The year was 2007 and my wife and I were victims of a dreaded condition known as complacency. If you’ve never heard of this terrible condition before, it’s a disease that leads to spending 10 hours a day at a job that you don’t particularly like.
It’s a debilitating condition that causes you to trudge through each day doing the daily grind as life quickly passes you by.
Back then, my wife and I used to get up early in the morning, go to work, eat dinner, sleep and then wake up again the next day to repeat the cycle.
Days quickly faded into weeks, weeks dissolved into months and months soon became years of the same routine.
Even though we both made a pretty good salary from our day jobs, we were coasting our way through life like lifeless zombies. After all, we weren’t challenging ourselves. We weren’t trying new things and we stayed within our comfort zone when making important decisions. We had no sense of purpose and we were unmotivated and stagnant.
It sounds harsh, but my wife and I were lazy pieces of !@#$. Even though we had a lot of free time, we always ended up wasting it on empty activities. For example, our day consisted of working from 9-6:30pm, eating dinner and then watching television until it was time to go to bed.
Days and weeks went by quickly and we didn’t have anything to show for it. Even when I try really hard, I am unable to recall any specific memories during that period of my life. The only thing I remember is that I watched a hell of a lot of television and that my wife was terribly unhappy with her day job.
In fact, the only memory that stands out in my mind was how much she dreaded having to go to work each and every day. Every morning she would kiss me goodbye and then say
Okay, Honey. I’m off to the hell hole I call my job!
It was particularly painful for me because I had to watch her drag herself out of bed and witness her suffer every morning.
Even though she changed companies several times during her career, she never felt fulfilled working at any of her jobs. What’s ironic is that my wife and I had always wanted to start a business and be our own boss but we never got around to it. We talked about opening an online store many times but never took any action until it happened….
All of a sudden I felt like I needed to get off my ass and become a better person. I felt like I needed to be more responsible and to take charge of my life. I felt like I needed to get my act together and provide for my family.
As millions of thoughts swirled through my head, my primary concern became financial security. We needed a bigger house. We needed to live in a better school district. We needed to start a college education fund. We needed an emergency fund so large that we could survive even if I lost my job or got laid off.
As for my wife, she wanted to quit her job so she could take care of our child full time. She didn’t want to miss a single minute of our baby’s childhood. The only problem was that with the additional expense of having a child, she didn’t want to place a major crimp on our lifestyle or our finances. As a result, we needed to find another way to make money and replace her six figure salary. Hence our online store, Bumblebee Linens, was born.
Even though things started out slowly, our online store managed to replace my wife’s salary of $100K within one year.
Having our own business allowed her to stay at home and take care of our child while running our online store at the same time.
The best part was that my wife didn’t have to put in nearly as many hours as her day job to make significantly more money and she was much happier too. You can read their story here