People often ask me how I got so lucky, being able to travel six months of the year. I like to say there’s no such thing as luck. I prefer to chalk it up to good decision making, like the time I traded a house for a salt and pepper grinder.
The salt and pepper grinder were originally a wedding gift to my wife, Katie. We’d been through many poor quality pepper grinders over the years when we came across the aptly named Perfex matching salt and pepper mills. Like the gigantic package of paper towels we bought at Costco the same year, the grinders outlasted our 10 year marriage.
We were fortunate to have relatively equal assets when we got divorced: two houses of equal value, similar salaries and retirement savings. In fact, the division of assets was so easy that we avoided hiring attorneys and did all the paperwork ourselves and had only to pay the processing fee of $350 at the courthouse in order to finalize our divorce.
Being an environmentally conscious couple, however, we only had one car. Katie suggested that she get the car outright as compensation since it was my cheating on her that led to our getting the divorce. I agreed to the fine thinking I was getting off pretty easy if it only cost me 20k to walk away guilt free. It wasn’t the last car she got from me.
I bought another Prius after the divorce but was never really happy with it and was looking for another car when Katie told me she’d totaled the Prius from our divorce settlement. She offered to buy mine, and we agreed on the price of her insurance settlement.
Our financial disentanglements continued when she decided to refinance her house. While we’d divided the assets according to the divorce decree, we hadn’t refinanced the home loan because of processing costs. She eventually found a loan rate that was so good, however, that she decided to absorb those costs. The trouble was that I was trekking in Nepal when she needed the loan documents signed.
While the original documents could be faxed to me, the documents I signed had to be mailed so I got to discover different neighborhoods of Kathmandu as I located the fax center and the post office. It was interesting truly finalizing my divorce from halfway across the world.
As it turns out, there was one final chapter. When I got home from my world trip, I had a decision to make. It’d been two years since I lived in the home I kept from the divorce so I had to decide whether to sell it or to move back in to avoid paying capital gains taxes in the future.
A quick valuation made it clear that what little equity I had in the house at the time would probably be consumed by real estate fees and repairs if I sold it then. My other option was to move back in, but that would tie me to an asset that I would be required to care for and pay taxes on. That would not be conducive to my new nomadic lifestyle.
I approached Katie, who I knew loved our original house, and I asked her if she’d be interested in acquiring it. Naturally she was interested but wanted to know the cost. I looked to the center of the table at the salt and pepper grinder I’d given her on our wedding day and said, “how about those”? She replied, “you’d give me the house for the salt and pepper grinders”? When I said “yes”, she said “deal”. And in that way, she got the house, and I got the world.