I was hiking with my boyfriend, Tom, in the redwoods north of San Francisco in 2015 when he made the craziest suggestion: “Why don’t we camp up here on Mount Tam? Give up rent?”
At first, I thought he was joking. Move out of my cute Zen cottage in the Mill Valley redwoods? No way! But he continued to talk excitedly from the fern-lined trail ahead of me. “Imagine how much you would save! At least $20,000 per year!”
Most people would never dream of giving up rent to get financially ahead, but Tom was different . He was a creative thinker, an adventurer (who’s sailed from the Chesapeake Bay to San Francisco), and a Minnesota-born outdoorsman.
To hi…
