When I was in high-school, I was never voted as the “most likely to be spending the night in an rv at the Flying J”. It’s true, yet here I am.
For those of you that don’t know us, we’re a family of six from Southern Oregon. I’m a work-from-home Dad, Boots is a very talented and imaginably busy homeschooling mom. We have four children who are also writing about our adventures — ages 17, 15, 14, and 10. We’re not highly social on the internet, but we started this blog to keep in touch with friends and family as we travel around the United States full-time in a 29′ travel trailer.
I’d suggest there are two major paths that will bring you to where you can travel full-time. The generally accepted method is to make it big, strike it rich, or save like crazy until you are independently wealthy to the point that you can eschew work and wander around wherever you’d like, stopping and eating crab cakes at your leisure.
It’s not that I don’t like crab cakes (or wouldn’t if I had the opportunity to try them) but that’s just not the route that worked for us. How we got here is a long story, especially when I’m telling it. If you are reading this while waiting in line at Costco, or just like to read the ending anyways, here’s the short version:
Dream big. Run a business. Overestimate profits, underestimate expenses. Build a house for the big dreams. Take out loans. Work long hours. Don’t make a profit. Sell the house. Bank calls. No loan for you.
That’s what happened with us. Once in this spot, and faced with the option of trying to find a place to rent that was mold-free (for my wife’s health), in the country (for our children’s wishes) and inexpensive enough (for our lightened pocketbook) we decided to take a different route. I work from home, the kids are home schooled — what if we did all of that on the road, adventuring in the evenings and traveling on Saturdays? So here we are. I give thanks to God for the opportunity to make lemonade and to my family for being willing to be stuffed in a small trailer with me. We’re traveling full-time, dependently unwealthy. Dependent on God for love, joy, and peace each beautiful new day; dependent on a job for clothing, food, and shelter. We’re not rich in things — in fact, we are back to less than where we were when we bought the farm 12 years ago. But we’re rich in opportunities — the chance to connect as a family, reset, regroup, and wait on the Lord for different dreams…and to seek not the dreams but the living of each day to the full.
That’s the short story. If you’re supermarket checker is ready for you to pay, you are welcome to stop reading now. What follows now is the longer version. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
We’ve always been dreamers — had lots of dreams, big dreams. The majority of our dreams had come to be centered around using the 37 acres we were living on to share God’s love with people.
For years we had planned and worked towards building a house. This wasn’t just any house, this was the centerpiece of our dreams — dreams of community and ministry. The dreams were big and varied: weddings, life-on-the-farm events, community home-schooling, supporting others in tough times, and, even bigger — 3 long-term foster-care homes with this main home as the common area for cooking, dining, and hanging out.
The time seemed right. Our business, a custom software development company, was running full steam. We had a large contract with a Fortune 100 company, multiple employees, and cash flowing in like I’d never seen. On the personal front we’d scrimped and saved until we had enough to build a dried-in shell (or so we thought…) I knew there was the chance we’d have to take on debt to see the project through, but I justified it — after all, it was something good, it wasn’t just a nice place to live, it was the center of a dream. On top of that, I’d seen people finally build their dream homes as their kids were heading off to college… I didn’t want to be that person. Our manufactured home had mold problems, which was being revealed more and more as being a possible major part of my wife’s health. My income had risen steadily and business was booming.
And so I leaped.
We started building in the summer of 2015. Costs quickly mounted beyond our expectations. Permit fees were astonishing. The septic system suddenly needed repairs. Site prep needed more work. We had to bring in a rock hammer to finish holes for water tanks. And framing … framing ate it’s own budget and started into the other budgets too. So there we were, winter approaching, no roof, rains soaking the shell of the home that was to be the safe, mold-free place for my wife, and no money left in the bank. I took out an unsecured loan to keep going. It still wasn’t enough. Oh, and the business had started a downhill spiral (more on this later).
When we began this project, a key part of our strategy to keep the costs as low as possible was for my wife to be the general contractor — which eliminated any chance for getting a construction loan to help with the process. Now, however, stuck between a rock and a hard place, I made the tough decision to engage a contractor and take out a large construction loan to complete the project.
Making this situation even more dicey was the state of the business. I need to set the stage a little here — when the company was going strong and had plenty of cash flow coming in I had decided to pursue an idea I had for developing an e-commerce product. I pre-sold this product to a client and had begun development of his site while building the product underneath it in tandem. It seemed the ideal situation — extra cash coming in from billable projects was funding our development of what could end up a profitable product with recurring revenue. And it was a great situation — until I drove it into the ground.
