T-16 months
When we made the commitment to the idea of going full time, we realized there was a lot of work ahead. Research, decisions, planning. And while we’ve heard several stories of people that just decided to change their lives and bought an RV and hit the road within a month or so, we knew it would take us much longer. Plus we currently have commitments, and a teenage daughter who does NOT share in our dream of hitting the road.
So that began the basis our our timeline: Her graduation. Of course you can’t just uproot someone who just receives their diploma, so we plan on getting her set up at college. That moved us into fall of 2016.
But we couldn’t leave our families right before the holidays, so that put us after Christmas. Not the best time to sell a house, so that moved us into early 2017. If everything goes well and the house sells quickly, we could be on the road south by the end of February. So backing up from that date to where we were gave us 37 months.
148 weekends sounded like plenty of time to:
- Decide on the type of RV
- Select a state of domicile
- Sell our store
- Sell our toy hauler, motorcycle, and rental properties.
- Select and purchase an RV
- Plan a route to begin with (Tom is NOT a “go where the wind takes us” kinda guy!)
- Sift through ALL our wordly possessions.
- Set up a new, mobile IT system
- Notify our employers (and for me, hire and train a replacement)
- Downsize, downsize, and downsize again.
- Decide what we need to take with us
- Decide what to put in storage
- Get our home ready to put on the market
- Get our new RV repaired,reconditioned and/or re-decorated
- Figure out how health insurance works for transients
- Select a nationwide bank
- Select and purchase video and/or camera equipment
- Install solar on our rig (unless we were lucky enough to get an RV ready to go)
- Take some shake-down trips to refine what we will and won’t need on the road
- Okay, so that list doesn’t seem nearly as long as it feels.
Did I mention downsizing? Do you have any idea how long it takes to get rid of stuff you’ve spent a lifetime accumulating? That is definitely the biggest challenge we face as well as the most time involved.
Now here we are at T minus 16 months. That’s only 64 weekends! and with our current schedule, that’s barely more than 64 days! It can freak me out if I think about it too much.
The good side is that we’re having fun planning, preparing, and getting into the right mindset.
The down side is that our to-do list keeps growing. Now that we have our RV, we have a laundry list of things we’d like to do to it and it seems like there’s never any time to work on it. And thanks to all the great you-tubes we’ve watched, and our DIY natures, we’ve been inspired to take on all these projects ourselves: refinishing the shower, installing solar, making a padded headboard, replacing the slide covers, changing out the flooring, just to name some.
However, we’re confident that everything happens as is should and we trust in divine timing, AND we have no set schedule or deadline. Whew! That puts it all into perspective!
Happy Travels!
Peace & Love, Joy