2018 was quite the whirlwind year for me, as I’m sure anyone else could say as well, full of great experiences and not-so-great experiences. At the beginning of the year, my focus was my 40 ^th birthday in July. I believe I hit mid-life crisis status where I was suddenly questioning everything in my life. Like I do, I read my way through it.

Not necessarily related to mid-life crisis, however, one of the books whose impact on me was huge early in 2018 was The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom by Helen Thorpe. Thorpe writes about her time with immigrant teens in an English Language Acquisition classroom in Denver. After reading about these teens’ experiences, I finally decided to sign up to be an in-home tutor for a refugee woman through Emily Griffith’s Colorado Refugee ESL Volunteer Program. I was matched with ZamZam in May and we have been meeting weekly ever since. She and her family have welcomed me into their home and we have a wonderful time together. Her five children are adorable and when I knock on the door and hear them chant, “Aimee, Aimee, Aimee,” I know I made the right decision helping their mother.

I started my mid-life crisis reading in Moab in April with Joan Didion and The Year of Magical Thinking . What I didn’t realize when reading Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking , about the way she handled the grief of her husband’s sudden death, is it was a precursor to losing my grandma in May. I thought I had read it to continue to work on the grief of my dad’s death, not knowing what was ahead. I appreciated the way Didion handled her grief academically, reading and researching her way through.

The next big impact book was The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store by Cait Flanders. I would consider this one in the ‘life-changing’ category. I didn’t read this until May but had already been five months into a shopping ban where I did not allow myself to purchase any clothes, shoes, jewelry or handbags. I had, up to the point of reading this book, still been allowing myself to take in stuff given to me, cuz hey, I didn’t spend money on it so that must be ok.

Flanders’ book taught me that no matter how you obtain the stuff, the stuff is the actual concern. Why must I have so much stuff? Why does getting stuff make me happy? And then really realizing that the stuff doesn’t make me happy, past the few minutes of a high of purchasing it or obtaining it. Then it becomes a burden mostly. More things to clean, more things to dust around, more stuff to continually put away.  After reading this book, I added books, home goods and records to my shopping ban as well. I was buying books with wild abandon because it was a place I allowed myself to spend. I, like most book lovers, have more books than I will ever be able to read!

After The Year of Less, I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I do wish I read this before The Year of Less because it would have been a little better planned to do the deep purge of belongings Kondo advises before going on a shopping ban. Once you do an inventory of all the things you have and realize all the things you no longer need or no longer bring you joy, it is easy to learn from those belongings and realize you do not need more. I have always had a hard time parting with something I paid real money for, whether I like or use the item anymore or not.

Through this process I learned that is my big issue. I spent my hard-earned money on it and now I am going to get rid of it? This is my big take away. Don’t spend your money on it in the first place if it is not for the right reasons.  I have always been a keeper of things, a collector, a lover of weird objects so this is an area I am still working through. I did not follow Kondo’s plan of going through everything in a very short amount of time, despite seeing the benefits of that way of doing it. So, I continue to spend my time going through things. Just yesterday I went through my books again, collecting about forty more to get rid of or donate.

Continuing my spending ban and working on paring down my belongings, I felt I was doing well. Then I read The Spender’s Guide to Debt-Free Living: How a Spending Fast Helped Me Get from Broke to Badass in Record Time by Anna Newell Jones and decided to take it up an extra level. In September, I created the guidelines for my Spending Fast.  I let my friends know I would not be going to happy hours or dinners, except the one per month I allowed myself with my husband. I committed to buying only what I truly needed and not what I talked myself into a need. From September to December I was able to pay $6000 extra on my debt, primarily on student loans and a little bit on the extra we paid on our mortgage every month. I also decided to sell my car. I took back my old car my grandma had been driving and gave up the car payment on the car I had purchased about a year prior.

Honorable mention goes to You Are a Bad-Ass at Making Money: Mastering the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero. She taught me it is ok to want more money. With more money comes more freedom to do the things you want and help those you want to help. I read so many other great books this year and certainly a lot of fiction, however, the books above had the biggest influence on my life. They changed the way I live, the way I spend and the way I look at money and belongings. They helped me realize my emotional attachment to things and where that comes from. They also helped me to find my version of financial freedom and I look forward to continuing on through 2019 with my new learning.