Just imagine a typical American family. Mom and Dad both work full-time. Mom, an accountant, and Dad in sales, have three kids in a suburban neighborhood outside of Austin. The three kids either go to school or daycare until about 5:30pm every day. The week nights are filled with tutoring, sports, or homework. The weekends are filled with activities and more sports, cleaning the house and just trying to rest until the week starts all over again. Half our money goes to daycare and the other half goes to our mortgage. We have a few date nights a month and maybe one week long vacation a year. Our financial situation was sad. We needed a change.
Insert a random radio ad for an RV show right up the road from our house one weekend in the summer of 2019. I dragged Zach to the RV show to “just look”. We both wanted something different. We knew we always thought differently than our neighbors and friends, but we didn’t know how to make our dreams a reality. Our dreams consisted of traveling NOW, not waiting until the kids were “out of the house”. But, financially we had no idea how to make this happen.
So, back to the RV show. We spent ALL DAY there. Looking at RVs and talking about the crazy dream of what life would look like living in one full-time. I had been watching YouTube families do it, but neither one of us had ever lived in one, pulled one, Zach had never even spent one night in an RV. But, for some reason the idea to make this happen stuck. We started researching everything we could about RVs. What we would need, how much everything would cost, etc. But, there was one big problem, we still had a house, a ton of ‘stuff’ and jobs that wouldn’t allow for full-time traveling.
Cue, Covid. Thankfully, our market in the Austin area is crazy right now, so we were able to sell our house in a day. Don’t think it wasn’t incredibly difficult for me to sell our first family home, it was! I had extreme anxiety. You are completely normal if you feel the same way.
Our plan was to move into an apartment until we could find an RV to buy and downsize into an apartment to make sure we could really live as a family of 5 in a tiny space. So, that is what we did. We signed a 6 month lease and moved in right when Covid hit. Covid allowed my husband to work from home full-time and also made it easier for me to leave my job. So, over the 6 months at the apartment, we found our RV and purchased it, found a company to add some upgrades to our RV, downsized some more, and got pregnant with our FOURTH CHILD! I know we are crazy.
When the lease was up at the apartment in August/September, we moved into our RV and parked for a month until we got adjusted to the RV life. Then, we decided to get a move on and start traveling. And we haven’t looked back! We have already seen 12 states in the 5 months we have been living in our RV. Talk about an adventure!
Is it hard? Yes. Is it fun? Most of the time. Do I regret it? Absolutely not! We get to spend WAY more time with our kids and each other then we did before. We have seen WAY more places then most people see in a lifetime. And you can too! The process was certainly not as simple as this article makes it (we can and will make many more detailed posts on every decision), but we wanted to tell you the broad story.
Are you thinking about going full-time? Do you have questions for us? Do you want to know more specifics about our journey?
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XO,
The Fabulous Life of an RV Wife
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