Special thanks to Joshua Becker for this Story of Not-a-Lot. Joshua is a husband, father, blogger, author of Inside-Out Simplicity (an excellent read), and a real simple-living inspiration.

The greatest seed of change is discontent. And for most of my adult life, I had experienced two avenues of discontent.

The first avenue was my finances. Although we were never deep in debt, we have always lived paycheck-to-paycheck – leaving us just one lost job or medical disruption away from really deep trouble. Similarly, I was never content with the way we spent our money. I often felt that we were living selfishly with our finances not being as generous to others as we would like.

The second avenue of discontent in my life was a growing realization that my time and energy was not being spent how I would prefer it to be spent. My children (6 and 2 at the time) were growing older and I desperately desired to be available to them. But between working outside the home and having to maintain the home when I was inside it, there was a growing sense that the stuff in my life was taking me away from the two people that were most important to me.

Both of these avenues of discontent came together to intersect on a Memorial Day weekend while cleaning my garage. Winter was over in Vermont and the garage was in desperate need of an overhaul. My wife and I decided to use part of the holiday weekend to catch up on some cleaning. My assignment in the garage proved to take much longer than I had originally anticipated . . . and my 6 year old son didn’t seem as interested in helping me as I had hoped. In fact, he was in the backyard asking me to play baseball with him . . . while I was spending our holiday weekend cleaning the garage.

Nearly three hours later, I was still working on the garage. My neighbor, who was working on his own home at the time, turned to me and said sarcastically, “Ahh, the joys of home ownership.” I responded by saying, “The more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you.” Her next sentence struck a chord with my soul and changed my life forever. Her response was, “That’s why my daughter is a minimalist. She keeps telling me that I don’t need all this stuff!”

“A minimalist?” I thought. “How attractive, how freeing – I want that in my life.”

Call me uneducated, naive, whatever you want – but I had never heard the term before. Yet, it seemed to be the one word that defined my deepest desires. I quickly went inside to tell my wife about the conversation and her response was the same as mine, “That’s what I want too.”

And our journey began. Since that conversation, we have removed 60-70% of the personal belongings from our home, we have virtually stopped shopping for anything other than necessary purchases, and we couldn’t be happier. We have less stress. We have found more opportunity to financially support other causes. And we have found more time and energy for our children.

Along the way, we found countless opportunities to inspire other families to pursue a more minimalist lifestyle. We quickly discovered that we were not alone in our discontent, and decided to do something about it. For that reason, we blog regularly at www.becomingminimalist.com hoping to inspire others to live more by owning less.