Do you want to make better money decisions for your family?
Budget better, side hustle, change your employment situation so you have more…
time to travel?
quality family time?
freedom to live where you want to?
Then you’re in the right place!
Our family set a goal and budgeted our way to location independence in under 3 years.
Want to see how you can change your family’s situation in 3 years?
Welcome to The Three Year Experiment! I’m Laurie, part of The Three Year family. Mr. ThreeYear is my lovely Latino, Chilean, to be exact, my partner in crime who helped make location independence just a year and a half into our three year experiment.
Junior and Little ThreeYear are our creative, bright, and crazy (no longer so little!) boys who keep life interesting.
In July of 2016, I turned 37. My husband and I lived in New England, far from both sides of our family, because of his job. I longed to be able to live in a place with milder winters, see my family more, and travel for extended periods of time. I wanted to visit Chile and see his side of the family, more than once every several years.
So when he asked me what I wished for on that birthday, I voiced that crazy desire, “I want to be able to spend half the year in Chile with your family and half in the Carolinas with mine.”
At the time, it seemed impossible. His job kept him in New Hampshire, our kids were in school there, and we were far from financially independent. Yes, we’d spent the last eight years growing our net worth, first by paying off our $38,000 of consumer debt in 2008 and then slowly growing our net worth from there, but we were no where near the amount needed to quit work.
But the idea had been spoken into existence, and I started dreaming about ways for us to unchain ourselves before I turned 40, or three years hence. The Three Year Experiment was born. I became Laurie ThreeYear, my husband is Mr. ThreeYear, and our boys are Junior and Little ThreeYear.
“If,” I thought, “we double our current net worth, we’ll have enough in the bank to make some non-traditional career choices. We can get remote jobs and travel to be with our families. We’ll be able to be location independent, and go wherever we’d like, when we like.” For the next year and a half, we talked, planned, saved, and invested.
Then, in April of 2018, an amazing thing happened: Mr. ThreeYear negotiated working remotely with his company. He’d be able to keep his job and we’d be able to move.
While we wouldn’t be able to travel around the world, which was one of our crazy ideas, we could pick where we wanted to live. And we chose the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, in a tiny town called Davidson, near Lake Norman.
We moved to the area in July of last year and so far, have a pretty sweet life. We’re 15 minutes away from aunts, uncles, and cousins, and a few short hours away from grandparents. We have the beach four hours away and mountains, so we can continue to ski (one of our favorite family activities) just two and a half hours away.
Best of all, being location independent means we can travel for long stretches during our summers. We have a trip planned to Santiago for Summer 2020, where we’ll be able to spend weeks with our family there, practicing Spanish, eating delicious Chilean food, and taking side trips to Peru and to Chilean beaches.
We still haven’t completed our goal of doubling our net worth (our deadline is December 2019) so stay tuned for more spending and net worth reports!
I’ll also be featuring stories of other people’s three year experiments in the future. If you’re interested in being interviewed about your financial/travel goals for the next three years, drop me a line (contact details below).
Get caught up:
Year One:
Year Two (So Far!):
Year Three
And more good stuff’s comin’!
Read More:
- Life Is Short. So Why Not Buy What You Want?
- How Much Should You Spend on Travel?
- Why Location Independence is Important for Us
- Our Secret Weapon Towards Financial Independence
- How to Run Your Own Race
Check Out My Location Independence, International Jobs Series:
- Steve from Think, Save, Retire
- Jim from Route to Retire
- Kerri’s Top 1% Etsy business
- Mavis, an International Teacher
Get in touch:
*Email: laurie@thethreeyearexperiment.com
*Instagram: @lauriethreeyear
Twitter: @lauriethreeyear
FB: /lauriethreeyear
*This is where I am the most.
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