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Ron & Brenda’s Great Adventure

Chapter 3.1

Some of our friends and family have been questioning our decision to sell our house and move into our 30 foot trailer full time; that we have taken leave of our collective senses. After all, as I write this, I am about two months away from my 82^nd birthday, and Brenda just turned 80 a few months ago, which is unarguably a time when conventional wisdom decrees that we should, in fact, be settling into a safe environment in which to spend our remaining years. There’s no disagreement with the fact that our physical and mental abilities have been diminishing for quite some time already, and it’s foolish to put ourselves at risk by cutting ties to a home base. Anything can happen as we drive around the country, dragging five tons of instability behind us, but as we’re all aware, bad things can happen to anyone anywhere, at any time.

So what is the issue at the heart of it all?

Brenda and I have spend a considerable amount of time trying to lay out what we want to do for the rest of our lives. We have been doing this forever in a process that our sons call “Mom and Dad Agonizing Over a Decision!” During this process we consider the decision du jour as it relates to a few metrics that we have identified as being an important part of our decision making process: Financial, our Physical Condition and Ability, and our General Health.

The Financial part looks at the amount of money we have and how long it can be made to last, and any amounts of money we can expect to earn, inherit or find laying around on the street.

Aside from the prospect of winning the Publisher’s Clearing House prize – they have been sending me notices of an impending award for months – I don’t foresee a significant windfall in the future.

But we have been able to accumulate a few bucks in our investment portfolio, and being the numbers wonk that I am, I created a spreadsheet that covers the next twenty years, to see if the money would last. I picked twenty years because living to 100 seems like a nice round number and a decent target to shoot for! The spreadsheet lays out an annual budget for each of the 20 years, a task that was made a little easier than it may sound, because Brenda has been preparing a monthly Profit & Loss statement for our personal finances for several years, and I have been posting this information on a spreadsheet, so we have a good idea of how much money we earn and spend. The fun/strange part was trying to project our expenses into the future, for example: how often will we be eating out when we’re in our late 80’s/early 90’s; what will our clothing budget be, doctors expenses, etc.

All of this probably sounds like an OCD exercise, but with a relatively small income and a limited amount of money on hand, watching the pennies is an important part of our lives.

Anyway, back to the Analysis: We sold our first house in Willits for a decent profit, enough to enable us to upgrade to our current, new house with some money left over to invest, but as we age, we realize that this house is bigger than we need, and a lot of effort and expense to keep clean and maintain. There’s still a mortgage involved and as the house gets older, there will be the need to invest more money for repairs and upkeep.

When I did the financial calculations, it became evident that we could sell the house and realize a profit, which would add nicely to our current investment portfolio. Moving into the trailer would result in a net savings over the cost of living in the house, and I plugged all of the future estimated costs into the spreadsheet.

Another section of the spreadsheet is a calculation of how our investment balance would change over the years, considering having to withdraw a certain amount each year to make up for the projected shortfall between our income (mostly Social Security) and our expenses. I created a simple formula that began with a starting amount in the fund, subtracting the amount to be withdrawn each year, and a conservative annual return on our investments, that was based on past growth. And the result was that the money will almost run out when I reach 100, but because Brenda won’t be 100 until a year and a half later, she’ll have to make do with less.

Sorry kiddo!

Actually, I realize that these figures are all rough projections, and a lot can happen over the next few years, let alone 20, but the whole exercise was to see if it is even possible that we can make it work. And given all of the possible variables and the time involved, and the knowledge that we will be adjusting our spending as we go forward, I am confident that we can make it work.

But the key to the whole thing is that we downsize.

If we wanted to, we could simply move into a small apartment and downsize that way, but another factor that we need to consider is where we want to settle down. For about 75% of our lives, Brenda and I have lived on the East Coast, within about 300 miles of where we grew up. During that time we traveled up and down the eastern seaboard, from New England to Florida, and nothing there – sorry – beckons to us. We’ve lived in California for a little more than 21 years, and until recently, have visited only a small part of the West Coast, but we’re pretty certain that we want to live in the west, not the east. We love it in Willits, and can see ourselves living here for the forseeable future – if there was some decent, affordable senior housing – but for now, we need to see what else there is. So instead of renting apartments in various locations, we decided that living in our own home, on wheels, was a pretty good way to find that perfect place.

I’ll write about what it’s like to live in such small quarters another time.

So; Physical Condition and General Health: Like anyone else who has lived for awhile, Brenda and I each have “things” going on with us, but we get regular checkups, fixing or maintaining our general health as required. For the most part, we are both in good health; we are active and mobile, and with some small limitations, we’re pretty much able to do whatever we want. We eat well, get enough sleep and exercise, and keep ourselves mentally active by doing meaningful things: Brenda still has her bookkeeping clients and I just retired after 12 years on the City Council and am about to retire from 12 years on the County Civil Service Commission. Medical science has just announced findings about something we have known for a long time – keeping mentally active helps not only mental capacity but physical abilities as well.

Learning what we need to know about RVing fulfills the medical recommendation of continually learning new skills. I find that tasks such as hooking up the trailer for travel, maneuvering the rig over the road and backing into tight places, and setting up at the camp site are stimulating and challenging both physically and mentally, and I enjoy every part of it. Brenda gets to transfer her skills into making meals in a small space and making a comfortable home in a space that’s smaller than our first apartment, and of course, doing the books. We are constantly exposed to new sights and experiences that take us a bit out of our comfort zone, and I believe we are thriving because of that.

Of course, there will be a time when we find we can no longer keep up the pace, but I expect that it will be a gradual process that we will monitor, deciding to come to roost when the time is appropriate. We will continue to get regular checkups and treatments as required, and I have no expectation that our health will deteriorate dramatically. Of course, accidents happen and can change things in a heartbeat, but we have never lived with a disaster scenerio mentality, and we’re not about to start. Being careful and taking precautions is one thing, but being afraid of life is not worth the effort!

That’s another thing about getting old: “acting your age” is a self-fulling prophecy, and we have known people who decided they were old at age 45, and they became that! That’s not to say that we try to act like we’re 35. We’re not; we don’t pretend to be anything other than who we really are, and we just do stuff until our bodies tell us that we can’t, or shouldn’t.

So bottom line: we have thought this out and walked the walk for over a year, and understand that we like doing this, we can afford to live this life for several years until we go to the next phase, and we will have the opportunity to see and do some interesting things.

My next post will talk about what it’s like to RV