Category: Planning

Back to the Drawing Board

Posted on by Laura & Brett

Here we are again, wondering if we’re ever going to be able to figure out what to do and where to go when we leave Tennessee.

You’re probably all thinking, why can’t these people make up their d**n minds and stick to something?

There’s been a poison pill in every one of our plans, no matter how good it sounds or starts out. The biggest pill of all has been: can I afford to stay in a place on my own (or continue traveling) if Brett predeceases me? Would I even want to continue to live in that place (or continue traveling) if Brett predeceases me? He feels the same, although affordability isn’t the issue for him that it would be for me.

Here are the plans that have come and gone since we’ve been in Tennessee:

  • First there was Mexico: We like Mexico and could easily live well there but it’s too far away from family and it’s a bit shaky on the medical care for our comfort these days. And, with the way Mexico has been raising their income requirements at the time we apply for a visa our income might not be high enough to qualify for a residential visa (we could afford to live there but not qualify for the visa to do so).
  • Return to Hawaii: This dream refuses to die and keeps popping up again and again and again. We can afford to live there but it’s the getting over there and getting settled that would be outrageously expensive and always stops us in our tracks. We’d have to sell our car here and buy another one (not as nice) over there. We’d have to store a few things here or pay an outrageous price to send them there. Then there’s first and last month’s rent (if we can find a semi-affordable rental that will accept Kaipo, that is), airfare from Tennessee, possibly new furniture and household goods (again) once we find a place, and so forth. And, we’d be even further away from our family. I could definitely not afford to live there if Brett predeceases me.
  • Let’s buy a trailer! Let’s not after figuring out the expense and loads of other issues.
  • The national park road trip was exciting and promising . . . all except for the expense, that is. We could live bare bones, camp along the way . . . except we really don’t want to do that at this stage of our lives.

So, we’re back to the drawing board again. Where can we go? Is there a good location for us or is it time to start making loads of compromises?

We have put on our thinking caps, talk about what could come next, and are making lists of the things that are important to us at this stage of our lives, and figuring out the compromises we are willing to make and the ones we are not.

The only things we’re firm on are:

  • proximity to family
  • reasonable cost of living
  • reasonably good weather
  • walking and sightseeing venues in the area

A solution is out there, but we just haven’t found it or figured it out yet. We’re going to keep trying . . . because we’re not planning to stay in Tennessee.

I hope you’ll stick around as we continue to work this out.

Reality Bites: Budgeting for Full-Time Travel

Posted on by Laura & Brett

The dream: road trip for a couple of years and visit all the national parks.

The reality: the monthly cost for how we thought we’d travel is significantly larger than we imagined.

It wasn’t long after starting work on a budget for our Big Adventure II that we began to discover our initial plans and itinerary would cost w-a-y more than we imagined, and would most likely drain our savings in short order, all without adding any extras.

Here’s the reality of what we’ve discovered so far:

  • Gasoline: We love the Armada – it’s the most comfortable car we’ve ever owned – and it’s perfect for this road trip in terms of safety, comfort, space, and the amount and type of of driving we would be doing. However, the Armada is a gas guzzler. It has a large tank and can go long distances, but would still require a fill-up or top-off nearly every day with our itinerary. Brett has worked hard at increasing the MPG, but he has figured out the cost of gas would be just slightly under double what we originally assumed. Ouch.
  • Lodging: This is largest monthly expense, and again, more than we initially assumed. After pricing (low cost) hotels and Airbnbs, a reasonable monthly budget amount for lodging would be about $3500/month to stay where we want to stay. Seriously. And that’s before adding in any pet fees. We could camp along the way, but neither of us is particularly interested in doing that for so long a period of time. We still do not want/plan to buy or pull a trailer.
  • Dining: This is the one reasonable area of the budget – with conditions. Completely avoiding restaurants, eating breakfast and dinner at our lodgings, investing in an electric cooler to keep fruit and other perishables fresh, and eating lunch on the road would keep food costs down to around what we’re paying now. But, it still requires some sacrifice and we doubt that’s sustainable for a year. Half the fun of traveling is dining out now and again.
  • Extras: There is no room in the budget for any extra side trips. We have free lifetime admission to the parks, but anything beyond that, like touring the slot canyons in northern Arizona or spending a few days in Santa Fe and Taos, NM, is out of the question.
  • Fixed expenses: We currently have only three fixed expenses that we’d continue to cover: car insurance, our phone plan, and storage fees for the few items we want to keep. We know what our phone plan will be each month, but the insurance and storage are currently wild cards. If we add an internet service for travel (like Starlink), that would be another additional fixed expense.
  • Unknown expenses: Thankfully medical costs are not a factor, but car maintenance is and we want to keep up a comfortable emergency fund. And of course other things can go wrong as well (an Airbnb canceling on us, for example, and having to find other lodging).

