighborhood. On non school days, my wife picks me up from the subway. But my son is in bed by the time I get out of class. So I drive to my subway stop on Wednesday mornings to ensure I have a ride home. That leaves my family with no car. My wife has made the best of it, deeming it "pajama Wednesdays". She and my son make it a lazy day. Other than that, we are never really in need of two cars. We've made the best of the situation for four years. Here is to four more. :)

Car Free Once Again

Cross posted at the Shock Family Circus blog.

As quickly as it arrived, it was gone. I no longer own my 2000 orange Miata I named "Orangina". The job I bought it to commute for I quit before I even started for a job that is Metro accessible. Despite how much I liked the car, I didn't want to keep it if I'm not going to drive it on a regular basis. We lived with one car for three years before I bought Orangina, so I wouldn't be blazing uncharted territory. But we went a step further. We traded in the Miata and our beloved Xterra, a.k.a. "Ruby" for a "family" car. We bought a 2012 Mazda5 wagon. Known to car enthusiasts as the "minivan for those who hate minivans". And we hate minivans. We're back to being a one car family but with a 6 passenger family car. We've already broken in the car Shock family style by hauling our hairy dog in the back on our holiday weekend roadtrip. He definitely left his mark.

Car Free No Longer

Today should have been my three year anniversary of living car free. I say "should have been" because 2011 has been a challenging year for me so far and has brought about a lot of change outside of my control, especially when it comes to my career. I was laid off in January and after a two month search, finally found a new job. I'll get into the details of my lay off, job search, and what I did during my time off in a separate post. This post will focus on my car situation. The new job is not easily accessible by public transportation. When I say "not easily" I mean walking to the bus stop, taking bus #1 to the subway, taking the subway for a number of stops, then taking bus #2 to the job site. All told the commute is three hours round trip. That just won't cut it for me. I need to spend time with my family. So I sucked it up and bought a used car last week. I can drive to the new job in approximately 45 minutes; a little longer in the evenings on my way home. Driving to and from work will shave at least an hour off my commute and I can come and go on my schedule, not public transportation's (always late) schedule.

I bought a car I've wanted since it was new, a 2000 orange Mazda Miata. I named her "Orangina". It's in keeping with the spirit and tradition of having orange roadsters and if I must drive, I want something fun to do it in. It has a manual transmission, which I haven't had in a long time and missed. It's in great shape, has below average miles for an 11 year old car, doesn't leak anything, is fun to drive and the original Bose stereo sounds awesome! All it needs is a new set of tires, a new radio antenna (original one is broken off) and some floor mats. Oh, and new center caps. For some reason the original silver grey OEM caps that matched the wheels have been replaced with ugly tan caps.

meet Orangina - my new ride to work

While I'm saddened to no longer be car free, at the same time I'm excited to have a car I've had my eye on. In the short term I've shortened my commute to my new job and we'll be back to being a two car family. Long term, we plan on having another kid and moving to Austin, TX in 2012. I don't know if that will necessitate the need to have two cars, but only time will tell.

meet Tawny, my original orange roadster

Forget Frugality

We've been living on one income since we decided to start a family. It's hard to do living in one of the most affluent metropolitan areas of the country, but we're making it paycheck by paycheck. We cut our expenses to the extreme by selling one of our cars, eliminating cable TV and by me working from home full time. We recently paid off the car we still own two years early. I have a work issued Blackberry that I also use as a my personal phone so we pay for only one mobile phone contract. We started budgeting by using the best budgeting software for the money-YNAB, which stands for You Need A Budget. I found out about YNAB from my favorite personal finance blog, Bargaineering. We don't go out to eat or buy anything without a coupon or discount. We subscribe to Groupon and all it's copycat competitors. But you can only do so much cutting back before there's nothing else to cut.
2011 will be the year to "Forget Frugality". I've been looking into ways to make additional income, both passive and active. Passive income requires money but not time. Active income requires time and money, but less of the latter. We don't have a heck of a lot of money to invest in dividend stocks to generate passive income, and I'm not going to dip into our savings to do so. It takes a lot of money to make a lot of passive income, but anything is better than nothing. I don't have the time for a part-time job and they usually aren't worth the trouble for the amount (or lack of) money you make or the time investment.
I stumbled upon the internet marketing website Prosperly.com while researching YNAB's founder and online entrepreneur Jesse Mechem (He and I have something in common. See if you can figure it out by reading his profile ;)). Prosperly is a website flipping blog. The founder, Adam White, is supposedly a successful online entrepreneur and will teach you the 'Prosperly Way'. He offers personal coaching to help you buy and flip your first website. I'm intrigued but nonetheless skeptical.
The YNAB community also introduced to me Ramit Sethi of blog and book I Will Teach You To Be Rich and the "Earn 1K on the Side" course. I participated in a two part webinar hosted by him. He's an in your face/personal guerilla marketing kind of guy that really talks up his Earn 1K course. His hard sell worked. He only opens the course for very short internals at a time so we talked about it and we decided to sign up. It's an expensive course, so I didn't take the decision lightly. I was again intrigued but skeptical. He offers a 3 month money back guarantee, so what did I have to lose? When I went to sign up and pay for the course the website crashed. How's that for a sign? I contacted customer service and they gave me another link to sign up, but I saw the writing on the wall. I Googled both Prosperly and Earn 1K to see if they were scams, but nothing negative came up in the search results. That doesn't mean they aren't scams, it just means that no one has posted anything negative about either program or that both guys are very good at suppressing the negative feedback or they are legitimate. Has anyone ever used either course? I'd love to hear feedback from people I know.

