Today Crystal shares why her family tries to live with less stuff and what the challenges are now that her children are older. Enjoy!
Having Less Stuff so You Can Give More
We’re the Wiley’s! We’re entrepreneurs, we love God, coffee, and adventure and we’re approaching our fourth year of homeschooling. We’re also planning a trip around the world come January 2019. (woo hoo!)
Our amazing kids are 8 and 4 and we love showing them how living simply opens up our world so we can achieve the visions and dreams God has put on our hearts. We try to live minimally (and intentionally avoiding consumerism) so we can focus on what matters most – each other and loving others.
We live in beautiful Oregon. We’ve been married for and owned a go-to-market business for over 10 years called EIGHTDAY. This led us to cofound multiple start-ups. Most recently Circle with Disney.
Kyle is an innovative, creative business leader. Crystal, along with homeschooling full-time, founded Broken to Brave in 2017 – a non-profit that delivers gift boxes of life-giving, inspirational books to local children enduring hardship.
I’m not sure there was a specific moment we heard about minimalism.
I think it’s in my blood to shed what doesn’t bring me joy. My husband, not so much –– he likes to keep things around. But after reading “The More of Less” by Joshua Becker (and he watched The Minimalists Netflix documentary a few years ago), we were both dead-set on simplifying our lives so we could live them to the fullest with our kids while they’re still young.
After the initial moves to minimize our belongings, our motivation was then seeing the fruit of our efforts; how freeing life really can be without a bunch of stuff weighing us down. We saw how awesome it was to spend a weekend playing and exploring with our kids than decluttering or organizing ANYTHING.
When we let go of society’s pressures to accumulate more we found sheer happiness and contentment with what we already had.
Less stuff equals more time and resources to help others.
We realized how much time was opened up to pursue our dreams in life along with helping others (which brings true happiness in and of itself). But even small things that make daily life happy happen more often when you’re not picking toys or clutter all day.
I wrote a post about “The Freedom of Maintaining Less Stuff” Because the more you own, the more you have to maintain it. Whether that’s organizing, cleaning, upgrading, fixing, storing, troubleshooting or simply researching how to maintain it. These are the things that then rule your life instead of say, what YOU prefer to do with your time.
It’s so true as minimalists we don’t always have we want but we always have what we need. I find a couple things challenging yet they never outweigh the joy of living a minimal lifestyle:
The Challenges of Minimalism
First, it’s HARD not to buy things when you know you won’t be going into debt doing it. We’re pretty debt-free so going into more debt doesn’t make sense to us and it makes sense not to purchase something new. BUT saying no is often harder when you can’t see what you’re doing long-term to the financial freedom you currently experience now and know you’ll continue to desire in the long run.
Secondly, our kids are just like any other kid – curious, active and creative. So I often wonder if I should purchase a certain crafty subscription box, a nifty play-yard structure, a new type of homeschool curriculum, or other things to help them play and have fun. But ultimately, when you don’t purchase those shiny products (unless it’s truly going to help them in their quest to develop a passion) you won’t then waste your time owning million things they’ll eventually lose interest in and only collect dust later.
On that note, it’s been extremely rewarding NOT having a ton of toys in lieu of going on more outdoor adventures together or just letting them be creative with the few toys the do have. (As studies show, kids are vastly more creative with fewer toys –– a win for minimal moms I’d say!)
Our extended family is also aware we (and the kids now) appreciate gifted experiences or tickets to events instead of material gifts. My heart sang when our son was asked by relatives what he wanted for his birthday: “I don’t really want anything. I just want to do something with you guys and spend time with you.” *sigh*
As soon as we saw the benefits of owning less, whole worlds opened up to us.
For me personally, simplifying revealed four things: 1) It brought me closer to God. Without a ton of household chores, I feel free to read my Bible more often, sit in silence or pray during what used to be a busy afternoon. 2) It brought me closer to my husband and kids. 3) It revealed an opportunity to serve others through creating my non-profit, Broken to Brave. 4) We found freedom to travel more together as a couple and with our kids.
We just got back from a 10-day trip in Ireland and it gave us the wanderlust bug. We have plans to travel to Utah this summer, Baja Mexico this fall and then travel the entire globe in six months! This wouldn’t be happening if we didn’t intentionally simplify.
Decluttering Your Calendar
Minimalism to me also means simplifying your calendar. And I oftentimes find keeping a simplified schedule more challenging than keeping a decluttered, minimal home. That’s become second nature to us.
But our kids are getting older and their interests are expanding (as are ours). This means we’re traveling more and just try to experience new things. Our son just earned his black belt and man, that was a time commitment for the past 3 years. But the key was we didn’t add on to that. We focused on that one pursuit with him.
We’re extremely good at saying “no” to multiple events and a lot of time-suckers and engagements that aren’t meaningful to us. But with four of us, there are a lot of opportunities this world has to offer. Our kids want to explore anything and everything. While we’re intentionally choosing them one at a time, committing to engagements can become overwhelming if you’re not careful.
Quality alone time together for my husband and I is also important to us. But keeping an open schedule is super important to us. Trying to uphold this calmness and peace amid our weekly routine will become increasingly difficult as we all expand our interests.
Blog: SimpleandFreeLife.com
Facebook: Broken to Brave (I don’t use Facebook personally unless it’s an auto-update – but I’d love for people to follow my nonprofit, in which Facebook is a necessary evil) 🙂
Instagram: @Simple.and.Free_
Interested in reading more stories from minimalist-ish families? Here are a few from the series:
Learning to say “no” can be a difficult thing, but everything takes up your time and energy. You can only do so much, so turning down what isn’t meaningful to you, as you said, is great! And it’s true, less stuff means less time and effort spent maintaining everything.
I know you said you’re not a fan of Facebook, but there is wonderful group that is a wealth of information for your upcoming ATW trip called Worldschoolers. Check it out!
Would love to hear more about your son earning his black belt in 3 years.