Minimalist Families: on the road with the Smeenks

A few months back I wandered upon the Smeenks blog and started reading up on their global travels as a family of six. I was intrigued by this Canadian family, not only because they were globe trottters, but I was also fascinated to know more about how they sold their large home and the decisions they made to allow themselves to go on the road. How did the children react to letting go of toys and books? And what about Jennifer and her husband? Was it challenging to sell a home they had spent many years and dollars making their own?

Jennifer graciously took some time out to answer some questions about their downsize and move to extended travel. I know you will enjoy this post. I read it and immediately started to think about how we could do something similar in a few years. Enjoy!

Living our Dreams with our Minimalist Lifestyle
If someone were to promise you that one of your dreams of ________________ (please fill in the blanks) would come true, and all you had to do was ______________, would you do it?
A year and a half ago, we filled in these blanks.
Our dream was to travel the world together as a family, and we sold our house and much of our things to do it. Call us crazy, but we did.
We’re a Canadian family of 6 who have a passion to travel and experience the world.  We enjoy spending time together and love to learn about different countries and cultures.  We stumbled into a minimalist lifestyle in order to accomplish our travel dreams. By definition, we’re not hard core minimalists, just minimalists out of necessity for our travel lifestyle.
Selling our home and most of our belongings wasn’t easy. It was emotionally challenging and a lot of work to get rid of our stuff. Like everyone else around us, we were consumerists, and were raising little consumerists. We were attached to our stuff, and spent our time and money accumulating more to clutter up our already full lives. We owned two vehicles and a large house. Our family of 6 could definitely accumulate a lot in a big house!
We really loved our house. We spent a lot of time and money renovating it according to our tastes. We owned a beautifully decorated home complete with a home theatre room (designed by my engineer husband), exercise room, handmade play castle in the basement, childrens’ theme rooms, and a luxurious master bedroom with ensuite jacuzzi bath. It wasn’t just a house, but a home we were very proud of.
Originally, our idea was to rent it out partially furnished during the time we were away.  But after some number crunching, we realized that it was impossible to find renters who could afford the rent to cover the expenses, let alone manage a little cash flow from the rental.  On top of that, the thought of being away for a long period of time with the fear of all our expensive theatre equipment broken or stolen by renters didn’t sit well with us.  We came to the conclusion that it was necessary to sell our house in order to free ourselves completely from any worries or hassles while we were gone.
My husband and I honestly thought we were crazy to be so compelled to turn our lives upside down for this one big dream which haunted us for nearly a decade. We had everything one could ask for in life –a healthy family, a beautiful home, a great community of family and friends we belonged to. Why would we want to change any of that?
Our hearts were telling us to go for it. We felt that our time was now or never. But it was hard to trust that we were doing the right thing. We grappled with our attachment to our house and our family travel dreams. Then we asked ourselves: Who owns who?  Do we own this house, or does this house own us? We didn’t want our big luxurious home to anchor us back from our dreams.
Our hearts were yearning for something more than a conventional life. Deep down, we knew we took so many things in our life for granted. We wanted to open our eyes and hearts to the world and discover who we were as a family without all our stuff. We wanted to stop letting what we owned from defining our identity. We wanted to take our children out of the ethnocentric beliefs of our North American Culture and give them a better understanding of the world.  We wanted something more for our children’s lives than fast foods, a busy calendar of extracurricular activities, and the preoccupation of keeping up with the Joneses. We realized that being together and growing closer as a family with each travel experience was more important to us than having a lot of nice expensive things.
So we sold our house. We also got rid of 80% of our belongings through donations to charities, freecycling to family and friends, and by selling items online and through a garage sale. We gave away our Ford station wagon to a cousin who was in need of a vehicle. We sold, donated, and gave away probably 90% of our clothes, toys, books (did I mention we’re book-aholics?). We also sold about half of our furniture and linens, and most of our electronics.

We kept our van, bikes, leather couches, huge family size kitchen table and chairs, our beds, and our special personal keepsakes. It didn’t make sense to sell the furniture we would need once we returned home after a few years satiating our wanderlust. The luxury item we kept was our wooden play castle, lovingly hand-made by a relative, which we consider as heirloom kids furniture. In the end of our material purging, we filled a double garage up with all our belongings. Our family van takes up half of the garage, and the other half is filled with the rest of our things.
We learned valuable lessons from getting rid of our stuff. First of all, we were embarrassed to own so much. I still cringe with the memory of sorting through a mountain of shoes which 6 pairs of feet have accumulated. Having too much stuff was wasteful and cost money to keep, store, and maintain. By purging our material things, we experienced how freeing it was.
Breaking our attachment to things was empowering. By taking away our preoccupation to acquire more stuff, we were able to focus on what was really important to us – our family and friends, our dreams, and living a peaceful happy and fulfilling life that makes a difference in the world. We also discovered that our children had an easier time letting go of the house and their stuff than we did. In some ways, they cared less about their things than we had expected.
Since October 2010, we’ve backpacked to the countries of Spain, Morocco, Vatican City, Turkey, Italy, Monaco, and France. We’ve experienced unforgettable memories together, like riding a camel in the Sahara desert, watching a bullfight in Spain, celebrating Christmas and New Years in Vatican City, paragliding in Turkey, visiting world famous museums, historical monuments and buildings. Instead of spending our money to buy things, we invest our time and money in creating unforgettable memories with each other. We are closer as a family more than ever before because we are journeying together and living our dreams.

Our nomadic travel lifestyle requires us to be watchful of what material possessions we buy because we always have to consider how to carry our things efficiently. The less we own, the less weighed down and freer we are to travel the world easily. We’ve discovered that we could definitely live well with the very little we owned in our backpacks. As travellers, we can’t go back to a consumerist lifestyle even if we wanted to.  We have no choice but to keep it simple in order to travel lightly.
We are living our dreams with our minimalist lifestyle!
In our next post, I’ll describe more about our travel lifestyle.
So what’s your big dream? What would you do to make your dreams come true? Is your stuff holding you back from your dreams like it did ours?

Want to know more about the Smeenks? You can read about their adventures on their blog: At Home in the World .