Misty Spreadsheets – lots and lots of spreadsheets! Everything from budget to top attractions, I had made a spreadsheet for just about everything. The main issue of course being how much money do we need before we can leave. Wow! What a major issue to tackle. Too much to discuss in one post so we will have separate blogs and videos about the budget process and tracking expenses as we move along to help those considering a journey such as this.
Now that the spreadsheets were made, we needed an RV. Well, neither one of us had RV’d before so we knew NOTHING about the cost, types, amenities, etc. The original budget for the RV was $15,000. Well, that quickly increased as we started to look at our options. One of the major hiccups with price was we were looking at new, not used. There was just something about us being the only owners of the place we were calling home for the next year (or longer) that called to us. There is nothing wrong with used RV’s, we just determined for this journey, we preferred a new model so the $15,000 was long-gone. That was especially true when we were looking at size. Remember, we are going to be living in this thing for a year with no “home” to go to after a long weekend. We needed something big enough to accommodate us and our two dogs, but not be too big to haul around! We’ll have a more detailed post about our RV shopping and first haul experience later.
Next big item on the list, the house. To sell or not to sell, that was the question. We figured out quickly that we did not want to drag this out, we wanted to leave!! That meant, selling the house and using the proceeds to fund the operation. No house also means most of our belongings had to go. We didn’t want to shoulder an expensive storage bill while on the road. The purge process was not as hard as we imagined, but there is not a ton of space in an RV so as we moved along it got harder and harder to determine what would go and what would stay.
That’s it! After that we just had to quit our good paying, good benefit jobs and leave! I was surprised by how we handled that process too. We are both planners and routine kind of people and we are going to go on the road with only the money we have saved. But we did it and it felt good! We will certainly have to find work again at some point, but how freeing that we can have it be on our terms, on our timeline and doing the type of work we want to do. Excited to see what future job looks like for us!
