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| BOB |
We’re about to start an adventure. We don’t know where it will lead. It actually took a fairly extensive conversation just a few days ago to even reconstruct the evolution of how we got to where we are now.
I remember first starting to think about what it would look like when our kids graduated high school nearly 12 years ago when we lived in Mamaroneck, NY, just outside New York City. At the time, we lived in a 2400 sq ft house which, even then, had yearly taxes of $15,000. We saw the school district continue to raise taxes and saw that this forced some lifelong Mamaroneck residents from their homes as they could no longer afford the taxes. We realized then that we couldn’t afford to live there once we stopped working so began thinking about what we might do when that time in our life arrived.
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| Our Lake House in central Vermont |
At first, our plan was to go live in our vacation home in Vermont. However, after thinking about that for a few years, we both came to the realization that we wanted more than that, and living in rural Vermont would be pretty boring, and colder than we would want at that stage in our lives during the winter.
By the time we moved to Colorado 8 ½ years ago we had already begun thinking about “hitting the road” in retirement. We began talking about buying a big RV and a big truck to haul it. We talked about traveling the country, exploring and seeing many of the great places that exist in this country. We talked about spending up to a couple weeks at each location, being in the south in the winter and north in the summer. We talked with people about what it would be like to spend the summer in one location and be camp hosts. We even talked about being seasonal Amazon workers. We looked at RVs at RV shows and found some that would work for us.
I was excited about that plan. I had a goal of visiting every national park and hiking and exploring every day. I thought we were set. All we needed was for Lexie to graduate from High School, go off to college and we would be off too.
A book changed our direction
That all changed a year and a half ago when Lisa went to the library to get some travel books for an upcoming trip to Belize. She came back with the book “The International Living Guide to Retiring Overseas on A Budget.” During the exceptionally rainy vacation in Belize, I read the book and immediately told her she needed to read it too.
From that moment our “set” plans changed. We realized that we could expand the traveling and exploration we had planned for the US to the world. We realized that we could really get to know parts of the world that people usually rush through in a few days and we realized that there were just so many places that we wanted to experience. We also realized that if we explored the world while we were still young, we could still come back to the US and explore it in our RV.
The new plan was set!
Tips:
Other great books we have also read include:
