We had planned to leave Saturday. We are finally ready to do it!
Off to adventures, first in the upstate NY area for a couple of days as we work towards friends in IA. Here we go! 
Eight days until departure!
I can’t even believe I’m writing this. The summer flew by, we packed up Ross’ studio, and next weekend we begin our epic RV adventures!
I have so much to do. As does Ross. But we are ridiculously excited to begin.
Our car visits the mechanic Monday, so fingers crossed that we can keep this thing going for a while without major expenses. The RV is happy except we don’t have a working hot water heater, but we lived without it all summer so we will let it go for now. (Estimated to cost about $350 and no guarantee the part would fix the problem.)
Tonight we perform our first church concert, and we have lots of family and friend visits planned on top of our mad dash to digitize and store before we leave. Thanks to everyone who is fitting us into their busy schedules.
Send us some happy car vibes and lots of energy. We will need it!
We’re in!
Well, we’ve now been living in our RV, more or less, for almost a week. It’s still pretty messy as we organize things, but we’re in and we love it! We are still in the midst of projects and organizing in storage and at Ross’ studio as well (where I have my computer for the summer) so life is crazily busy.
But it’s so good. I am so much less stressed now, on a day to day and moment to moment basis, than I was at my last job. It may be crazy, but I know we’re on the right path.
I should be getting my first paycheck from Jean’s tomorrow. Godspell is going extremely well. I’m really looking forward to adding the band. I’m very proud of our work and happy my body is so far cooperating with the craziness.
Our next goal is to embark on the Whole 30 diet – the more difficult auto-immune protocol for me and the regular version for Ross. We had a bit of a propane scare so we aren’t using the stove yet – I’m hoping we can get that figured out before we start the diet.
We’re still seeking a cheap car for Ross. My car is tiring and the writing seems on the wall there too. Let me know if you’ve got a cheap car in NH that runs well.
Money is tight, but life is good. Thanks for reading!
We’re Getting an RV!
Closing is set for Friday, June 10. We’ll be looking at an RV payment of $211ish per month plus whatever we pay for insurance (expecting a quote by the end of the day)…and we are so excited! It’s beautiful and it’s very us and we can’t wait. Keep those fingers crossed that all goes as planned and that we can find a cheap (to us) car under 2K to keep us on budget. Hoping to have her moved in to her summer home (is it a her? Ross, any thoughts?) by the following Sunday!
False Starts and Next Steps
I’ve been lying in bed for about an hour. It’s 2 a.m. Since I can’t sleep, I thought I’d try a blog post.
Things are not looking good with the RV. Although we can get it drivable for $1400, they weren’t able to find a part (the air pump) for the truck! They even called Ford. And I really don’t want to travel cross country with something no one can find parts for. We also still don’t know about the inside of the RV. So we are leaning toward selling and we have no clue right now if we can make back close to what we paid or not.
Meanwhile, Ross’ car was totaled after we were hit in an accident. They gave us money for it, but we really didn’t want to be shopping for a cheap car just for the summer. So we are at a real crossroads. Options include:
Buy a junk car for under 2K. Buy a more expensive vehicle that can become our primary vehicle, perhaps one large enough to tow something (storage or a pop up) if we have to tent it or rough it for a while. We could at least tent it this summer.
Buy another RV ASAP through a dealer with financing while my income is higher. Definitely a junk car in this scenario…hopefully trade in RV for at least a few thousand in credit.
Some combination of the above options.
So this week, we expand our car and RV buying search. Awkward time as it is my last week working with the Arts Alliance, but so it goes. I do think all these struggles and challenges are bringing us a lot closer as a couple. Please send us some good thoughts and help discerning next steps. We can use it!
A Place to Live – But No RV?
I’ve drafted so many blog posts in my head recently. Blogs about dealing with the extra levels of stress of planning combined with chronic illness & the related battles to figure that out. Blogs about how hard things are. Blogs about simplicity. Blogs about pulling through adversity. Blogs about the fact that Ross was rear-ended and now on top of RV repairs, we have to car shop, but I am really uncomfortable buying a car when we don’t know the status of our RV.
