I just thought it might be worth noting that it is about a year now that Vicki and I have been living on one day of work each a week. I have had a few freelance jobs, and a 6 week stint filling in for another teacher, but then again I am a casual teacher and don't get paid for school holidays so that kind of balances out.
We still have our savings in the bank, we have not required or sought any welfare assistance, we have been supporting ourselves, a horse and a dog, and best of all we are as happy as we have ever been. I can't tell you how liberating it is to have the work to live to work model smashed before your eyes. I walk around these days looking at people working their way through a strange parallel dimension. Everything we achieve is made possible by my the co-operation, drive and support of beautiful wife, she rocks :)
While life still has its inevitable ups and downs I am at least free from having my happiness tied to some unattainable work related goal, maybe other readers manage to engage in full time work without this trade off, but for me its never really been an option. I don't do things by halves and always tended to end up emotionally entangled in my work. I still do even with the one day a week of teaching I do, but I find the long periods of time away from the classroom inevitably keep me grounded.
I wonder if others read this (all 2 or 3 of you :P) and tell themselves I'm somehow lucky I can do this, and that for some reason you can not. I suppose one factor is that we don't have a mortgage, but even if we did have one, that could probably be covered if we each worked an extra day or so each a week, so we could still be keeping full time work at bay. Before this situation was forced upon us the changes we are making seemed impossible to us as well.
Next we look ahead to enhancing our lives even further with land, a serious veggie patch and livestock.
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