Well, we have been a year travelling full-time with the horses and the one year anniversary is always a good time to pause a beat to review and reflect.
One thing financial advisers will say is that after the first year of retirement it is a good idea to review your financial situation and see if you need to adjust your spending. Ari is 66, almost 67, and I am 63. Ari is on Medicare and a supplemental plan and I am on a full plan through ACEUSA. Finding medical insurance has been challenging because most medical insurance plans are tied to a state residence and won't cover out-of-state care. Neither of us is collecting social security yet as we want to wait until we are 70, so we could maximize our payments.
We live on a combination of payments from annuities, my teaching pension, royalties from my textbooks, withdrawals from our 401K, stock income, and any consulting gigs I pick up here and there. Our 2021 income will be about 80% of what we were making prior to retirement, which is what financial advisers recommend. We are hoping our 2021 taxes will be considerably less, but we shall see.
Ari has been day-trading to offset withdrawals from the 401K and, so far, he has continued to outperform the withdrawals. Our goal is to spend down the 401K and IRA accounts before we hit 70, because once we hit 70, we will have to deal with Required Withdrawals - where the government requires you to take money out, so you have to pay taxes on it.
Our house is on airbnb and the airbnb payments cover the mortgage payments, insurance, utilities, and maintenance. It basically is a wash. So, all the airbnb income allows us to keep our home in California for when we are done travelling. All the other income covers our life style. We paid cash for the LQ and we own our truck. We don't carry any debt other than our mortgage.
Our biggest expenses are the horses (feed, vet, health certificates, grain, etc.) and gas. About 90% of our meals are prepared in our trailer, so we don't eat out that much. Our next biggest expense is internet. We pay $50 a month for our T-Mobile SIM card and another $60 a month for our Winegard SIM card. We spend about $1,000/month on campgrounds. I try to mix it up, so that we spend at least a week every month in state, federal, or dispersed camping to keep our expenses down. There is a big difference between FREE camping or state/federal campgrounds (where it is around $14/night) and the private campgrounds which run $70/night and up.
So, we look at how much we are spending versus how much money is coming in and while we are spending down Ari's 401K, we easily have enough money to last us through 2023, at which point we will have to start drawing down my IRA.
Besides our finances, we also want to take a moment to check our relationship. Living in a tiny house and the stress of always moving from one place to the next (with no idea whether the next place is even going to be nice) is not always the most conducive to a great time. We manage by trying to spend at least a few hours away from each other two or three times a week. Ari or I will go run errands alone and leave the other person at the campground so they have some "me" time. This goes a long way towards making the whole small space bearable.
The LQ appears to be holding up. We continue to make repairs and adjustments as needed. It is taking longer to get through the states than we had planned, partly because my broken foot bone took us off the road for a month, the broken axles on the trailer likewise delayed our travel for six weeks, so we aren't as far along as we would have liked, but we are also are still figuring out how long we want to stay at each place and what qualifies as a good campground.
There is also a big difference between living full-time at campgrounds versus the people who are on vacation for a few days or weeks. We are definitely a lot more laissez-faire about any bumps or hiccups because when you only have a set amount of time to relax any annoyance becomes magnified. We're retired and aren't on a clock, so if something takes longer or sets us back a day or two, it's not that big a deal.
So, at the year mark, Ari and I look at each other and say - "should we keep going and stick to the plan or give it up and say, well, it was a nice thing to try, but it's too stressful/too expensive/too whatever?" We're sticking to the plan...California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota - 13 states down and 35 to go.
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