Ever since I was a little girl, I wondered, “WHY? Why did my parents move from California to NY?” Ever since then, I’ve wanted to leave. Of course, life happens. I got pregnant at 17, had my first daughter before I graduated high school. Got married, had another baby, got divorced. My ex was never going to leave New York, and he was definitely never going to let me leave with the girls. So here I was, for the next 18 years in New York. Between that point and now, I remarried, had another daughter, divorced, remarried and had 3 more children. I know. It’s a lot. Luckily, where I am in life now, it’s been in the planning stages of leaving for some time now. We thought we could travel here and there, find maybe a new place to settle down, but deep down, I knew settling somewhere new wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to travel. I don’t want to be stuck anywhere anymore.
My brain has been grappling with the thought of homeschooling my kids for years. I just kept telling myself, I am not capable of doing that. I had to face that fear and decide, I AM CAPABLE! So, now we start the planning of our future. A future that involves traveling around the country, hopefully traveling the world in the near future.
We will be listing our home for sale in the spring. We got “lucky” and were able to buy the home out right after selling our “dream home” that kept us house broke. It was a fixer upper to say the least, but we had no mortgage. For about 5 years it felt good. Slightly content. The school district has been amazing with my youngest 3 kids, and I will be sad to leave that support, but my heart aches for freedom.
The plan has changed about a million times in the last 10 months. Like I said, originally, I thought if I could just get out of New York, I might be happy. So, we took a mortgage out on our current home here in NY and purchased a fixer upper down in Texas. We thought, lets flip southern trucks for money, we could use the house in NY just for a home base for those sales, and for visiting with my entire family that I will be leaving in NY. But in the back of my head, I had this feeling that it just wasn’t enough. I thought, if we could not have that 9-5, and we could travel when we felt like it, on the off season of school breaks, that could be enough, but it’s not. It is just not enough.
Bringing you to today. Today, the plan is to sell the NY home, take the extra profit, buy a nicer camper (the one we have now is pretty old), and just travel. We will have a home base in Texas which we will consider our “home” for the purposes of tax filing, registering for homeschooling, insurance needs, doctor’s appointments and all the basic “necessities” of life. It may turn into selling that home as well, to purchase a smaller home for home base.
I have spent an extensive amount of time trying to plan things. I would love to spend at least 6 months out of the year traveling within the United States, which may include some working at campgrounds, such as KOA’s which offer part time temp work which would be great for the flexibility of just leaving when we are ready, maybe transferring to another KOA. With all this trying to utilize as little of the profits from the house sale as possible just to keep us going.
It is my hope to try to get out of the country to a new place at least once a year, for an extended period. Immerse ourselves into the culture of a new area. And then spend the remainder of each year in between home base and visiting with family.
The residual income is where things get a little unforeseen right now. Will my blog, maybe youtube, social medias for my “LOLA” community take off and create an income stream? Will I need to find some other forms of income that I can do remotely? Maybe I will need to commit to doing a house flip every once in a while. Right now, that’s undecided.
What is for certain, is that by the end of the school year 2026, my family will be starting a new adventure!
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