Joshua Zitser's face on a grey background

We’re a couple in our 30s who dreamed of building a tiny home. My parents had concerns, so we made a pitch deck to convince them.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Anne Leijdekkers, 32, a Dutch arts entrepreneur, and Simone Solazzo, 31, an Italian who used to work in tech. Last year, the couple moved into the house they built in the tiny-home village of Minitopia in Valkenswaard, the Netherlands. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Anne: At first, my parents were sceptical about our plan to build our own tiny home.

Friends will always stand behind you, but family members can be more critical. It was important for us to have them on board.

Simone used to work in the corporate world and loves PowerPoint presentations, so on Christmas Day in 2024, we used one to pitch our dream to my family.

We wanted to be financially autonomous

Simone: I liked the idea of being able to explain to them why we wanted to do this and what we were planning. The first slide said, in Dutch, “We are building our home. We’d like your support.”

In the presentation, we told them about the plan, the timeline, and where we would be living. We included our budget, which ranged from 40,000 to 80,000 euros ($47,000 to $94,000).

Mostly, the slides outlined our motivations. The first reason was to be financially autonomous.

If we were to buy a big house, we’d be committing to a big mortgage. Instead, we used our savings to pay for the construction of the tiny home, and its transportation to the Minitopia site in Valkenswaard. In total, the project cost us 75,000 euros.

We don’t have a mortgage, and our monthly costs are relatively low. We spend about 500 euros a month on ground rent, utilities, and insurance. I imagine the monthly costs of running a larger property would be considerably higher.

Living in a tiny house is like being a snail

Simone: When you have a smaller space, you have to limit your possessions to what you actually need.

Anne: It was important for us to find out whether we were capable of doing that. We wanted to show that there’s a different way to live. You don’t need an attic at the end of your life filled with so many things.

It wasn’t about being minimalist as much as decluttering. It’s almost like being a snail. We keep things compact and can move our home whenever we want.

That’s how we arrived here: putting our tiny house on a truck and moving it.

Simone: We also like that the house can evolve with us. This means it can be our forever home. For example, if we decide one day to have kids, we could easily build a second module on top.


Simone Solazzo shows photos of construction and presentation

In the presentation, the couple shared their motivations for building a tiny home, which included financial autonomy.

Joshua Nelken-Zitser



Living in a tiny home encourages you to spend time outdoors

Simone: We both felt that knowing how to build and dismantle things was an important skill to learn. We like to challenge ourselves, and building our own home felt like the ultimate challenge. It turned out to be a real learning experience.

We’ve become handier. Sometimes, when it’s raining heavily, I wake up in the middle of the night worried about a leak. But now, if something goes wrong, I know how to deal with it.

Another bonus of living in a tiny house is that it encourages you to spend more time outdoors. When you have a big house, you can do most things inside. When your home is tiny, you need to get outside and move around in nature. We haven’t lived here in the spring or summer yet, so we’re looking forward to seeing what that is like.

My parents had concerns, but they stood behind us

Anne: The final slide said, “Let’s think about it and make it together — as a family.”

Before the presentation, my parents had concerns: was it a sensible investment? What if we wanted to have children? Were we actually capable of building it ourselves? My brother even suggested we buy a pre-made tiny house on Amazon.

After the presentation, they still had concerns about the financial rationale, but they understood our dream and 100% stood behind us. That was an amazing feeling.

We spent two months planning, budgeting, and designing, and then we started building. We began the process exactly a year ago, and it took about five months. Now that it’s finished, they’re very proud of us.

Simone: Anne’s father, who is in his 70s, even helped us build it. It gave her a beautiful opportunity to spend time with him and to build new memories.

Anne: It turned out to be a really warm period in our lives.




Source link

Lauren Crosby

I moved away from my family in my 30s. When I called crying, my dad dropped everything and came to see me.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ruth Davis, a Creative Director in LA. It has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2019, I relocated with my 12-year-old daughter and fiancé to Los Angeles, which is two hours away from the “family village” where I had grown up.

All my family — siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents — all lived within 15 minutes of each other. I knew it was going to be a hard move for our nuclear family unit, but I was convinced LA was the right place for us to be.

I didn’t fully understand the impact it would have on me.

My dad is my everything

It was my dad whom I immediately felt I had lost.

Before we moved, my dad was everything to me. He and my mom had split when I was young, so my dad had full custody. It was just the two of us all the time.

When I had my daughter, my dad moved in with us and was there to help with all the practical aspects of raising a child. But he was also just there as emotional support for me. He made me complete.

After we moved, we only saw him once a month, when he’d take the train to visit us. I missed him and felt overwhelmed without him.

In August 2025, I was grieving the loss of two family members, feeling overwhelmed with sadness, but also with life in general. I remember sitting on my bed, losing it, crying.

I called him, crying

My daughter was knocking on the door, asking me when we were leaving the house — we were going out for the day. I snapped at her. I couldn’t leave the bed. I wanted to show up for her in that moment, but couldn’t.

In that moment, I felt like a failure compared to my dad. He had lived through so much grief and so many hard times, and yet I never knew because he managed to hold everything together.

