I’ll be honest, these last few months post road trip have been hard. If you’re new here, in the beginning of 2021 my husband and I became debt free (it feels so good). We both worked remote during 2021 so we took advantage of the opportunity and bought an RV to travel the US. We took a 2 month road trip and saw 20+ national parks and over half of the states! It was an amazing trip but as they say, all good things must come to an end!
When we returned, the RV sat in the driveway for 3 whole days before we sold it. Jeffrey doesn’t like to see things sitting around for long and we wanted to take advantage of the insane RV market. Some quick numbers, we purchased the RV for $40k and spent $15k during our road trip. The largest expenses were diesel and RV parks. We also purchased a solar power setup that ran us $3k. If there’s interest, I’ll do another blog post with a breakdown of our expenses during the trip because they were far higher than we anticipated. The buyers for the RV talked us down from $60k to $57k (the RV we had was ranging from $50-$70k). We could have held out for another buyer that would have paid more, but we liked the couple and let’s be honest.. we paid for our trip and still came out $2k ahead. For those of you unfamiliar with RV’ing, that’s unheard of! Unfortunately most RV’ers never get their money back so we took it as a win!
When the shock hits..
First off, if you ever feel like you need to buy a bigger house.. go rent an RV for a week and come back home. When we walked into our 1,500 sq. ft house, it quickly became a luxury estate! After 60+ days on the road in 100 sq. ft with 2 humans and 2 pets, we were in shock at how much space we have. In truth, we noticed how much unused space we had in our home.. almost half of the space wasn’t being utilized (a foreign concept in the RV world). We never noticed it prior to our trip but once we were home we completely re-configured our house to use the space efficiently. We now both have our own office space as opposed to sharing an office to keep a bedroom open for the “guests” that we never have. Also, why is there so much water in the toilet bowl?! If you know, you know.. Another epiphany we had is how many things we own. The first week home was spent purging all of our “stuff” that we’ve accumulated since our last move (only a year ago).
After the initial emotional roller coaster of being home, we started to bounce off ideas for what was next. During our 30 hour drive home, we had discussed buying a sprinter van to live in part time when we got back. We were itching for a longer term nomadic lifestyle and thought we could rent out our house and be in the green. Once we returned though, Jeffrey started crunching the numbers from our trip. I’ve mentioned in other posts like this one that we use Mint, which helps tremendously when budgeting. The app made it easy for us to tag transactions related to our RV trip so we could quickly estimate how much we’d spent. We truthfully thought that living on the road would be cheaper than life at home but we were very wrong. Maybe if we hadn’t driven so much or so quickly.. but at the pace we traveled, it was not an affordable alternative. If we rented out our house and lived in the van, it would barely break even and we know we would get side tracked with traveling more (thus spending more) instead of trying to hit FIRE (financial independence – retire early).
Getting re-grounded:
We’ve now been back home for 3 months and are finally starting to feel like we remember our purpose. When we set out on our road trip we knew we might not have a chance like that anytime soon (or ever again we thought) and we took full advantage of the time and spared no expense on doing the things we wanted to do. Grant Cardone mentions in his book “Be Obsessed or Be Average” that if you can’t go on vacation for a month in the fanciest place buying the most expensive dinners and activities with cash, that you can’t afford to be on vacation and need to go back to work. I used to think that was a rude thing to say and found it offensive but now I realize the importance and truth of it. We took that trip to show us the kind of life we want to live everyday. That trip showed us exactly why we work and save and push ourselves to be better and achieve financial freedom. Being debt free is nice, but being financially independent is nicer and we aren’t there yet. So needless to say, we’re back at home working!! We’ve spent the first week of 2022 crunching numbers on last year and setting our financial goals for this year. Shockingly in 2021, we spent less money in total expenses than we did on our mortgage on the mini mansion we used to live in during 2020. We saved over $100k this past year and still managed to have a heck of year traveling. I won’t lie, I stared at those new years specials from my favorite travel budget website (Great Value Vacations – not an affiliate, we just really like them) and wanted to book that trip to Portugal SO bad but that’s not where my focus needs to be this year.
How long till we can travel the world forever?
Based on my recent calculations, we’re 5 years away from lean FIRE (spending less than the average American) and 7 years away from fat FIRE (spending more than the average American). I’ve used the calculators online for calculating FIRE and I’ll be honest, they didn’t do much for me. I have always LOVED the methodology behind FIRE but until I made my own numbers, I couldn’t get motivated. A lot of the tools online summarize a few numbers for you but they don’t show you the journey of how to get there. I created my own version in excel to include our ages (I want to know how old I’ll be when I’m sipping a piña colada on the beach) and included things like savings per year, compounding interest growth, withdrawal rates and remaining income after expenses. I ran this all the way out until we’re old and gray to see how much money we’ll have when we’re 100. This lit a fire under me (pun intended) and I feel rejuvenated to stay on track and make the needed changes this year. Knowing that we could fully retire and get by in 5 years is so exciting.. seeing that we would only have $6k a year beyond that? Not as exciting.. it’s motivated me to work harder for the ability to travel the world if we want to. If you’re interested in the template, drop a comment and I can add it to my resources tab.
Best of wishes to everyone in 2022!