Related articles

• 'You Need a Budget' Gets a 'Leg-Up' from App-Up (prweb.com)

Two Years of Car Free Living

Today marks two years of living car free. The addition of our son Fletch truly makes us a "one car family". It's working out great for us. We run our errands together on the weekends. We haven't yet had a situation where we both needed the car. I guess we are just excellent schedulers. With Jennifer now a SAHM we've reduced our need to have even a single car. No commute for her. Her only need is going to school twice a week. Over the past year my office changed locations and was no longer easily accessible by public transit. I started commuting with a co-worker three days a week and working from home on Wednesdays and Fridays. That lasted about eight months until she surprised me with the "it's just not working for me anymore" excuse. After talking with my boss, as of April 1 I'm officially working from home full time. None of my team is even in my office, so there is no reason for me to be there. Now my round trip commute is walking up and down the stairs to my home office. A 20 second commute. You can't beat that!

Do I miss my car? Not anymore. I don't even have a picture of her on my desk. Do I still think about what my next car is going to be? Yes, but I'm not chomping at the bit to go buy one. I'm happy knowing that I'm winning the psychological battle of me verses society's "need" to have one car per adult. Bring it on.

Car Free - One Year Later

Today is the one year anniversary of living car free. On April 5, 2008 I sold my beautiful Nissan 350Z roadster, a.k.a. "Tawny", and never looked back. I've been commuting on public transit ever since. I leave the house at 7:30am, I walk 3/4 of a mile to the bus stop and catch the 7:45 bus. That bus takes me to the Vienna Metro subway station. I then ride the subway about 20 minutes to the Rosslyn station which is a couple of blocks from my office building. I get to work about 9am everyday. In the year I've been riding public transit, I've only been late to work a few times. My job lets me work from home on Wednesdays, so I'm only commuting four days a week.

Every once in a while I think about Tawny and how much I miss her. I have a picture of her on my desk at work. Before I sold her I was only driving her about 15 miles a week, so I wasn't getting any value out of the relationship. It was for the best. With Shock Jr. on the way and the wife planning on becoming a stay at home mom, the money we save selling my car makes life easier in the long run. Jennifer has Ruby, her Xterra that she drives to work and school. After Shock Jr. is born, she'll be driving to school only.

At the time I sold Tawny, gas was around $4 a gallon. Gas is cheaper now but the recession is in full bloom and the decision to go car free makes me look really smart. It makes as good economic sense now as it did a year ago, even without the family getting bigger.

I'm still a car enthusiast. We talk often about what car I'll get next. But I don't know when that will be. I'd like to think we could live with one car until Shock Jr. starts driving. That's a pipe dream but not impossible. Ask me in 17 years.

Getting More Mileage Out of Life

I never thought the day would come when Tawny wasn't a part of my life. I've spent so much time with her over the last 3 1/2 years that it seemed inevitable that we would be together forever. The daily commutes, the topless drives to anywhere, the vacation in the OBX. Those are good memories. But the relationship is over. We've gone our separate ways. Tawny and I have broken up. I was slowly weaning myself off of my dependence of her. I dropped her off at the dealership last Saturday. I turned around and never looked back. I am now proudly car free. It's no big deal. attitude is everything. if you decide it's possible to live without a car, it will be.

The vast majority of car owners in this country have an addiction to it. And like any addiction, it's a costly one. Most Americans spend their entire adult life feeding this addiction with precious time and money simply because they don't know any other way; they don't know there is a viable alternative to a car based existence. The good news is all it takes to cure a car addiction is a little info and some mild lifestyle reengineering. As author Katie Alford writes in her book Divorce Your Car! "Car dependency is a psychological addiction, not a physical one." From birth, cars are as much a part of daily existence for most of us as eating and sleeping. It's no wonder most Americans don't question why or whether they need a car-they just accept it as a necessary part of life. Driving is remarkably habitual. Once you settle into a habit, it appears to be the only way to do things. but now that I've switched to a bike/walk/public transportation lifestyle, it no longer occurs to me to use a car for everything. All the whining about being out of shape or too old or that biking isn't safe is just a rationalization to avoid having to think about your life and actually implement changes to improve it. Without a car you learn to plan ahead, to be patient and to delay instant gradification. Part of living car free involves reevaluating, rearranging and streamlining some of your activities for better efficiency.

Car free living makes exercise a part of your life, not something else you have to try to fit into your busy schedule. And exercise is something I sorely need. Chronic and I have taken up biking as a hobby. I walk 1 1/2 miles roundtrip to the bus stop every weekday. I've come to realize that cars are mostly a way to display status. Im not out to impress anyone, at least not anymore. Financial independence is more important to me and my family than image.

The environmental movement has finally won me over. I believe in protecting the environment. "Think globally and act locally." Getting rid of my car is my way of reducing pollution.

Perhaps the most valuable benefit of car-free living is peace of mind. It comes from the cumulative effect of the many smaller benefits of the lifestyle. For example, solid personal finances and good health are essential to peace of mind. And peace of mind is the foundation for building a high quality of life. When you get rid of your car you may find that all the benefits add up to one big payoff - a richer, healthier, less stressed life.