So far, I have taken you all over the place. You have so far learned:
- We would like to retire early a year from now, which would make us 45 and 55 years old respectively.
- We want to sell our belongings and travel in an RV for an undetermined amount of time.
- We have spent the last 4 years securing investment property that we will own at the time of a normal retirement age. So, we have secured ourselves financially for that future point.
- Our oldest children have graduated already from college and have their own lives now, but we are getting ready to start paying for college for our youngest son who we have no college savings already put aside. We do however, have savings, just none of it was specifically ear-marked for college.
- We currently both work in full-time careers so we do rely on our paychecks and our health insurance through our employers.
Have you begun to worry if we are really crazy or unrealistic yet? Yeah, me too!
Obviously we have to work on many things. Some are obvious now, others will probably make an appearance in our blog soon because we haven’t discovered them yet. Here are our immediate next steps in order for us to live the way we want to:
- We must secure a duplex or other property that the other renters pay for the mortgage, providing our son a place to live for free. This will also ensure he has a year-round home.
- He must meet the requirements of the state funded scholarships. This would take care of the lion’s share of his tuition. We are not in control of that, but it does weigh into our plan. He is a terrific student and gifted in math, so I think we are probably safe.
- We must make some renovations to our house and put it on the market to sell, along with holding sales for most of our belongings that aren’t coming with us.
- We must purchase a fifth-wheel RV. We are trying to raise cash for that because we would like to put enough down or fully purchase it as we do not want to carry a payment. We will have fees for campgrounds, more gas expenses etc., We do not want to make our lifestyle expensive or be stressed about making ends meet.
- While we do have a nest egg, we are currently being aggressive in investing it so that we can make it bigger as quickly as possible. We also would like to leave it alone unless it is being used for further investments or should we need it for an emergency. In other words, we don’t want to rely on this money to travel with either. We will add to it as we sell our house, and we do have some properties in our portfolio we may choose to part with as well.
- We will need to figure out how we have income on the road. Our rental properties pay for themselves but do not leave enough left over to live on. We are experimenting currently with offering some of our places on Airbnb. This will potentially allow us to have some “rental overages”. Meaning anything we make above rent could be used for our income. We can possibly find jobs to telecommute, and my husband has considered doing RV repair and maintenance and advertising in places we stay. However, ultimately we would like more freedom than either of those last choices. You are going to find out with us whether the Airbnb idea will be something we can build up enough to live comfortably on. Should it work, perhaps we can set up new ones in places we travel to.
- We need to expand our rental portfolio in order to hire our current maintenance and office person full-time so we have someone locally overseeing our properties. We are close, but would like to offer some benefits and other options that invests them more fully into our business.