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I LIVE IN CENTRAL New Jersey. Within walking distance of my house are some McMansions—huge homes clustered together in new developments. I look at them and think, “Who cleans these things?”
I live in a three-bedroom ranch-style house with an unfinished basement and a two-car garage. My garage is filled with two cars and my tools. The basement is filled with my wife’s stuff. We bought the house when my wife was pregnant. Thirty-three years later, there are three people living in the house. It was big enough 33 years ago and it’s still big enough today. Why would I want more?
My neighborhood gets noisy during the week, especially in the summer months, because all my neighbors have a landscaping service to mow their lawns. Now, if they all hired the same service, the noise would be limited to a single day. But because all use different lawn services, the landscapers come on different days of the week. The result is that the roar of these high-powered grass-cutting hot rods fills my world five days a week. Meanwhile, I mow my lawn with my self-propelled Honda lawn mower.
Every morning, I begin my day with a coffee mug filled with black coffee and no sugar, which I raise up and say, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it. Help me to be glad.” Then I list those things that occurred the day before that I’m grateful for. Basically, I count my blessings.
This practice should not be new to anyone. “Count your blessings” is something we’ve all been told over the years. But how many of us do it?
Money has always been important to me, and I saved diligently throughout my life. As a result, I have money “in the bank.” Is it enough? If I died tomorrow, yes. If I live to 100, I’m not sure.
Now that I’m retired, I have embraced the concept of enough. I look at what I have and what I’ve done. I then compare that to what I wanted to have and to do, and I believe it’s enough. I don’t have a lot, but I do have stuff.
Besides money, the one area of accumulation I’ve pursued since I was 18 years old was Craftsman hand tools. I’ve been working on cars since I was 16 years old. I have no business working on cars because I’m not very good. Still, I continued down this path. To make up for my lack of skill, I would buy the next “magical tool” for my tool box, thinking it would suddenly make me a master mechanic. It never did.
The beauty of this focus is I have enough Craftsman tools. I don’t have every tool. But all in all, I seem to have the tools necessary to fix whatever needs fixing with the car or around the house. It’s a great feeling.
I believe every one of us has our own “enough.” It doesn’t mean you can’t have more. But do you need more? Until you can identify what your enough is, how will you know when to stop accumulating and to stop pursuing? Arguably, money is something we can never have enough of. But until you decide that what you have is enough, how will you ever be satisfied?
How would you define “enough”? Offer your thoughts in HumbleDollar’s Voices section.
i remember my proud father in law demonstrating his new leaf blower. it was not quite 50 yrs ago. that’s a while back. i told him that the physical effort required looked an awful lot like rakin’ leaves…..
“Enough” is a feast.
if you let the concepts of evolution and compounding guide your decisions you’ll survive and flourish. Good luck.
David (and readers) –
I’m going to provide some unasked for advice.
Start decluttering and selling your unused stuff NOW!
We lived in our forever home for four decades. Now we have “downsized” to a Condominium in a super walkable location.
But getting rid of our junk along with the details of buying a new place and selling our home has been a … nightmare.
And we’re still doing it.
Just a word of warning for someone not smart enough to figure that out on his own.
Totally agree. We did the same the year we turned 59. It was hard then, and I’m glad we didn’t wait longer. It was exhausting!
Been there, done that. It took us about a year to get it all resolved. No fun at all.
Ooopssss.
Should a “word of warning from someone not smart”
(I appear to be unable to use Social Media too)
What a timely article! I We live in a tiny house in the woods surrounded by McMansions.
On my walk this morning I spoke with a nice neighbor that moved from a smaller home into one of the large homes behind us. He said he sometimes felt like he needed a staff of workers to maintain the house.
Everyone uses a mow, blow, and go service. I mow an acre of gas and mulch leaves with an electric push mower, rake areas the mower can’t reach, and try to make the least amount of noise possible.
Patti’s husband
Glad to hear you’re using an electric mower – me too. Our town has a law that outlaws gas blowers after 2023. That will be nice.
Leaf blowers are the worst! Something I will never spend time or money using. Raking provides exercise and fresh air for free, minus the cost of a new rake now and then. Enough, for me, means being satisfied with a small home that still has a little guest room for the occasional overnighted, plus my recently finished basement for the grandson and friends, but more importantly, enough is the contentment I have from the good friends I can count on, family with whom I can have minor disagreements but remain on speaking terms, and a spirituality that has helped me through both sadness and joy. And, yes, David, like you, and so many HD readers and writers, I count my blessings every day.
We have a similar noise issue in our beach town. The leaf blowers are the noisiest.
Leaf blowers bother me much more than the lawn mowers. California has banned gas powered blowers beginning in 2024 (electric blowers aren’t nearly as loud and have zero emissions) and an increasing number of towns are also banning them. Not surprisingly, the landscapers are contesting these bans in court.
The noise pollution of gas-powered leaf blowers can no longer be heard in places like Lexington and Concord, MA and Palo Alto, CA because the voters pushed for them to be banned. My HOA refused to hire one large landscaping company because they didn’t have battery-powered leaf blowers, and we paid a bit more for one that did. It’s wonderfully quieter and well worth the additional cost.
David, Take a stroll through Rumson, Middletown or near me Essex Fells, you could put a McMansion in some of the houses in these towns – and they mostly leave their cars in the driveway 😃 They routinely rip down houses, just to build larger one on the property or in three cases I know of they ripped down a huge house next door so they could have a larger lawn.