We are currently at a standstill and trying to come up with some options or ways to do things differently. One would be to rent Airbnbs for longer periods of time, say three or four months at a time, and use them as a base to visit parks in the area. This could cut our gas expenses down a bit, but wouldn’t save us all that much on lodging. Occasional overnight stays would still be required, but this plan would slow things w-a-y down and require us being able to find good, but reasonably priced Airbnbs in each place that will rent to us long term and accept a pet.

The Armada is big enough that we could sleep in the back of it but it doesn’t sound like a good option for us two oldsters for a variety of reasons. Neither does setting up and living in a tent and cooking outdoors for months on end.

We could sell the Armada, or trade it in on a more fuel efficient car, but a) we don’t want to be potentially stuck with another car payment, and b) it would just be a hassle. The overall savings wouldn’t be that much in the grand scheme of things.

It was so affordable traveling around the world back in the day, but we’ve unfortunately discovered expenses in the U.S. are much, much higher for everything (well except for gasoline, but everywhere else has trains, superb public transportation, etc.). We have a lot to think about right now. I know we can figure this out in a way that makes sense and that helps us stick to our budget, but for now we’ve arrived at a standstill.

Sketching Out An Itinerary

Posted on by Laura & Brett

Brett and I are finishing up the “talking about it” phase of planning for our National Park Adventure and have starting putting things on paper . . . in pencil. We’ve started setting things down on our calendar, from dates to destinations and what we’ve gotten so far seems pretty solid. We have to keep reminding ourselves that what we’ve come up with is only a first draft of our “dream” itinerary and things can or may have to change.

This big question we asked ourselves was which way should we go first? We decided the most important thing we need to do first is get domiciled, so our first major destination should be South Dakota. Getting domiciled appears to be an easy and fairly quick process, and we chose Rapid City for our location so we’ll also be able to see two national parks while we’re there (Badlands and Wind Cave) and Mt. Rushmore as well. We’ll stop at Hot Springs National Park (in Arkansas) on our way there.

We figure we’ll spend about 10 days in South Dakota, but once domiciling is taken care of we’ll head up to North Dakota to visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Following that we’ll go west to Montana and spend a few days at Glacier National Park. Then it’s down to Wyoming to see Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. We’re thinking we will stay in the area for a few weeks, to relax and take in the western landscape. From Wyoming it will be on to Utah to visit The Mighty Five: Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, and Zion national parks, with a detour to Nevada to visit Great Basin park on the way. We’ll stay in Moab to see Arches and Canyonlands, spend a night or two near Capital Reef, then on to Kanab for a couple of weeks to see Bryce and Zion as well as visit the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and head over to Page, Arizona to tour the slot canyons.

Then it’s on to see the south rim of the Grand Canyon again – they now have pet-friendly lodging inside the park, one of our first splurges. Leaving there we’ll head for a month’s stay in Tucson to see friends and visit Saguaro National Park and other sites. Following our time in Tucson we’ll head back up to see Petrified Forest National Park and visit Canyon de Chelly, located in the Navajo reservation.

