When we tell people what our plans are for quitting our jobs and working on the road, we get funny looks. Not tee hee funny, but more like peculiar looks. I can see that they have a whole lot of thoughts rolling around in their head about how someone our ages can be doing this. "Quit work at age 46 and 51 ?" Who does that ? And how do you do that, cause I'm in line behind you. What most people don't realize is that there is a whole revolution of people out there who are taking to America's highways and byways and living and working on the road. From ages 20 something to couples with young kids, they are seeing the value in "living life to the fullest" and not settling for the stress filled 9 - 5 life that so many of us have been enduring for most of our lives.
I think for a full time RV-er there comes a point where the almighty dollar loses its grip on us and we want to give something back. We no longer have this need to climb the corporate ladder for prestige and big bucks to only get to the top and be miserable with our lives. It isn't fun anymore and we want to re-capture the fun and adventure that we remember CAN exist and SHOULD exist in our lives.
That is the case with us.....Linda 1 has been a gypsy most of her life, having lived in four different states and a multitude of houses while following her then husband's career wherever it took him.
Linda 2 has been working the same job for the past 18 years, seeing her kids now finish up college so that she can start a new career path. Supervising over 100 employees with all the stresses and responsibility that goes with that and being in management for 30 years has made her yearn to get outdoors and do something different.
So, exactly how can we afford to quit our "real" jobs and travel. We both sold our homes and took some of the proceeds and put into Vanguard funds. We paid for a financial advisor to look at our portfolios (retirement and non-retirement accounts) and tell us if what we wanted to do was a possibility. At first we thought that we would just use the house proceeds to buy the truck and 5th wheel so there would be nothing owed on them. He said this was not the best way to use our money. (Lesson #1 that I preach: You never pay cash for a depreciable asset.) In the case of our 5th wheel, the interest would actually be deductible as it's a house. Our goal is to pay off the truck by the time we leave our jobs so the only payment we have is on the 5th wheel. If we find that we can't make enough money working on the road, we can "re-balance" our portfolio annually and take out up to 4% of it to use to pay our bills, live on, etc. We will take the 4% out and put into a money market account or a ING account (to accumulate interest) and draw against it as we need to each month for expenses. We are hoping that we'll only need to do that year 1 (to pay off the remaining truck balance in Sept.) and Year 2 as a buffer till we get our first jobs.
Even without this type of strategy, I read about people all the time who make enough on the road to live on. Basically depends how much you need ! Some people live on $500/month while others need much more. I will keep a spreadsheet and post our monthly expenses once we get out there. 145 days to go till then !!!!!
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