One of our spending categories that we’ve had the toughest time mastering is our food budget. Neither of us loves to cook and convenience often wins the day when dinnertime rolls around. But when I looked back at our food spending for last year in Thrifty, I found a pleasant surprise.

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I can’t believe that we’re already six months into our one-year mini-retirement! It feels like just yesterday that I was packing up my belongings at work and at home as we flipped our life upside down to try something crazy.

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From the outside-in, frugality and minimalism often look like acts of self-deprivation. After all, eating out is easier and tastes better than a home-cooked meal and getting a new gadget or outfit puts a smile on your face. Why would we deprive ourselves of these little luxuries?

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Earlier this year, we experienced a culinary tragedy - our pizza cutter broke. Our initial reaction was to go out and buy a replacement, but we were in the middle of our Nothing New Year challenge so we held off. A few days passed, then a week, then a month. We hadn’t replaced the pizza cutter and somehow, amazingly, we were still surviving.

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The personal finance world has been abuzz with talk of automation. It started with automated bill-pay and has grown into automated savings, robo-advisers, and algorithm-based investing. We dream of letting the machines take care of our finances so we can free up our time.

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Ok, so my husband, Chris, has officially been on his One Year Mini-Retirement since July first. And as of September second, he started working here on Keep Thrifty full time. We are still early in this whole mini-retirement thing, but it feels so much longer. Every week brings a new challenge in our marriage. It’s exciting and exhausting. There are tears and laughter. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions. Here’s how it’s been going.

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Patience is a virtue, but it’s more than that. It’s an incredible source of passive income. OK, maybe not income in the traditional sense, but at the end of the day, patience leaves you with extra money in your bank account for doing absolutely nothing.

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Before our mini-retirement, we were focused on building our finances. We were prepaying our mortgage, saving for vacations, contributing to a 401K, and building our emergency savings fund. Then we decided to temporarily step away from getting a paycheck for a full year. Our focus on our finances had to change. Here’s how:

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Do you ever get to the end of the month and wonder where all your money went? There’s a negative force at work against your journey to financial freedom called the Frivolous Purchase Threshold. It’ll steal your money and leave you with worthless trinkets you didn’t need. Let’s learn how to identify this bugger so we can exterminate it from our lives.

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There’s one phrase we’ve heard over and over again since revealing our mini-retirement: “I mean, if you can make that work, it sounds amazing.” It pains me to hear because the person assumes that achieving a mini-retirement isn’t possible for them. But I know that they can. The formula for getting to a mini-retirement is simpler than you might think.

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