We’ll leave Arizona to visit Santa Fe and Taos, two places we’ve never been to and would love to see. From there we’ head’ll go south to visit White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns national parks. We have friends in Deming, and relations in Las Cruces, and may adjust our route to make stops there.

We’ll end the year in Texas with stops at Guadalupe Mountains and Big Bend national parks before going to Dallas to see Brett’s sister and brother in law.

The following year is still to be decided, but it will be winter when it’s time to leave Dallas. One idea we’ve had is to leave our car at Brett’s sister’s and go to San Miguel de Allende for a few months. Or, we could continue our trip and go to Florida and the parks there, then start slowly heading up the east coast. A stay in SMA would give us a chance to relax and refresh before hitting the road again, but it’s also not really part of any national park itinerary.

There are a couple of reservations that will have to be made nearly a year in advance (like the Grand Canyon lodge), and in some other popular locations several months before our planned arrival so we’ve got our fingers crossed we get those set as our first choice for lodging. We’ve already adjusted our budget to cover lodging costs – they’re going to be slightly more than we first imagined, but still doable, including pet fees.

The calendar has been started in pencil, but eventually will be filled in with pen as we get closer to our departure in 2025 and figure out the budget side of things. Life happens and things can change (again and again for us, it seems). But are we having fun yet? Yes, and it’s only just begun!

One More Adventure

Posted on by Laura & Brett

An outline for our post-Tennessee life is taking shape. We’d been considering several ideas and even combining a few but none of them had what we wanted or made us feel happy, even though they included the two things that do make us happy these days: family and travel. All of them had serious drawbacks though, from the cost of living to the climate, and we were frustrated that nothing seemed right.

We went back and forth and round and round about whether we should move back to Hawaii, travel overseas full time again, or buy a house somewhere, but neither of us felt enthusiastic about any of those. It seemed there were more cons than pros with all of them. Places we considered for relocation had problems as well.

However, unknown to us, our children still had a few ideas about what we should do post-Tennessee. They believe we still had one more big adventure in us, and we received Christmas gifts from them that helped point us in the right direction.

Brett received a Keurig Mini coffee maker from our son-in-law. We didn’t need a new coffee maker, but he had mentioned the Keurig Mini when we were looking at trailers, and also thought one would be nice even if we didn’t have a trailer as it’s the perfect size to make a good cup of coffee in a hotel room (if you’ve had hotel room coffee recently you’ll know what I’m talking about). He also received a big Rand-McNally U.S. road atlas with national park information from Meiling.

It was a small gift to me from YaYu however that settled things for both of us. She gave me a national park scratch-off poster, with a shield for each U.S. National Park. After a park is visited the coating on each shield can be scraped off to reveal a photo of the park. She knows me well: the gift contained both a goal (uncovering a photo of every park) along with the challenge to accomplish that goal.

As we scraped off the shields for the parks we had already visited, Brett and I came to see this is really what we want to do: visit all of the remaining national parks in the United States and its territories (did you know there are national parks in the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa?). We have talked of nothing else since Christmas, and we grow more excited and more sure every day this is the right path for us.

We’ve already been looking at maps and have ordered blank calendar forms to eventually plot out a journey. There will still be no trailer for us; instead, we’ll stay in a combination of Airbnbs, hotels/motels, and the occasional national park lodge (when pets are allowed). We’re also thinking about whether we’d like to occasionally camp along the way, but think that will happen later, if at all.

There are 63 National Parks in the United States and its Territories, and between us Brett and I have seen 16. There is absolutely nothing about visiting the rest of the parks we don’t like. We’re excited about road tripping for a couple of years, and then making a big effort to see all eight parks in Alaska and the two in Hawaii as well as fitting in the Virgin Islands and American Samoa along the way. Then, as Brett says, we’ll finally be ready to settle down somewhere.

The Occasional Nomads still have one more Big Adventure left in us, and we have the car, the income, the savings, and the desire and determination to make this plan a reality . . . stay tuned!

