After tons of planning and hard work we have finally made it to the end of the first phase in our big scheme, and from here there's no turning back. Jon quit his job at the end of March to finish up our house projects and my last day of work was yesterday. Today we accepted an offer on our house. If all goes well we will be closing on May 22nd, and will promptly take off across the country with only what will fit inside (and on top of) our little Subaru.
We are feeling so lucky that everything has fallen into place. Our timing in getting the house ready perfectly coincided with the housing market boom in Denver. The sale of the house will provide us with the funding we need to make our trip happen.
I think what we've learned looking back on our attempts to fund our adventure, is that we couldn't have done it any other way. One of the biggest contributing factors to paying down our debt was having only one car for the last 4+ years. Which means that Jon has ridden his bike to work somewhere around 1,000 times.
While preparing for the trip, our major goals were to be debt free and to get our house ready to sell (or sometimes rent depending on which incarnation of The Plan we were pursuing). Though I'd like to say we paid for house projects as we went, the real truth is that we paid for projects and then paid off the associated debt and then repeated the cycle.
I have no idea just how much money we have spent on this house. Sometimes I think it's about as much as we're making in the sale. However, we're pretty sure the only way we could've actually generated enough money through saving alone is if we never left the house aside from going to work. Since that sounds like a really boring way to spend a few years, investing in our house turned out to be a smart plan.
Aside from house projects, our biggest expenditures were for vacations. After we cut those out the money began to pile up a little easier. I think the turning point came about nine months ago when we calculated how little income we had left to earn if we were really going to leave in the spring of 2014. What was once a far off dream finally became a legitimate countdown to launch, and that gave us the motivation we needed to buckle down. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you just focus.
We are feeling so lucky that everything has fallen into place. Our timing in getting the house ready perfectly coincided with the housing market boom in Denver. The sale of the house will provide us with the funding we need to make our trip happen.
I think what we've learned looking back on our attempts to fund our adventure, is that we couldn't have done it any other way. One of the biggest contributing factors to paying down our debt was having only one car for the last 4+ years. Which means that Jon has ridden his bike to work somewhere around 1,000 times.
While preparing for the trip, our major goals were to be debt free and to get our house ready to sell (or sometimes rent depending on which incarnation of The Plan we were pursuing). Though I'd like to say we paid for house projects as we went, the real truth is that we paid for projects and then paid off the associated debt and then repeated the cycle.
I have no idea just how much money we have spent on this house. Sometimes I think it's about as much as we're making in the sale. However, we're pretty sure the only way we could've actually generated enough money through saving alone is if we never left the house aside from going to work. Since that sounds like a really boring way to spend a few years, investing in our house turned out to be a smart plan.
Aside from house projects, our biggest expenditures were for vacations. After we cut those out the money began to pile up a little easier. I think the turning point came about nine months ago when we calculated how little income we had left to earn if we were really going to leave in the spring of 2014. What was once a far off dream finally became a legitimate countdown to launch, and that gave us the motivation we needed to buckle down. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you just focus.
Penny cam is the BEST!
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