But I finally have some good news to share, so that’s more fun, right?
Jean’s Playhouse agreed to allow an ad trade for a discounted or free campsite for us this summer. Part of the compensation when we work there is housing, but the idea of living in dorm style housing, presumably single-sex and with other people, didn’t seem that appealing to us given that we’re married and much older than many or most of our co-workers will be. So finding a campground seemed like the perfect thing – we get a place for our RV and can try things out and learn with less pressure, and Jean’s gets to save money by not having to house us.
So I sent out a bunch of emails, beginning with the campgrounds in Lincoln and North Woodstock (the next town over), about housing us for a few months. Two out of my three top choices replied – one was positive, but didn’t have any space left (maybe next time); another just couldn’t accommodate a longer-term visitor (KOA). So I emailed our other choices, who were 20-30 minutes away but mostly great options. One of our top choices in terms of livability, Tarry Ho Campground in Twin Mountain, called me within a day or two of sending the email. I was so excited! The more we talked, the more we realized we’d met at a networking events a couple of years back, she knows my father, she had fantastic memories of our conversation, etc…
So after meeting her in person with Ross and touring the campground, I’m thrilled to say that we have a home for the summer! God willing our RV will be drivable and livable so that we aren’t tenting it. Keep us in your thoughts and prayers. As soon as our RV is ready (or as soon as we want to move in), we’ve got a campsite with our name on it. And get this – we’re working for our site! No cash at all. Their seasonal sites rent for $1,950, so between Ross and I, we’ll be putting in 195 hours before the season is over on November 2. (We hope to leave by the beginning of October, but it’s awesome to know we can stay longer if we want to.) We’ll be doing a mix of marketing/social media work (me) and music/working the new food truck (Ross) and possibly whatever else needs to be done. We know it’s a lot of hours to fit in, but we’ll be coming up with a plan to make it feasible, and we can absolutely stay for a couple of weeks at the end to knock out the rest. (After all, if we each put in a couple of 40 hour weeks, the work would be almost complete!) Although there’s a 30 minute commute to Jean’s, it’s only 11 minutes to Ross’ studio, which is great for him and great for us if we need to escape camping for a bit.
We hope some of you will come up and visit us. They have gorgeous river front campsites with water and electric as well as other sites for tents and RVS, plus bath houses, a pool, an ice cream stand, a food truck as of late June and supposedly great wi-fi. They’re also being super-nice about accommodating both of our vehicles. So besides metered electric, which I think we’ll be paying for, we will be living rent free this summer, which will really help justify our 30 minute commute on a tiny salary. 🙂 My goal is to keep saving money even on our tiny income. Whether that’s possible or not will largely depend on what our health insurance costs are. Really hoping they’ll go down significantly when our income changes at the end of the month!
My last day of work at my current job is May 27. I’ll be so glad to be able to move on. Thanks so much for reading, and please send us happy & inspected quickly RV vibes, as well as a good cheap car for Ross!
Planning and Plotting
It’s out! The word, that is, about my departure from the Arts Alliance. I am also deeper in the planning stages of our tour. After some dramatic back and forth with Judy, I have learned that the Carpenters booking hasn’t gone as planned. So we have two gigs in September, hopefully followed by a performance at Contact East, a booking showcase in New Brunswick. After that, we leave New Hampshire. Whoo-hoo!
Our itinerary is purposefully loose right now. My brother lives in Kalamazoo, MI, so if it isn’t too cold yet, we hope to drive through upstate New York (or maybe Canada) and visit him. After that, we will head toward Iowa to visit our friends. Depending on the weather and our mood, we will stay for a few weeks or even a month. After that, we continue south. We will stay in Arizona for December, primarily the Phoenix and Tucson areas if everything aligns, and then I’m thinking the San Diego area for January, which is typically the coldest month. Plus my sister lives there! After that our options open up as it warms, so our exact path can be adjusted based on booking and our interests. We also may need to visit Florida to become residents there at some point….time will tell. We’d like to make our way towards CO, OR and WA in the spring or summer as we think there are a lot of towns with potential there.