Food: Simplifying and Saving in 2024

Posted on by Laura & Brett
photo credit: Maria Lin Kim/unsplash

Brett and I eat a nice variety of healthy meals. And, we do a good job for the most part sticking to our monthly budget of $500 per month for food. By leveraging my discount at Trader Joe’s and limiting what we buy at Costco and other grocery stores we keep our food expenses down without giving up quality.

However, at the end of last year I began to wonder if there were still ways I could simplify menu planning and shopping to change things up and save a little more. We’re doing a good job keeping food waste to a minimum and using what we have on hand, but by changing not only what we buy but how I cook I knew we could create additional savings while still enjoying tasty, healthy meals.

For the past year I’ve tended to purchase foods (including many prepared foods) that feed us for a night, or a night and lunch for one the next day, but mostly don’t provide enough for leftovers. Most of these meals come from Trader Joe’s. Their prepared foods are not only fun but healthy and satisfying, and they save time and effort, especially after I’ve worked that day. However, we can cut back on these types of items if I do a better job of planning ahead. I honestly don’t enjoy cooking as much as I did in the past, but I know how to create tasty, healthy meals that will last Brett and I for a couple of days and not cost more than what we’re paying now for something already prepared. I still want to include one or two prepared items into our bi-weekly menu plan, but that will be the limit.

We’re pretty much only buying items at Costco these days that provide affordable building blocks for meals or are cost effective. For example, a tray of their prepared stuffed peppers costs somewhere around $18, and contains six large peppers, which provides three meals for us. I could make them myself, but it’s nice having something already prepared (they freeze well) at only slightly over $6 for the two of us. The same goes for Costco’s prepared meatloaf meal – I pretty much can’t make it for less, and we can get three meals from the Costco one (two dinners and one lunch). I’m also going buy a $5 roast chicken each time I shop at Costco, use the meat from that for various meals, and make broth and or soup from the bones. Back when I was feeding five of us, I could often get four meals from one chicken so I know I can do as well now. We rarely buy produce at Costco any more though as the packages almost always contain more than we can finish, and we also skip meat, cheese, bakery and most deli items as there’s just too much in these packages as well (and they take up a lot of space). Our rule of only buying six or less items when we shop at Costco has kept us more mindful and saved us a bundle and we plan to keep that up.

Aldi will continue to fill in the gaps. It remains our go-to for several items, things like butter, graham crackers, organic produce (always less than Trader Joe’s even with my discount), and a few other items.

Menu items and meal prep will focus more on casseroles, soups, and quiches during cooler weather, and on main dish salads in the summer. These meals cost less than many of the prepared items I have been buying at Trader Joe’s and can provide two or more meals each week from one dish. We will still keep a couple of quick meals from TJ’s in the freezer for those evenings I’m too tired to stand in front of the stove.

This is an achievable goal for this year. I’m aiming for a savings of around $40 per month, at least at the beginning of the year, and more as the year goes along.

Four Simple Goals for 2024

Posted on by Laura & Brett
photo credit: Social.Cut/unsplash

The four goals we have for 2024 have us continuing down the same path we were on in 2023 for the most part. None of them are very exciting but we know where we want to be at the end of the year, and don’t need a lot of goals to get us there! Our overarching goal for the year will be keeping things even more simple than we did this year. We also have one big financial goal – more about that coming soon!

  • Read at least 52 books. I’m not giving myself any sort of theme this year – I’m just going to read whatever catches my fancy, whether that’s a new book or one I’ve read before. Barnes & Noble is right next door to Aldi, and I plan to stop in occasionally and see what’s new, and then get those book from the library.
  • Make no purchases other than food, clothing, birthday gifts, and Christmas gifts. We’re going to limit our clothing purchases to no more than 12 items between the two of us, and continue to use eBay, thrift stores, and other resale options whenever possible. I am starting off the new year though with two new pairs of my favorite leggings, on sale at Costco for $9.99/pair.
  • Maintain a monthly food budget of $500. This is doable! Brett and I talked quite a bit last month about how we can continue to keep our food spending in line and under $500 each month. We still have a few tricks up our sleeve!
  • Maintain a monthly walking distance of at least 40 miles. Also doable, especially while I’m working at Trader Joe’s.

