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As I look back it feels oddly strange how our path has led us to our current road we are traveling today. Our story is not some magical unicorn where one day the light bulb burst into light and WHAM – we figured it all out and knew exactly what we wanted, how we are going to get it, and had a happily ever after. No….. not even close.
In our mid-twenties, we found ourselves puzzled because something was missing from our lives. Yet, we were not exactly sure what that something was. Our lives revolved around the typical American dream (college, career, home ownership, marriage) that made us unhappy, stressed out, and disengaged with knowing what we wanted out of life. We were dumbfounded because we thought we did everything we were suppose to do. We had good jobs that came with benefits such as healthcare, retirement, and vacation. We were naïve to think our American dream could be the root cause of that missing something.
Our American dream consisted of 40+ hour work weeks (50-60+ for Adrianne), the relentless work associated with owning a old fixer-upper home, and typical house hold chores. Not to mention our spending habits were out of control. We were restless, grumpy, and did not accept that this was it for our lives.
Needing a change in our lives we stumbled across the notion of financial independence. We started by evaluating our behavior, attitude, and relationship towards money. We began maximizing our retirement benefits to the point of shocking the human resources department. Reassuring them that the numbers we provided were correct and we didn’t mistakenly add a zero onto our regular 5%. We cut useless spending where we could and explored doing more ourselves. We challenged each other such as riding our bicycles to and from work, using public transportation more, cooking at home more rather than dining out, and questioning every single purchase we made. In return, this helped us to promote and encourage one another to achieve our new goal. I’m not going to lie, we started off on the extreme end of the frugality spectrum that at times, was extremely difficult to maintain.
After awhile, our new found habits and behaviors became easier to incorporate into our daily lives. We sold the two-story Victorian home and moved into a rental house that’s half the size of our previous home. Soon, we will be downsizing again to move into an RV that’s the same square footage as our current master bedroom and bath, which is approximately 300 square. We have always wanted to travel both domestically and abroad. Yet, we grappled with how to make it a reality. We stumbled across some stories about people living an in RV and was intrigued with the idea for ourselves. Once again, we evaluated ourselves and determined what changes were necessary to make it a reality. To begin this evolving escapade, we thought we’d give the RV life a try. And that is how we arrived to where we are at today.
We hope you’ll come along and experience our escapade with us.
