Project Pioneer #1 August 31, 2023
Another rent payment is due. It’s going up and up. You know the drill. Just like everything else–food, clothes, just...everything.
Project: Pioneer is the live reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle, just at the start of winter. (Audio at this link, Apple, and Spotify)
Giavana and I are fed up with paying so much for rent, and ready to fight back. Pia, our little Bichon fur baby, is oblivious. She’ll get her fresh gourmet food even if we end up living in a van down by the river (oh, wait—we plan to…).
In short, we’re selling all our crap, and moving into a small RV, full-time, just before winter. Best case, it’s forever (however long that is, we both have health issues). Worst case, we hope to make it a year.
Pia is the one pure spirit in our lives that’s never lied, never let us down, always done as asked, and only given love. She gets the best, because she lights up our lives, and like everyone else these days, often we need it.
If she has food, water, some play time, some love and affection, she’s happy. Shouldn’t we all be? Why do we need these basements, closets, garages, and attics full of crap? We often get the idea the animals are the smart ones, pitying us in their silence, knowing how it will end for us, choosing to mutely observe.
Not that things are bad for Giavana and I. We’re financial people. We both come from working-class families. We grew up doing without stuff other kids had. We don’t yearn for extravagant things, we couldn’t care less what others think about us or our status. Our goal is to leave our kids something we never had–a legacy. We’ve done well, primarily by following the path laid out in our two personal finance bibles, Kiss Your Money Hello! (and Financial Stress Goodbye), and The Simple Path to Wealth. I’m semi-retired, running a home-based business and writing, and I’m trying to get Giavana to retire. Working in these conditions will be yet another challenge to tackle.
I’ve always been an RV-lover. Giavana (being a city girl, former Playboy bunny, lover of comfort) not so much. When I pushed for an RV, she pushed back. Imagine my shock when, discussing our disgust with how much we were paying for rent, she floated the idea of just living in an RV!
Who is this woman, and what has happened to my beloved wife? We’ve been on an extraterrestrial Netflix kick, has she been abducted and replaced? Or, after we’re all settled in, will she then say, “Here you go Mr. RV-man, you’re set just like you wanted. Sayonara!”?
Giavana amazes and inspires me, especially lately. I’ve always been the reassurance guy, “It’s all going to be alright.” But I’ve been grouchy, mired in the details, the steps of the many, many things we need to do. I’m the type A, anal, detail-fixated, get-it-done-now half of our team. The military did that to me, and I thank them. We each have our roles. My built-in traits can be stressful with something like this on my plate, but she’s been there for me, buoying me up daily with positivity and her good nature.
How did our roles flip? She’s fiscally a worrier, even though we’re more than OK. She’s financially responsible. We sold our home in 2021, after receiving offers we couldn’t refuse during the bubble, and after asking ourselves repeatedly why we needed three floors of house and four bathrooms for just the two of us (and little Pia). We did well on that deal, and calculated we could invest it wisely and pay rent with our yield, retaining the principal.
I was homeless once, in Tulsa, Oklahoma during winter, so this new idea triggers me a little. Some of that is fictionalized in Farawayer, along with other reasons I feel a constant need to uproot. We’ve moved seven times in eleven years. In the sequel to that novel, Stayer, I’ll cover more reasons, related to my work in the intel community and world-wide business travel. Or, maybe it’s just that this is the second (and last!) marriage for both of us, and maybe subconsciously, we feel being grounded in a traditional home would be a betrayal to our kids from those first marriages, even though they’re grown now. The human mind is a mysterious thing. There are always powerful subliminal forces at work in there. We’ll get into that!
What else worries me about this decision? Winter is coming, Jon Snow. I have some light RV experience, as far as things like tailgate parties at Penn State, which hardly qualifies for what we’re about to do. Giavana has none, aside from a few rentals for weekend festivals these past few years. I’ve driven big class A RVs, and even tractor trailers long, long ago in my military days. Any experience there is now lost to time and an ever decreasing memory. I have no experience with pickup trucks, long despising them, and no experience pulling an RV trailer behind.
I have two heart conditions that could take me out without much notice. Currently, we live right across the street from a major hospital. That’s hard to walk away from, when minutes could likely matter. As my readers know. after my recent post, What’s It All About? I’m no longer worried about dying. One more thing—the folks that own and run the lake we’ll be living by don’t exactly have a great bed-side manner, based on the google reviews. Will we get along?
So, given all that, why are we doing this?
Minimalism–Why do we need all this crap in our closets, basements, attics, garage? It all used to be money, we’re turning it back into that
Climate, Politics, Apocalypse–To be minimal and mobile if the stuff hits the fan or democracy and this rock we live on begin their collapse
Finances–Skyrocketing cost of owning/renting vs a few hundred bucks a month, enjoy experiences more than “things”, and leave more behind to help our kids.
FIRE–Do you know about the Financial Independence/Retire Early movement? Is this RVFire? CampFIRE? We tried owning homes and renting–neither worked, for reasons we’ll explain as we go along on this journey. Our experiences and lessons learned should help others in this community.
When we look around, especially these tumultuous last years, we see harbingers that concern us. The pandemic was a shocking eye-opener and rough for everyone. There’s war in Europe, incredibly. The climate, planet, and democracy seem to be crumbling around us. Half our freedom-loving democracy has joined a cult—fanatics for a guy who openly lusts after fascist, authoritarian leaders and yearns to be one. He kept our most sensitive national secrets in the unlocked shitter at his country club! Military and intel assets and lives may have been lost. The same guy that ripped off Giavana’s family business, the “billionaire” refusing to pay after they had excitedly accepted a big last-minute job from him. They made sure to do impeccable work, because the agreed price was life-changing for those working class small business people. Like so many others, he stiffed them, and ruined them. Nice fella. He’d do it to you, too.
We want to be mobile. The news seems to be following the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, The Road, and DroidMesh Trilogy. We don’t want to own land if a collapse is coming. We want to be able to go. Canada is just up I-81 north from us. Our species seems to be at a tipping point where the tech our developed brains created is too much to manage, out of control, and often barely working. Artificial intelligence seems almost 2001: A Space Odyssey smart enough to realize what an invasive pest we are (along with the planet itself, see: Gaia Theory) and eliminate us. We seem to be crumbling under our complexity, at the crossroads as our ethics and morals evaporate at an alarming rate while our tech grows out of control.
Why the name, Project: Pioneer? We’ve been on a westerns kick, as far as our entertainment. We were watching 1883 and saying, “Those settlers and natives had it rough. They had nothing.” This is our modern day pioneer journey, although it will be hard by modern day pampered standards, it will be nothing like our ancestors endured. I’ve traveled to very poor corners of the this planet, and I’ve seen how folks get along with very little, out of necessity. And, some of them are the happiest people I’ve met.
As our journey proceeds, we’ll go into all the above. We could be wrong–very wrong. This might be a massive mistake and a short-lived journey, but hey, it’s something you all have thought about, especially in these times, right? Who doesn’t like camping? Let’s do it full time, Dad! Mmmk.
What’s next? Big moves. Sell the plug-in hybrid and buy a pickup, find the perfect RV. Lock down the location. Stay tuned!