Scott
I was born and raised in a middle-income home in northern Kentucky with my dad working and my mom staying with us at home. Neither of my parents went to college. I was raised Christian and when I graduated from high school, I went to a local technical school and received an associate’s degree in heating and air conditioning.
After I graduated from school, I got married, and I was working hard at living the American dream of cars, homes and vacations. My wife, at the time, and I bought and sold houses to raise additional income, and we lived paycheck to paycheck.
When I was in my early thirties, I realized that my life was missing something, and I started going to a church that was big on loving and caring for people. I started hanging out with homeless and people in need, and I realized that not everyone had the same opportunities that I had—that there were reasons why people were in the places that they were. I started struggling with the idea of living a more simple life with less things. At the same time, I was going through a divorce. Around this time, I also was diagnosed with a pituitary tumor for which I had surgery and now am taking medication. I ended up selling the big house and buying something inexpensive so that I could give money away. I wasn't fully committed though. I also bought a new jeep that I had been eyeing for some time.
Around this time, I decided to use $3500 of my money to take a trip to South Africa with a church in Cincinnati to work on a construction team building homes for people in a township there. When I was in South Africa, I was struck by the massive poverty and how people were living without the basic needs that I had taken for granted – food, water and shelter. I met Suja who was on the same trip.
When we were dating, she brought up the subject of consuming less on a daily basis so we could give more money away. We shared a common value for giving and caring for people. We decided to get married, and now I work at the University of Illinois as a controls programmer. Together we have motivated each other to live more simply to give away more money, and we decided to embark on this blog to encourage our own giving as well as others.
Suja
I was born in Storm Lake, Iowa. My parents were immigrants from India and moved to Storm Lake so that my father could take a job teaching at Buena Vista College. My sisters and I went to public school, played sports and attended a Presbyterian church. When I was eight, we all went to India. I was struck by the poverty there. Later, when I was seventeen, I worked at Hardees and saved about $750 to go to India again with my parents. Being older, it was more shocking to see intense poverty, especially seeing little – really little – kids who were very dirty, begging for us to buy things from them.
After high school, I left Iowa to go to college in the Chicago area at Northwestern University. I decided that I wanted to go to law school. I went to NYU in New York City, and after law school, I worked for a federal judge in Chicago for a year. I moved back to New York and worked for law firms. Over the years of working in New York, I had spent little and saved a lot. However, I was not giving much away. After trying out teaching, I decided to become a law professor full-time, and I accepted a position at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
Upon my move to Cincinnati in 2000, I started spending a lot more. I bought my first car, a new BMW, and I also bought my first house, a 3-story townhouse. I actually managed to pay more for my mortgage in Cincinnati than for my rent in New York. I loved my house and car, and I filled up my house with lots of new beautiful furniture.
A couple of years after I bought the house, I began thinking about how I had lived rather frugally in New York, in a small apartment. I started thinking about how, if I lived on much less, including having a smaller living space, that I could give away more. A couple of years later in 2007, I went to South Africa with a church, and I helped people there with job seeking skills. Many things caught my attention on the trip but probably the thing that struck me the most was that little kids wanted things as simple as the water that we were carrying.
On the last day of the trip, I met Scott, who would become my husband. A few months later I went to South Africa on my own for a couple of weeks to learn more about the problems faced by the South African population post-apartheid. When I returned from the trip, I told Scott that I wanted to live a different life - a life where we consciously on a daily basis looked at how we spend our money. The idea was that we would spend less on things we don’t need, and then we would give away more money to charitable causes. We now live in Champaign, Illinois, where I am a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law.
Thanks for reading the blog.
Scott and Suja