Making your mind up... To change your life

Well we have been talking about selling up and going on our travels for well over a year now. The conversation first started at the end of 2012 when both my husband and I found ourselves out of work at the same time. That always begs the question, well what next.  Should we both look for other jobs and try and replicate what we are doing now?  Shall we start our own business and try and get some freedom from the ups and down of the corporate workplace? Shall we just sell up and go live somewhere else.

We had all those conversations  And just like everything in life, it wasn't black and white - we kind of did a mixture of all of them for about 18 months, but came to the realization, we were not really maximizing the opportunity to be happy.  Both of us love to travel, to experience new things, we love nature and we want to see more of what life has to offer.  We were lucky enough to be able to take a few vacations every year, but it just wasn't enough and just made us more determined than ever that I wanted more time for us.

So, we have been through our financial situation in great detail, we have set a budget for a full time travel scenario, and have decided that it works. We can sell our house and with the savings we have accumulated over 25 plus years of working we can live with a reasonable budget that fits our plans.

We have decided that we will start our adventures in our adopted home, the United States and mix traveling here with several months of the year in some of the other countries we have been interested in. I will discuss our thoughts about where to travel in another post. The important thing now is that our decision is made. We are going to do this and now is the right time.

We are in the process of telling everyone about our decision and it affirms to us that it's the right thing to do. Most people have been very supportive and some inevitable questions have been asked. Aren't you scared? What about the insecurity of not having a job? My honest answer is I am not scared at all, if we don't like traveling full time then we can stop. Security is all relative, right now we have a mortgage and both found ourselves unemployed in recent years and quite honestly are getting to an age where employment can't be counted on. So if security was my biggest concern (which it isn't) becoming debt free seems a good choice. So as corny as it sounds, my only fear would be that we didn't give this whole thing a try.

Decision made, now it's time to get the house on the market and take our decluttering to the next level.