What comes to mind when you hear the words ”American dream?” I always thought of the perfect marriage with the right job that pays well. That two-story house I always wanted growing up, and coming from a farm background, it had to be on acreage with a huge backyard for the kids and pets to play in. What is your idea of the American Dream? Did you attain it? Was it what you thought it should be?
With sixteen years of good but not-so-perfect marriage (I think the definition of marriage should have “it’s not going to be perfect” written into it), a two-story house on 2 acres in the Denver, CO area, high-paying professional jobs, and the assorted toys, Michelle and I thought we were living the American Dream! But were we… We realized that the outward trappings of success and level of debt required to feed the “American Dream” left us feeling unfulfilled and stressed. We were unable to have kids and I was never comfortable with the idea of foster care, making the large house mostly empty. Plus, the hour-long commute to and from work left us with no desire to cook dinner, so we were constantly eating out and were too tired and unmotivated to do anything else at night when we did get home. Finally, we concluded this lifestyle didn’t make sense for us.
From Thought to Reality
At the end of October 2021, we made the decision to put our house on the market and transition to full-time RV living. You might be thinking, “Wow, just like that, you go into full-time RV’ing?!” Well… No, but we’ll go into that later. The house went under contract in 5 days for our full asking price. The Lord was watching over us since this allowed us to completely pay off all our debt, which was our number one requirement. The number 2 requirement was to have enough to buy back into sticks-n-bricks, have an appropriate emergency fund, and be able to live for a year. By the time Michelle and I stopped working in early January, we had met all our requirements to be able to take the sabbatical, or the “retirement” as I liked to refer to it, that we desired.
Michelle and I had talked about moving out of Denver for many years (the RV idea came later, we’ll get to it, I promise), but with both immediate families living there, we weren’t quite willing to initiate the plan. Originally the idea was to move to the northwest region because we really liked that area when we traveled there for vacation. We started to seriously talk about “pulling the trigger” on moving out of Colorado in February of 2020, right before COVID 19 became a multi-year pandemic. We decided that a trip to Coeur d’Alene, ID and Spokane, WA was necessary to see if that was really where we wanted to move to. During the three weeks we were there, we didn’t get any of the “I have to live here” warm and fuzzies that we had hoped for. At a loss of where else we could go to make the lifestyle changes we desired, the idea of upgrading our RV and traveling to different areas until we found our new home started to float in our minds.
There were many things that still needed to be worked out if we were going the RV route. The amount of time we were willing to live in an RV was one. Michelle’s view was “you’ll only get me to do this for three months, six months top!” I felt that amount of time was too short to really get an idea of anything. I was thinking more in the range of one to five years and that we could go see all the places we wanted to see while we were still somewhat young, and life hadn’t intervened. Being on the same page is a very important part of full-time RV living, it’s a huge change in lifestyle and if you don’t have complete buy-in from both parties, it can quickly turn miserable.
We weren’t on the same page yet, but we knew that we needed to start getting things in order because one way or the other we were leaving our “American Dream” to find something else. We started to look for a “new to us” RV as soon as we returned from our Idaho trip. Buying an RV during 2020 was not an easy thing to do, COVID turned the RV market into a seller’s market and RV’s were a prime commodity since it was a way to vacation and still moderately isolate your family. But in less than two months after our return, we found the RV we wanted in a price range we could afford.
Upgrading our RV was the first step, getting the house ready to sell and figuring out how to downsize were two more. We had roughly 30 days to vacate the property once we signed the papers and we were not prepared for the amount of work required to downsize from a large house to an RV. Moving into a 300-square-foot living space, storing the things we absolutely had to keep, and moving out of the house we were selling in one month was a challenge! It doesn’t seem to matter how much you have prepared for a big move, there are always more things in your house than you realize. We quickly realized that a lot of the items we wanted to keep for our future “sticks and bricks” were more than we could store or take with us in the RV. So, we sold what we could sell and gave the rest away.
Our Journey Tails Begins
Ready, Set, WAIT! Even though the house was sold, it took us a little while to hit the road since we were finishing up jobs that wouldn’t allow us to travel while working remotely. Christmas was weeks away and we needed to finish prepping the RV, organize our long-term storage items and transfer our legal abode to the state we wanted to call our “home”. This also entailed getting new driver’s licenses, titles and vehicle registrations. We finalized all these items in the middle of January and hit the road!
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