Post-RV life:
I can’t believe it’s been 3 years since I wrote a blog post! When I left off last time, we had just wrapped up an amazing U.S cross country RV road trip and we were on a high from that. We got back home and the following months were challenging to say the least. You go from waking up to something beautiful and different every morning to being back in dreary Georgia in the middle of winter staring at your neighbors dead yard, ha! After settling back in to our normal “routine” we did what we do best, walk and talk! It’s a favorite past time of ours to walk the neighborhood and talk about our dreams, goals and aspirations. I asked Jeffrey something along the lines of “why do we live here?” and he said something like “because we’ve always lived here.. our families live here.. it’s just where we live” and then I said something like “so we just traveled the entire United States and you’re telling me out of everywhere we went, you’d choose to live here?” and another lightbulb went off.. It was not where we would chose to live.
We have these “aha” moments quite often and they usually lead to some major life change that sends us into a whole new chapter of our lives. I can tell you that in the last 3 years, we’ve had a few of them! I’m going to summarize because it’s too much to tell in one sitting.
Getting out of dodge:
After our walk and talk and a double homicide at our neighbors house, we decided to move! As you know from our blog we love aviation, scuba diving and the ocean. So what better place to move than Florida? We opted for Southeast Florida which just so happens to be some of the highest cost of living that there is in the states, but you pay to play I suppose. It didn’t quite align with our “never be in debt again” strategy because we decided to take out a mortgage instead of paying cash. But ultimately after running the numbers, we knew that investing the money that we’d use to pay for a house would yield a higher return than paying off a house so that’s what we did.
We quietly moved to FL without telling many people and sort of went off the grid for a bit. We moved in June of 2022 and started renovating the new house. We were mostly done with the renovation by August/September and started having friends and family come visit us. We were LOVING our decision to move and spending our afternoons and weekends scuba diving, snorkeling, paddle boarding and just enjoying life.
Losing loved ones:
In October of 2022, we lost my brother in law and spent the next year going through the most difficult time of our entire lives. I literally don’t have the words to explain how hard this chapter was. In the middle of grieving, I found out I was pregnant and would be expecting our baby by August of 2023. I did my best to stay positive and healthy during my pregnancy. In May of 2023, we had another death of a childhood/family friend. Both of these losses were loved ones that were under 36 years old so it was a traumatic, unexpected, awful time. If you’ve ever lost someone close to you that’s young, you know how it makes you feel. I don’t want to say it’s easy to lose someone that’s older, but they’ve had their whole life to live. When you lose someone young, it feels like injustice. Like they didn’t get to do everything they wanted to and their lives were stolen from them. I still don’t understand why these things happen, and I’ve always been a “everything happens for a reason” type of person. I plan on having a long chat with God about it when I make it up there (hopefully in a very long time after living a full life).
Losing them in our lives really made us sit back and say “what are we doing with our lives? what do we want to be doing with our lives? why aren’t we doing those things?” etc. etc. It was another big “aha” moment that made us start to evaluate what we wanted in our lives and really put things into perspective. You go along life thinking that all these things/milestones/goals are so important but then you realize that TIME is the most important and valuable of all. TIME is the thing that you can’t make more of, or get back. You can always make more money, or achieve more accomplishments but you can never get time or memories back.
Welcoming a new family member:
I made it through those last few months of a very warm pregnancy (9 months pregnant in August in south Florida is no joke) and our daughter arrived shortly after her due date after a 38 hour labor. I had all the intentions of having a home birth, but had to be transferred to the hospital because I’d been in labor too long. I was able to have a natural, unmedicated birth which was my goal and she came out screaming and healthy! She’s almost a year old now and is an absolute fire cracker. I’m pretty sure I was a goody-two-shoes baby, so I think she gets the chaos from my husband, but she’s the best and I wouldn’t change a thing.
We made it through the holidays and although we’d typically be traveling during them or staying home for our own traditions, we decided to spend them with family. It’s something that we hadn’t done in a few years but I wanted our families to meet our daughter and to have some of those memories together. And I’m so grateful that we did.. because in February of 2024 we lost my grandma. I’m so grateful that she got to meet our daughter and that we have photos from that Thanksgiving just a few months before. She also wrote my daughter a letter before she was born and it’s now framed and will be hung in her nursery and bedroom for all the years to come. It was a hard death for me because it was the first time I’ve lost someone in my immediate family that I was very close with. It was also another big shift in our life again.
Leaving corporate:
I had just gone back to work after being on maternity leave for 6 months and things were not going as planned. I had been told I’d be promoted before maternity leave, I had applied for the promotion, then never got it. When I spoke to HR they essentially said “we don’t promote people on maternity leave”. So after 5 years with the company and working my tail off, the promotion I was supposed to get vanished. My boss (who was amazing) left the company just before I went on maternity leave, and 2 of my co-workers left during my maternity leave. So when I came back, the team had completely turned over and was not headed in an optimistic direction. I tried finding another role internally but didn’t have any luck due to poor timing with opportunities.
In the middle of all of this, Jeffrey gets laid off from the startup company he was working for.. Then 2 weeks later my grandma passed. It was just pure chaos all around. The week of her funeral, I put in my 2 weeks notice. We had already been discussing what I would do if I couldn’t find something else, and we knew that we were in a financial situation where we no longer needed W2 income, so that’s what I did! It was the best and worst feeling ever.. to be in the situation to not “need” a job, but to give up one that you have loved for so long and would have continued to do if you were being treated differently. It still feels like an unfinished chapter for me but it was the right decision for myself and my family at that time.
Retirement:
So fast forward to today, we have officially been unemployed for almost 6 months! Unemployed meaning no W2 jobs. When we first moved to FL, Jeffrey and I started our own consulting business and we’ve been running that concurrently for the last 2 years. That income combined with our real estate income is what we’re living on. It’s the first time we’ve never had health insurance *gasp* and the first time we haven’t been contributing to a 401k but it’s also the most free we’ve ever felt. We have been in a situation to actually retire for a few years now, but we’ve continued working because we were both high earners and knew it would get us further ahead.
Experiencing all the stress and chaos over the last few years has just changed our mindset. Why would we work for someone else who doesn’t treat us right or appreciate us? Why would we give up time with our daughter for someone else’s gain? There are still weeks where Jeffrey is pulling 40+ hours and is stressed out, but for the most part we have the ability to structure our week however we want. It’s not unusual for us to go on a morning outing and for him to start work at noon or for us to take off a week and spend time with loved ones. We have a lot more freedom now and although it’s scary at times because we aren’t following the traditional path, it’s so much more rewarding.
With this newfound time, we have been traveling a lot this year. We spent three weeks in Europe visiting friends and have traveled a few times to GA to visit friends and family. We’ve been working on our homestead, expanding the yard and building a pool for the summer time and future years with our daughter. We are still saving as much as we can, but with our lowered income we will need to sit down and budget more proactively than we’re used to. Our passive income covers our living expenses, but big purchases will need to be budgeted and planned moving forward. My goal this year is to get active again on chasingtheoceans. I’m working with a close friend on doing group travel and hope to start incorporating those trips into the blog. I have 4-5 trips to write about in the coming months!
Thanks for visiting 🙂
-Brianna
