When you decide to follow your day-dream, where does one start? I had convinced my husband that getting rid of all the things that were weighing us down and holding us back from really thieving as a family. I wanted to get on the road once the thought had been created in my brain, I’m kinda the need instant satisfaction kinda person. My husband on the other person is the grounded and logical one on our team. We decided we would divide and conquer and start a list that would give us tasks to research to see if this day-dream really was feasible and worth giving a go.
Our initial list looked something like this:
1.Telecommute jobs
2.Schooling – work
3.Current finances
4.Future finances
5.My biz future
6.RV’s
7.Trucks
8.Family cabin
9.Insurance
10.Selling house – painting
11.Selling stuff
12.Drives license
13.Home school
14.Healthcare
15.State of residency
16.Taxes
17.Travel plan
18.ETD strategy
19.Telling the kids
20.Wifi – Ranger/phones
Taking into consideration we really had no RV experience and VERY little camping in the past, we had our work cut out for us!
He dedicated most of his time, which there was little of with his current 60 HR week job, to these free on-line courses and he picked it up pretty easily. Over the next few months while he focused on this I took on a few tasks like learning about all the different types of RVs and what kinda towing power you would need from a truck to haul your tiny home around. We briefly looked at subjects such as insurance for RV/truck/healthcare as well but really needed to focus our energy on his new career and also get started on getting the house ready to put up for sale.
Our house was move in ready when we purchased it 7 years prior but unfortunately the previous owners had painted every room with a flat based paint so 7 years of little human hands all over it was not a good selling feature. I dedicated my efforts to repainting every single room myself, including trim!!! I could probably start my own painting business if I wanted to at this point. We had a few exterior trim problems to address and hired out to do this.
We are huge DIY people but we were already stretched thin and our house is 3 stories high so some areas would be trickier to address then we were willing to risk. When we first started this journey our house was still recovering from the recession and we would had been happy to break even. We just wanted out of this mortgage which was holding us prisoner.
1 year after our daydream was underway the housing market in our area had really turned around and it seemed like we would stand to actually profit from the sale of our house. This profit was going to open a few more possibilities in the direction we could go with when choosing an RV and when my husband could stop working at his current job.
His main focus was to find a job that would be easily done remotely, while I dug into the basic info on what RVing and full time traveling involved. He’s had his BA in finance and has been a restaurant manager for over a decade, so it was going to be a mental shift. He has a ton of patience and understands computer lingo, so we decided that him learning computer coding would be his best bet in starting over at a new career.
We luckily had an acquaintance who was willing to share all his knowledge of what, how and where we could do all his free on-line training and offered help with Q&A if the need occurred. Besides my grunt work I was also focusing on growing my business to get it to a point that would provide for us on the road.
You can read my previous posts on how we came to this decision and how we are coming along here! Comment and let me know your thoughts! Have you ever dreamed of packing up and traveling the world?
