People tell us all the time that we're different from other families.

We tried to be to normal and that just didn’t seem to work for us. We didn’t fit into a normal kind of mold very well.

We've spent the last couple of years changing our lives. From our family life, parenting, teenage life, to our technology and travel and most especially our diet and nutrition. 
  

Hi, we're the White Family. We’re a pretty awesome family of 5 —two teenage girls and 1 teenage boy. Jeffrey, Kristina, Arianna, Halle and Jack. We’re a super tight knit group, we spend a lot of time together and people tell us that we’re just different from other people they meet.  

We came from a very established middle class type of family and decided that we were not a very happy group. We left a lot of that behind and made a ton of changes that make us more like a quasi middle class family who people think are different. 

No, we don’t live like nomads and travel around the world in a bus. No, we didn’t sell our house, and every thing in it to carry only what was on our backs. We live in our same house, drive our same cars, but just took everything else and shook it upside down and scrambled it around a bunch. 

Because we wanted to live better, more wholeheartedly and fully. 

We share the things that make us unique: our opinions, the technologies we’ve embraced, things we’ve removed completely, our travel and how we make it work in our budget, where we’ve made health, wellness and nutrition important in our lives, the boundaries and lines in society that we question and sometimes cross and ultimately how we teach our three teenagers to cope, succeed in a modern world and become healthy, happy citizens.
 

Why the Limit Exchange? 
The name came about as we were going through all of the changes in the last 2 years. There were times that I thought about starting a blog, or a website, a something to document what we were doing. It seemed very monumental to me, and I wanted to record it all…. yet at the same time, I didn’t want to. not yet. It was very fresh and fragile and new. I wanted to protect it and hold it safe. We had been out there in the world, you see, and some of that harshness can be very scaring. We will carry those experiences with us forever. 

I also felt the very strong urge though to share our story with others. People ask us all the time, why? How? How are you doing this? How did you do this? I frequently shrug my shoulders and say I don’t know, I just did. Because I wanted to. 

But we were driven to do it by some inner force greater than ourselves. It was compelling.
In walking away from an established life you have to have a lot of courage. You have to be ready to cross a lot of boundaries, to question a lot of social norms and all of the dictates around you. 
You have to have the courage to stand up to them, and to set your own limits and to test the limits that others put before you. 
You have to exchange one belief for another. 
You have to exchange ideas, and ideals. 
You have to exchange one view for another. 

You need to exchange limits. 

the Limit Exchange.

Who are we? 
Jeffrey and I are high school sweethearts. We’ve never really done anything normal, other than attempt to rush towards what we thought was a ‘normal’ lifestyle.  Which we did by getting married a couple of years out of high school. After we’d moved across the country together and then moved back to the midwest where our hearts belonged, we got on the highway to “normal" adult hood as quickly as possible. We had our first daughter 1 year after graduating college, the second 2 years after that and our youngest almost 3 years after that. We will have them all graduated high school by the time we are 46 years old. 

Jeffrey and I were always the master of the hustle. We’ve both been working since we were 14 years old. When we were fresh out of college we founded an online community/store that we went on to sell for more than a million dollars before we were 30 years old. We continued to operate and eventually own again that business for 15 years. It helped to create our established lifestyle that we had grown quite comfortable in, but really wasn’t doing us any favors.

We are rebels and always looking to do things our own way. Always taking the information around us and turning it on its side to look at it from a different perspective. There are so many other ways to look at life, money and living. 

Our kids are a diverse bunch, each with their own interests and talents. Yet they are all the same in that they all look at the world differently. We have encouraged and validated that aspect in each of them. We have also encouraged each of them to find something that they love, find the path to get there and go hard. Don’t let things stand in your way. We’ve watched each of them grow as an individual and find their own paths and make their dreams come true. We’ve also watched them grow together as a  unit from all of the changes that we’ve made in our household to become a true family. The people and citizens they are becoming is something to be proud of.
 

