Roy and I decided to create this blog to possibly help anyone who is considering the full-time RV lifestyle. I’ve been reading many blogs about people who decided to RV full time, sold everything, and hit the road. Their experiences have helped me tremendously and I’m hoping that this blog will help someone else considering this lifestyle. Everyone’s path is different, in one way or another, so our path won’t be suited for everyone. We can at least share our experiences in hopes of helping someone else through our mistakes and successes. Once we FINALLY get to truly live the lifestyle of traveling I hope this blog will keep us connected with the folks back home that want to know where our travels take us. That’s the why behind the blog, and now let me begin sharing our story.
Sometime during the month of August 2012, Roy and I made the decision to totally change our lifestyle. As monumental of a lifestyle change as this is, I cannot pinpoint the date or the discussion we were having that brought us to this decision. I took a month off of work in August to de-stress from extreme personal stress and some work-related stress that had accumulated. During that month I had plenty of time to look at my life, what got me to this point, spend quality time in God’s Holy Word and in prayer with Him. I also began seeing a counselor who helped me to see clearly that change was needed for me to come out of the depression I was in. The life Roy and I worked so hard to build for ourselves, our children and grandchildren had drastically changed within the last several months. Even though we were living a very comfortable lifestyle financially, both still working without many bills, everything else had changed. We came to see that we needed to refocus our lives on the two people who fell in love and got married 40 years ago. Roy and I are the original family, and we deserve to be happy, so lifestyle change here we come.
In the beginning, our thoughts were very general. We knew we wanted to sell our house, sell everything we owned in the house, yard, and garage, purchase a mobile type home, retire and travel. And we thought it would happen in that order. We’re still on that course but our plans are getting more specific as time goes on and the order in which we’d complete our plan has changed. Several times at the beginning we couldn’t see how we could make this happen. One obstacle was that we really didn’t have sufficient retirement income to support ourselves even in a reduced RV lifestyle. Another was that my husband needs stability and the idea of our only home being one on wheels kind of unnerved him. I thought keeping a house here “just in case” was a waste of money. I’m perhaps a little more of a risk-taker than he is and it was very obvious in our stands on this.
Things started falling into place and several things happened within a week that made Roy and I much, much more confident that this was the future plan for us. One day before my husband and son went shopping I was especially distraught that maybe our plan was not doable. They must have discussed the problem at hand and being the problem-solving men that they are they came up with a wonderful, wonderful idea. When they came home they asked me to sit down and they shared with me the idea they came up with. We thought about it and discussed it further and when it hit me that this was the perfect solution to our meager retirement income not being enough to support us on the road.
We own a rental house that brings in good income but right now it is being used to pay the note on that house with very little to spare. Their idea was to pay off that mortgage when we sold our house (which has no mortgage) and supplement our meager retirement income with the rent they pay, making this plan very doable! Not only did paying off the rental house provide us with income, it also provided us with a house we still owned that we could live in if we decided to stop full timing or if one of us got sick or we need to stop RVing for a while for some unforeseen reason. Check off additional income, check off sticks house to return to if needed!
On top of these two items being checked off the concerns list, sometime during the next week I discovered WORKAMPING!!!! Never heard of it before, didn’t have a clue that such opportunities existed much less that thousands of RV folks are doing it every day. As we have time to learn more about Workamping I’ll share it for those who might be interested. Basically, it’s working a few hours a week at a state or federal park or even Disneyworld in exchange for a free RV spot there. We began to see that lots of research and opening ourselves to new possibilities were needed to make this happen.
First up was a garage sale to rid ourselves of all the things we absolutely didn’t need. Since I had time off work I began going room to room, drawer to drawer, and door to door seeing what we could let go of without us feeling it. Every day I came up with enough things to cover our big kitchen counter and the dining room table plus some. After days and days of filtering through most of our things and many hours of pricing things, we had our first garage sale. Signs were up in the neighborhood, ad in the newspaper, Craigslist notice, and invitations sent to all my Facebook friends. We were starting the garage sale at 8 am. By 6:30 am there were people waiting in the driveway.
I loved having that garage sale. It was so freeing to get rid of the “stuff” in our lives. I got to give little things to the children and had fun cutting deals with people. I’ve never liked doing that but that day it was a blast! We hoped to maybe make $300 and wound up far exceeding that around $700! What a motivation that was to keep getting rid of our stuff. If you walked through our house it didn’t look like we’d sold so much stuff but we had. Why in the world had we hung on to so much stuff for so long. We think it was “just in case we need it”.
At that point Roy hadn’t begun going through his tools and computers and that will probably wait to be sold until everything else is gone through and sent off to a new home. His tools are his babies and I know that will be a difficult parting of the ways when it does happen. He will get in the garage sale spirit soon I am sure!
ONE DAY CLOSER TO OUR DREAM!!!!!!!!!!!!
BECAUSE HE LIVES 