All I could think to do was to call my dad, crying as he answered. He listened to me and then told me he would call me right back.

“Everything is going to be OK,” he said before hanging up. Dad has never been a “words” person.

Not too long after, he called back and told me he had been to the train station to buy a train ticket to come visit the next day.

Knowing he was coming felt like a double-edged sword. I felt incredibly lucky to have a dad who would come and see me at the drop of a hat, but I also felt self-doubt because my elderly dad could get it together, but I couldn’t.

The next morning, when I knew my dad was on the train, bound for my house, I was certain everything would be OK. My dad was coming. With him, life feels normal and complete.

I won’t advise my daughter to move away

I don’t regret the wonderful changes the move afforded me and the position in life it put my nuclear family and me in. But had I known not seeing my dad every day would wreck me as it has, I don’t know if I would have done it the same way.

I had bought into the modern idea that decisions should always be made with the nuclear family in mind, but the distance from him made me realize how much I emotionally value my dad in ways I didn’t think imaginable.

Knowing what I know now, I would never advise my daughter to move away from her village, even if it means she’ll move closer to a partner’s village, as I did. I think as a mother, I did her a disservice by moving her away from my family, her tight-knit community.




Source link

My-husband-and-I-left-our-jobs-to-travel-full-time.jpeg

My husband and I left our jobs to travel full-time in our 30s. Transitioning back into the workforce has been hard.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

When one of my favorite graduate school professors died just weeks into her retirement, it hit me: I didn’t want to spend my life working toward a future I might never get to experience.

I started my career in education as a high school counselor. My husband, Sam, was a self-published author who could work from anywhere, so we took full advantage of my school holidays and long summer breaks, jetting off to new places whenever we could. We created a travel blog, ForgetSomeday, to share our stories.

But the trips we took during school breaks left me yearning for more, and I approached my husband about taking a year off from our careers to travel full-time.

It didn’t take much convincing. We didn’t own a home and hadn’t yet started a family, so the timing seemed right.

I submitted a request for a year of leave, but it was denied due to pending budget cuts. We decided to move forward with our plan anyway, not wanting to wait until retirement to make this dream a reality.


Man in a campervan in Scotland.

The couple’s adventures included a road trip through Scotland.

Provided by Toccara Best



Time for an adventure

Over the next year, we slashed our spending and saved more than $30,000 by cutting out anything nonessential.

We sold our car for $5,000 and brought in a bit more by selling smaller items, storing the rest in a 10×10 unit because we thought we’d be gone for just a year.

By June 2015, we had about $40,000 in the bank, walked away from our lease, and flew to Prague on one-way tickets.

We ate our way through Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, partaking in bucket-list festivities like Oktoberfest in Munich and St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin along the way.


Two women doing crafts in Mai Chau Village, Vietnam.

Best visited more than a dozen countries, including Vietnam (pictured).

Provided by Toccara Best



We visited more than a dozen countries — island-hopping in Croatia, Thailand, and Portugal; exploring Cambodia’s temples; soaking in Hungary’s thermal baths; and driving 500 miles through Scotland in a campervan.

From hiking in Austria and Slovakia to swimming with seals in Sweden, the year became a crash course in adventure travel.

As our official gap year came to an end, our bank account was still surprisingly healthy, thanks to housesitting opportunities and blog partnerships that helped stretch our budget. And because I didn’t have a job to go back to, we decided to keep traveling.

Little did we know, our biggest adventure was right around the corner: 6 months later, we found out we were expecting.


Pregnant woman posing in Iceland with snow in the background.

Iceland was Best’s final stop before returning to the US.

Provided by Toccara Best



And then we were three

We returned to the US to have our son, but just a few months after his birth, we began traveling full-time again, this time exploring America.

By his third birthday, my son had already visited 27 states. Eventually, the pandemic put a halt to our full-time travels, and we took that as a sign to settle down.

We returned to California five years after the adventure started.

When we planned our gap year, it was supposed to be just that, a year. But as time went on, the gap on my résumé grew, and my motivation to return to the career I once loved began to fade. My husband was also trying to figure out what he wanted to pursue next.


Small boy walking down a trail at Quinault Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, Washington.

The couple continued to travel around the US after having their son.

Provided by Toccara Best



Reentering the workforce

We didn’t realize that our global adventure would end with such a hurdle — a career pivot after five years away, right in the middle of a global pandemic.

Maybe it was the break we both needed to reevaluate our next steps, but it has taken us both quite a while to get back in the saddle.

Once our son started preschool, I transitioned back into the workforce as an executive personal assistant for a busy entrepreneur, putting my organizational skills to good use.

When the executive moved out of state just over a year later, I quickly found a new role as operations manager at a nonprofit organization, where I’ve worked part-time for nearly four years. I’ve been searching for meaningful full-time employment for the past year and a half, which has been especially challenging in today’s competitive job market.

Was our gap year impulsive? Not exactly. We spent a year saving and planning. Was it risky? Definitely. More so than we imagined. Would we do it all over again? Absolutely.

That said, if we were to do it again, we’d probably just stick to a year.

Do you have a story about taking a gap year that you want to share? Get in touch with the editor: akarplus@businessinsider.com.




Source link