Kristina Nicolai-White

marketing STRATEGIST | ARTIST | unintentional housewife

I have spent most of my life as a creator. I have been creating art as a side hustle since I was a teenager, it was in my blood, I come from a family of creators. I’ve had my hands into everything: quilting, stained glass, basket weaving, sewing, painting, mural painting, hand lettering and calligraphy, pottery, baking, jewelry and florals and gardening. I love party planning, decorating and staging— I think this is my love language. The thing everyone knows me most for is photography and scrapbooking.

I have spent all of my working life in consumer based businesses learning how to market, sell and build a loyal following. I understand the psychology of the audience and how to connect with them. I specialize in marketing, branding through authenticity and building a loyal customer base. 

I started my multi-million dollar online store at only 23. I grew a community of over 500,000 followers and a website that received millions of page views every month. I also started a small side manufacturing business, a small product design house, a couple of small little apparel and lifestyle companies all while raising three children to teenager-hood. 

After leaving all of this behind, I have spent almost 2 years completely turning my life and my household around. I am an unintentional housewife. I have turned my family into a wellness machine, learning everything that I can about natural medicine, eating whole foods, meditation and wholehearted living. 

I have divested our home of more than half of our possessions, embracing a more essentialist lifestyle.
I basically know how to run a multi-million dollar company that lives entirely online, or I can totally flip a household and make that a rockstar too.

I belive in honesty and realness. I always tell it like it is and believe that once we accept and live in our true authentic selves we live a happier existence. 

I always wear jeans with holes in them. I've done this forever.  I love action movies and rock music. I spend way too much time researching a life full of wellness but I am a terrible cook and actually hate cooking. (mainly because I really really hate doing the dishes). I’d honestly rather have a dance party in my kitchen. 
People tell me all the time that I don’t look my age and they assume that I am younger than I am. People are surprised and shocked to hear that I have 3 teenagers, one over the age of 18. My mother is the same way, and one of the many things I thank her for is passing down these genes. Thanks Mom. 

Jeffrey White

ENGINEER | BUSINESS and technology STRATEGIST | PILOT | GAMER

I’ve made a career and living out of helping others with technology and/or using technology to improve their businesses, because, frankly, it comes easily to me. What can I say?  I’m a nerd. Not necessarily the stereotypical tape-on-the-glasses kind of nerd, but technology and I have gone hand-in-hand since I was a tot.  This became obvious to my mother when she found me with a screwdriver and what used to be Dad’s stereo system.  Oops.  My skills and techniques have improved since then, but it still comes down to an affinity for technology and hacking it until it works.

It’s pretty obvious after spending a few minutes in our house that tech plays an important role.  From ensuring that everyone has smart phones that both keep us connected AND double as always-ready, memory-capturing cameras, to having an ISP-class internet connection that feeds our custom-built network and entertainment systems.  I’ve molded (and continue to mold) our technology to enable us to do and share the things we love.  Again, for me, it helps to keep us all connected, even as the kids start to build their own lives at college and beyond.

But, travel.  Ah, travel.  Travel is my first true love.  My mother infected me with the travel bug at a young age.  She grew up in Germany and moved here when she turned 19.  As such, we not only traveled back and forth to Europe dozens of times, but she also had an insatiable desire to experience the US and travel to all of it’s diverse destinations.  All 48 contiguous states before I was 8? Check.  Avid skier? Check.  Pilot’s license? Check.  I love to travel.  It’s been my passion and I’ve worked hard to try and instill that same love with my family.  We have our favorite places, of course, that we have, and always will return to, but we also love the new.  When we choose a new place to go, we all research that location from our own perspectives and we end up planning incredible adventures.

I’m not a complicated guy.  I love adventure, I love my family, I love technology.  Without fail, these are the conversations I come back to again and again and what define everything I do.  It’s no surprise that combining all three are the moments I live for.

You’ll find me in jeans and a t-shirt most days.  I reset before and after work with good fiction and my secret pleasure is writing.