The Year of Less by Cait Flanders

Author:Cait Flanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2017-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

7

january: rewriting the rules

months sober: 24

income saved: 56%

confidence I can complete this project: 90%

I returned to my apartment in Port Moody on New Year’s Eve, and invited Kasey over to celebrate the occasion. We put together a couple plates of cheese, crackers, vegetables, and desserts, drank sparkling water, and watched holiday movies in front of my fireplace. I know I can speak on Kasey’s behalf when I say we also happily parted ways around 10 o’clock and were both asleep before midnight. These days, it was everything I hoped for in a party.

January was shaping up to be a quiet month. I only had one trip planned: five days in Toronto for work again. This would give me a chance to not only spend more time at home, but also save more money. I was happy with the progress I’d made in the first half of the shopping ban—saving an average of 19 percent of my income. Compared to the 10 percent or less (because I have to be honest and say it was usually less) I’d been saving every month before, this felt good. But I still knew I could do better. Whenever I went to Toronto for work, my only expense was food and entertainment—things I did with friends during the hours I wasn’t at the office. In the middle of January, most people hibernated in their homes during those hours, in an attempt to escape the cold winds that blew through the streets of the cement jungle. This meant I would spend the majority of my off-time on this trip curled up on my old roommate’s couch with her dog, Charlie. My heart and my wallet were ready for it.

When I arrived at Jen’s apartment, I walked into a scene all too familiar. There were black garbage bags everywhere. One next to another next to another, against the wall in her hallway leading from the front door to the living room. At the top of the stairs, there were more bags leading to the bedrooms, as well as plastic tote containers and cardboard boxes. I didn’t know what was inside, but I knew exactly what was inside: stuff Jen had decided she no longer wanted in her two-story apartment. She was decluttering.

Jen and I had grown up together in Victoria. Our parents lived only a few blocks from each other, so we’d gone to school together since third grade, when my family first moved to that neighborhood. We had sleepovers and played night league basketball, as kids. Our interests took us down different paths in high school, but we found our way back to each other in college and had been close ever since. I visited her in Toronto, shortly after my breakup with Chris in 2008, and knew it was a city I wanted to spend more time in. When I started working for the financial startup in 2012, Jen invited me to move into the guest bedroom in her rent-controlled apartment. Now she let me stay with her whenever I came into town.

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