This adventure requires a lot of faith…particularly in my own abilities to pull this off. It’s a good thing I have never lacked for self-confidence….
In the coming weeks, we need to start pitching ourselves to local campgrounds…discounted site for program add at Jean’s and maybe a bit of work is the hope. Keep us in your thoughts, and thanks for reading!
The Big Reveal and the Beanie Baby Purge
Well, it’s done. I gave my notice at my full-time job. While I am not yet ready to announce my RV plans to the world yet – we need to wait until the summer so I can keep my church job – I am delighted to announce that after May 29, I set arts administration aside, at least for now, and can focus on other things.
Am I excited? Ridiculously so! I wouldn’t say a giant weight has been lifted yet – much of the weight was definitely caused by financial stress – but for whatever it’s worth, I am not as tired or quite as stressed. So yay for that.
I am also happy to report that last night, as I ran a purchase by my mom (fleece t-shirt quilt to use all my old tees) and talked about how much progress I am making with purging old clothes and my grandmother’s beanie babies, she sees genuinely happy for me. She encouraged me, congratulated me on my progress and asked thoughtful RV questions. I am so glad I got the telling her part out of the way to give her room to do her mom thing. She’s a good mom, even if she doesn’t always understand my way of thinking, and she’s usually right about things. 🙂
Handling Ross’ finances is proving to be exciting, in that we can try new things to pay down debt, but also disappointing in that there isn’t nearly as much room to trim our budgets as I’d like. So I need to get back to work for Judy and hustle some more lessons ASAP. My first north country voice student (minus a few vocal coaching sessions) is tomorrow, so I am looking forward to that.
It’s also hard to make frugal food purchases when you are trying to lose weight (both of us) and hoping your diet can help fix your body (me). I have been doing a great job so far – trying to keep my food budget to $30-40 per week – but Ross is buying a lot of his own food too…and it is just a lot of work to choose which fruits and veggies you can afford if you need a lot of dairy products, for instance. I know we will keep refining it though…lots of things will get easier when we are on the same schedule too.
The next step for Ross is promoting his solo album. Meanwhile, I need to not only make more money, but start getting on top of RV planning. Hoping we can set up an RV appointment this week for the spring.
That’s all I have for now. Thanks for reading!
The Money Machine
I’ve been thinking a lot about money. Mainly because my blog of the month reading has consisted of financial blogs – mostly Mr. Money Mustache, which I highly recommend if you are interested in getting serious about saving or even retiring early.
For my entire adult life, I have considered myself to be succeeding if I was breaking even each month, with a little left for fun money. I have never made big bucks, but I have always figured out a way to make things work…but likewise, even when I was making 45K or so a year, my expenses were so high (living solo, driving too many miles, etc.) that my savings rate was never great.
When I went to graduate school, I really thought I could get a significant pay raise with my degree, so I thought 20K of debt was no problem and didn’t even bother trying to pay any of it off during school. After all, I didn’t have any undergraduate debt (thanks Mom and Dad!) so I was better off than many.
Of course, I didn’t foresee struggling for over a year to find work in my field, settling for a boring desk job, and then taking a pay raise that was really a pay cut because it came with no health insurance or other benefits (besides vacation)…also, no opportunity for a raise…and very limited opportunities for my husband to find work nearby.
And meanwhile, Ross’ amazing success story of going back to school, working in radio, building his own teaching studio etc. is not nearly as amazing when you realize how much debt he picked up at school….and a decent portion of it in private loans.
So while Ross has payed off his credit card debt (!!!) and I have paid off my cat medical bill debt and I’m almost finished paying off my own medical bills thanks to charitable care, we still have a huge amount of debt between us.
So my new obsession has become getting really serious about finances. Saving more and paying off debt will be the focus for the foreseeable future. And I am posting it here, for accountability. Ross and I have big dreams, dreams of achieving a level of financial independence where we only need to make 15K or so a year to live – which would let us pursue our creative projects with abandon.
We will have to work very, very hard to get there. But thanks to Mr. Money Mustache, I believe it is actually possible. And if you want to contribute to the cause, let me know. 🙂 We have lots of skills to share.
Crafting The Life You Want: A Practice in Living 