Pro – Spending a lot of time with those you love – you can’t get away!
Con – When it is cold or rainy and you don’t want to go outside, you never get any alone time.
Pro – You have to be polite to each other and wait for the other person to get out of the way before you can get through the tight places.
Con – You can’t MOVE without tripping on someone or something!
Pro – Living in a camper the way we did was a huge money saver for us! With rent around $1,000 a month for an apartment around here, we decided to do something different.
Con – Being different than everyone you know is HARD! We felt socially awkward and looked down on for the way we live.
Pro – Only having a tiny bit of house space forces you to go outside and enjoy the outdoors – especially when you have a busy toddler!
Con – The busy toddler makes rainy days in a tiny space rather miserable.
Pro – Simplistic lifestyle – You simply don’t have the space to accumulate much “stuff”. This also helps you live cheaply. Double pro!
Con – If you’re like me and care what people think of you, living simply can often leave you feeling out of style, behind the times, etc. It’s hard to not be jealous of other people’s big beautiful kitchens and stylish decor.
Pro – No payments! No debt! This in turn freed us up to go to Bible School for 8 weeks, go on a trip to Alaska in 2015, house-sit for friends for months at a time, and take a mission trip to Tibet when Gabe was almost a year old. We wouldn’t have been able to do those things if we were either renting or trying to pay off a house.
Pro – Living in a small space with children will either drive you crazy or make you more creative in finding ways to entertain them. We found that this kiddie pool with dried corn kernels occupied Gabe for at least half an hour before he got bored with it and we had to move on to something else. (Short attention span, that one)
In conclusion, living in the camper has been a stretching experience for us. Especially me. I feel like I have learned a lot the last three years about doing what I do because I enjoy it, not because of what people will think of me. I love how we are thinking outside the box with our lives instead of just following the crowd. Because the crowd is not always right! Who says young couples have to go into heaps of debt as soon as they get married? There are only two of you. What happened to starting off small and working your way up? Sometimes it seems like my generation thinks we have to start off marriage where our parents are now. Not true! Ask them. Your parents probably started off their married lives without very much and worked up to where they are today. There shouldn’t be any shame in simple living. It shouldn’t be abnormal to live within your means.
Sure it doesn’t look like we have much, but that’s okay. We don’t have much. But we own everything we have, free and clear. We aren’t putting up any fronts to make people think we are doing better financially than we actually are.
And I have come to like it that way.