Perhaps I’ll write in more detail about the crash later, but the summary is this: around the same time we hit the wall with the house construction, the Fortune 100 client that was our bread-and-butter suddenly ended our contract due to their own financial downturn. Here I was with a huge house project in process, partly through a massive software project with significant commitments and expectations, and a cash flow situation like a cement truck parked on a garden hose.
I’m a quick reactor. Not a big planner, not a thorough thinker. (My wife is both of those, and that’s a more personal side to the story.) I just knew this software product was a winner, and had done some estimates on costs and potential profits. These estimates were enough to make me comfortable taking out yet another loan, this time for the business. With a large quantity of borrowed cash in the bank, two employees and I went to work building out the product. I don’t know why, but it seems like we were slugging through molasses. It was like a slow motion video, and I couldn’t put my finger on it but I could feel things were moving slowly — unwisely I never took the time to slow down and figure it out. Six or nine months in I peeked into my checking account — in shock finding I didn’t have enough money to meet payroll the next month. A friend from our church offered to take a look at the situation and quickly and wisely counseled what I knew but didn’t want to admit — I had to lay everyone off, immediately. Within a couple of weeks I was left with myself as the only full-time employee with a mountain of code still needing to be written and a major commitment to fulfill.
On the home front we were in still in the midst of building the house. My wife was working full-time on the project: planning, working with contractors, installing flashing, trim, exterior insulation, cedar-siding — and being a full-time mother and housewife. The children struggled along in school, farm maintenance lagged, and I put my head down and poured myself even more heavily into programming— my goal being to finish what had turned into a nightmare of a project and move on with life. I spent nearly every waking moment at the computer, 6 days a week. Last year I logged over 2600 hours, most of them unbillable. In October of 2017 I fell over the finish line — finally releasing the customer’s website. But the race wasn’t done. Our financial situation was dismal — we needed income, and need it quickly. This meant that in addition to maintaining and improving the website I had just released I needed to work as full-time as I could to start money flowing back into accounts.
Through the entire process God provided just what we needed, often at seemingly the last possible moment. Earlier we had found a savings account we’d forgotten about that kept us afloat for months. Now a friend needed help on some projects so I was able to subcontract to his company to begin earning a somewhat steady income.
With this momentary breather, we took a hard look at our situation. We could now estimate the income I would now be making and estimate the monthly business expenses (which were significant with the loan payments). When all was said and done, I came to the conclusion that the income I was making wasn’t enough to service all our debt and meet all of our expenses (which my wife had wisely trimmed back to admirably low levels).
There is much more that could be (and perhaps will be someday) written about this time. For now let it suffice to say that we ended up putting the house up for sale. Nearly a long rough year later it sold. I submitted a preliminary application to our bank to open the discussion about getting a smaller loan to purchase a small parcel of land and build a home on it. My excitement at this season finally coming to a finish had a sudden and shocking end. The bank officer called to notify me that the fact that I had steady income coming in wasn’t enough given the major business losses I had sustained in 2015. They couldn’t loan me anything. Not a penny…
The timing of life certainly makes for an interesting ride. If I had submitted this application earlier (as my wife had requested), we would have understood this situation before we signed a contract to sell. Would we have then decided to somehow make it work to stay longer? I cannot say. During the last year or so leading up to this time my wife had been in medical testing and treatment for a declining health situation. During the tests it was confirmed what we had already known to some degree — she had a significant build-up of mold toxins in her body. This made renting a house a daunting task — it would need to be newer, free from leaks and water damage, and be tested for mold in an attempt to provide a healthy environment for her. The children strongly requested that we not move into town. And my income demanded that we not spend too much.
It’s hard to even understand how we came to the decision that we then came to, but here it is. We decided to buy a 29’ travel trailer, put our belongings in storage, and travel around the US for the next 9 months. The idea sounded simple: spend time working early in the day, the children doing their school as well. In the late afternoons and evenings we’d explore the part of the country we happen to be in. On Saturdays drive to the next spot. Lather, rinse, and repeat until Spring.
How will it all REALLY work? You are welcome to join us, through this blog, as our family imperfectly tries to make lemonade out of lemons.
(The funny thing is, we don’t really use sugar…)
