So, It Begins…
Four years is an eternity. Four years is a blink. We’ve set our sights on four years from today, unless our financial advisor tells us something different. It seems like an impossible dream, and yet at the same time, we watch countless YouTube videos of others who have done exactly what we’re talking about – selling everything and going full time in an RV. We have the benefit of years of camping and RV experience. Chris’s family has camped for his entire life, and since we’ve been married, we’ve had a camper and camped every year in a variety of places across the Southeastern part of the United States. So, for us, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how and when. It feels good to have settled on a direction – full time RVing by 2024.
But now the real challenge begins. Bringing the dream to life in a way that doesn’t hurt us financially. Bringing the dream to life in a quick enough fashion that we don’t drive ourselves crazy with waiting and wanting. We’ve never been very good at delaying our gratification, and we’re fairly decisive people. So, now that we’ve decided, we’re ready, now. Also, bringing the dream to life in a way that doesn’t cause us to doubt our sanity – there are a thousand things that can go wrong between now and then. Are we crazy for making plans now for something that is four years out? Like I said, four years is an eternity; four years is a blink in time.
We picked a maximum of four years for a number of reasons.
- We will have been in our current house five years as of April 2024, the mark in time that our tax advisor said we needed to meet in order to avoid tax penalties. This is due in part to the sale of the house we built in 2016 as part of our relocation and only lived in for three, tension-filled years before finding our oasis here. This decision can change based on what our financial advisor says.
- I will have finished my PhD by then in industrial and organizational psychology. Assuming no significant challenges, my degree is supposed to be complete by the end of 2023.
- Our youngest daughter should be close to being done with college by then and close to being off the payroll. She graduates high school in 2021, and then, assuming no significant challenges, she should be a junior in college and most likely living in an apartment by that time.
- God-willing, Chris will be on the verge of turning 54, and I will be 47 by that time. We don’t want to wait until we’re too old to be able to travel and enjoy it.
Sell the Nest
Exiting our current lifestyle seems to be the clearest part to me right now. Within one to two years, we will be empty nesters, so sell the nest. We both had four-year old daughters when we married and added one more to the mix along the way, so we’ve never known life without kids. Don’t write us off as selfish or bad parents just because we’re excited about discovering what our relationship looks like without being centered around dinner times, homework, and cheer schedules. We’ve never known anything else.
So, we sell the nest and put the proceeds into savings, into living expenses, and/or into paying off the new camper and truck. We sell my car, sell the tractor, sell anything not attached to one of the children or to our new lifestyle.
Financial Planners
We spend the next three years becoming expert financial planners. Paying off debt, building savings, learning how to build and stick to a monthly budget, etc. There are monthly bills that will go away with the transition to full time RVing – the power bill, the debt that we pay off or sell, the home internet bill, etc. There are monthly bills that will stay with us or change with the transition: insurance, cell phone/internet bill, my student loan debt, the truck/camper/motorcycle bills, expenses for our daughter’s college, etc. We spent the first half of our marriage recovering from personal financial decisions made at another time and place for each of us, and we’ve finally crested the lip of that hole, with the exception of my student loans. But without the forcing function of this dream driving us, we’ve been lazy with our financial discipline. Now, it’s time to get serious and make some things happen.
Clarity and Murk
We’ve already decided on a camper type that would be the perfect fit. More on that later, though, because again, we’re talking four years here. Technology changes every other month. Who knows what will be available by the time we’re ready to buy? And that’s another decision, when to upgrade our camper and truck? Now, so we can start to pay down on them? Later, when we’re just about ready to go and the technology might be way different? Technology changes can also be a good thing and a bad thing, just depending.
The murkiest thing for me is what will I do on the road for work. We will be paying on some things for quite some time to come, plus our monthly living expenses, plus the need to support our kids and elderly parents, and the truck/camper/motorcycle. Again, it’s doable. We’ve seen it done, and I can work the numbers our on paper. But what will I do to keep bringing in money on an ongoing basis? That I haven’t figured out just yet. I have some ideas, but they need work. It’s hard for someone so tied to their day job to think about how to do something differently. I’ll get there, though. The good thing is that I like to work, so it’s just a question of figuring how to do what I like to do on my own terms and in a way that supports our new lifestyle.
Our Why
I’m a workaholic. I’m one of those people who doesn’t know how to relax, who sits down to “watch TV” with a pile of stuff in my arms to work on at the same time, who feels anxious over taking a nap on Sunday because there’s so much to do, who has known very little other than school and work for nearly the last decade, and who spends most of her nights and weekends working. The only time I ever truly relax are when we are camping or riding the motorcycle with Chris. Chris is an equally hard worker. He never calls in sick, even when he should, and works ridiculously hard around the house, despite an incredibly difficult shift schedule that keeps him feeling like a zombie most of the time. We have earned this. We owe it to each other, to our families, and to honor the gift of this amazing world.
I know it’s the right thing because of the peace and excitement that blossom in my chest when I think about making this leap. I know it’s the right thing because of the tension that squeezes my chest when I think of year after year of working as hard as I do right now. Lately, the refrain that keeps running through my mind unbidden is, I don’t want to work this hard for the rest of my life. I don’t want to do this anymore, work this way forever. I lost my dad when he was 46 years old. One day he was with us, and the next he was gone, changing our lives forever. In some ways, I think my professional and educational accomplishments are in honor of him. He was trying to finish his first college degree when he died at 46, and the tragedy of that breaks my heart. In many ways, I’m doing this for him, as much as for myself. And for Chris’s parents, who thankfully are still with us, but love to travel and camp as much as we do. And we’re doing this for our girls, to show them the wide range of options life has to offer. Mostly, though, we’re doing this for us, for our next grand adventure, and for the time together that is frittered away in daily commutes, evening teleconferences, weekend papers, and preparing for/recovering from shift schedules. We’re doing this for us – for who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.
