In this episode, Paola Merrill and Luke Gehring reflect on building a more intentional life in rural Washington while balancing family, creative work, and financial uncertainty. They discuss income from land surveying, YouTube, Patreon, books, and art, and why buying a beloved local bookstore became a meaningful career shift. The conversation also touches on budgeting, mental health, and redefining success through stability, purpose, and a slower, healthier way of living.
Working at an independent bookstore, I will never be making a huge amount of income.
And for us, it was a lot of conversations about making sure we're watching where our spending is going.
But I think it will be worth it.
It is an incredible challenge, but a wonderful one to learn how to have a dream, but really focus on gaining all the knowledge to make that dream successful.
My name is Paola Merrill, and I am 29 years old.
My name is Luke Gehring, and I'm 37 years old.
We live in Winthrop, Washington.
We have a 22-month-old named Caspian.
In 2025, we brought in over $209,000.
[FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
We live in a beautiful valley right at the foot of the North Cascades.
I'm a field technician for land surveying.
I do field work pretty much year-round.
So in 2025, my job brought in $63,000.
The vast majority
The vast majority of the income I made in 2025 came from Patreon and YouTube, and then I made a smaller amount from royalties from my book that I published, as well as selling art on
my Etsy shop.
I also recently fulfilled my dream of self-publishing a children's book, and it has been very exciting.
Pretty much all the excess money that I made, all that went into savings, and so that set us up really well to even consider buying the bookstore.
I've worked there on and off for over 5 years.
There's something about the little bookstore that has always been really close to my heart, and so it just seemed like the right fit during a time where I was looking for a career change
and a lifestyle shift.
I'm buying the books as well as the kind of sideline merchandise.
I'm also dealing with insurance and monthly payments.
My passion is collecting rocks and crystals, and so I purchased a bunch of crystals, and they're kind of our new little sideline in the store to help bring in a little more income that
the bookstore never had before.
Even though I brought a larger income in, in 2025, it's still very unstable.
It can multiply 5 times one month and be considerably less the next.
With that lack of predictability, we've often built a lot of our kind of idea of what we should spend based off of your income and kind of the minimum that I can expect in order for
us to make sure that we're budgeting responsibly.
So we purchased this house, uh, from my parents, and it's on the lot that's right next door to them.
They've actually been working on kind of remodeling the whole house for for about a year before we bought it.
It originally was an old barn with an apartment in the top.
They sold it to us for, I would say, under market value.
Yeah.
In this area, the homes are really, really expensive.
Groceries and food are expensive as well.
That is an added struggle with trying to keep our budget lower.
We don't cook that much at home.
Yeah, with us being so busy, it's been nice to invest our time more in our son and in the bookstore.
So the time that buying food has afforded us has been really nice, actually, even though it's a lot more expensive and we don't want to do that for the foreseeable future.
Yeah.
Using the old man for content.
Yep.
Hey, Dad.
We have two very involved sets of parents who are really excited to be grandparents and who are really excited to support us.
And I think without them, we wouldn't be able to live our dream life.
The way we look at our money is quite simple, really.
It helps because we live in a rural area and a lot of the free activities we do, such as hiking and walking, really fill up most of that.
We still do like to invest in our hobbies.
We're both artists and creative people, and so that definitely has to have a part of our income as well.
Because I happen to live in just such a lovely area with a lot of national parks around, I decided that I wanted to try to share a little bit of the beauty of nature.
I've always seen this channel as my creative outlet.
It's kind of my artist's heart song.
A few years into having kind of a full-blown business, my anxiety, which had always been, you know, something that was always a personality trait of mine, had slowly grown and kind
of came to a head a few years in when I started struggling a lot with panic attacks and just this feeling of just deep anxiety every time I was trying to get a video completed or meet
deadlines and things like that.
A lot of that pressure was absolutely self-imposed.
It was getting so bad that I was having health issues, and some of those even landed me in the hospital.
It was
a very, it was a very difficult time.
My career was at arguably one of its peaks and definitely something I'm sure I could have continued doing successfully for years to come.
Sometimes doing more and growing your business more and making more isn't the answer, not when your own mental and physical health is affected, not when you don't feel like you are
in alignment with what you are doing.
At that point, I realized that our local little bookstore was for sale.
So my goal with buying this bookstore was to eventually transition my career so that I would be more of a full-time bookseller and maybe someone who just does a little bit of YouTube
on the side.
So far I've found that to be a really wonderful balance.
Overall the bookstore has been profitable, but month to month the profitability changes drastically depending on tourism and changes in weather.
But so far we've been able to be prepared for it.
So if I work at the bookstore more full-time and do my online work just as a hobby, I definitely will be greatly reducing my income.
My ultimate goal is to have a store that continues to survive and hopefully most of the time thrive.
Even in the future when I have to adjust my finances again and deal with a smaller income, it will again be a very worthwhile cause.
It does not mean failure.
It means choosing something more important than growth, and sustainability is also success.
At least that's been my own perspective, and our lives have improved drastically.
I think you would agree I'm a much happier and healthier person now.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
It's absolutely been worth it to transition to the bookstore, seeing how much happier Paola is.
I know fear can stand in the way, especially when you've built something and you're thinking about doing something completely different.
And it, it is scary, but I realized it was only scary because we hadn't jumped into it yet.
So now that we have been learning about the bookstore and we're both working there and helping, it's a lot less scary and it's a lot more exciting.