My flight leaves February 21. One way, Houston to Tirana. It cost $344 and I paid for it with miles, so the cash number was zero, and I still have about 100,000 miles sitting there for whatever comes after. My first 32 nights are booked too. Eighteen in Tirana, fourteen in Durres. Total charge: $409.10,…
Everything I owned fit in a Nissan Altima. Not in a philosophical way. In a literal way. Clothes, a few bags, toiletries, some electronics, and whatever else I’d decided was worth the space. That was the inventory. If you’d stolen the car you’d have gotten all of it. I wasn’t doing an experiment in minimalism….
For most of my adult life I believed one equation. Work harder. Make more money. Life gets easier. I ran that experiment for about a decade. I went from making around $1,500 a month to making around $4,000 a month in Houston, which is not a city where $4,000 a month is a rounding error….
About a year ago I started asking myself a question I couldn’t answer. If this all works, then what? At the time I was working in roofing sales and building my own roofing company on the side. Things were going well. I was making good money, learning fast, doing what looked like the obvious next…