Having only four goals seems pretty boring, but these are the ones that will get us where we need to by the end of the year. And of course we will be saving, saving, saving for the future!

Figuring It Out

Posted on by Laura & Brett

Since deciding a trailer purchase was not for us, Brett and I have been thinking a lot about what we’re going to do and where we’re going to go after Nashville. We’ve been having some great conversations about what we should do next, but have yet to find our landing spot.

This is new territory for us. We’ve always had the next step figured out well in advance, but this time it’s been different for some reason. Nothing we’ve come up with since we’ve been in Nashville has felt like the right fit for a variety of reasons. Our ages have something to do with it; we’re in good health but have some underlying concerns that we need to take into consideration. We also own a sweet little dog that has made our life happier and richer but also complicates things a bit. Full-time travel or living overseas still excite us, but come with a whole different set of issues with a dog along. Settling down and establishing a home base might also be the best thing to do, but the huge question remains where? Everything we think about requires compromises, but many of those are still unknowns, further complicating any choice we try to make.

One more thing weighs heavily on us this time as well: the need to get it right. In the past we could make corrections but there will be no more opportunities for a major do-over. I will be 73 and Brett will be 75 when we leave Nashville and there will be no starting over again if we get it wrong.

The one positive in all of this is we’re in the best shape financially we’ve ever been. That opens several doors that were previously closed to us. However, we’re finding that having more disposable income does not make it any easier to choose the best path.

Our task for the coming year will be keeping our minds open to different and potential opportunities, and focusing on important factors like cost of living, proximity to family, weather, tax friendliness, healthcare, and such. We’re not dismissing traveling full time and will look at how that might work out for a few more years.

For now we have time on our side. With a little over 18 months until it’s time to move on, we have time enough to think everything through and make the right decisions for us the right reasons.

Keeping It Simple

Posted on by Laura & Brett

Simplicity has been our overriding watchword this year, and will continue to be what we focus on next year as well.

After only a few months into planning for a Great American Road Trip we have decided that we’re not going to tow a trailer. While it initially felt fun, exciting, and like the perfect solution we got to a point where everything about owning a trailer, from choosing to purchasing to the reality of actually pulling one around was making us very unhappy and keeping both of us awake at night. So was the thought of having to camp every night.

It was, we realized, a complicated way for us to travel around.

We could not get over feeling very uncomfortable with the investment a trailer of any size or make would require at this point in our lives, from the actual purchase to outfitting it. The amount (and potential cost) of maintenance and upkeep, and lists of things that could go wrong with a trailer kept growing the further we investigated. Resale at the end of our travels was another HUGE issue we had to consider. Towing a trailer also complicated itinerary planning, requiring more frequent moves and more actual time on the road, as well as keeping us away from some places.

So, we took a deep breath and chose simplicity. There will be no trailer for us. A road trip is still on though; we just have to rethink how we’ll make it happen

Do we have regrets about purchasing the Armada? Absolutely not! We have a luxurious, comfortable, and quiet car that we continue to fall in love with for future road trips no matter where we go or for how long. The tow hitch will still come in handy too: we plan to buy a rear rack so we can carry our bikes around.

Laura & Brett’s Big Adventure II

Posted on by Laura & Brett

We bought a new-to-us car last month: a Nissan Armada.

And why did we get such a big SUV? Because it can tow!

And why would we need a tow vehicle?

Because we are going to take an extended road trip around the U.S. and Canada when we leave Tennessee! We will either tow a trailer or stay in Airbnbs throughout the U.S., and will need a comfortable vehicle that can potentially tow a mid-sized trailer.

Wait a minute! What about Mexico? Or living overseas? Or going back to Hawaii? Or any other place you’ve talked about going post-Tennessee?

We could still go to any of those places, but the truth is we’ve never felt truly happy in our hearts about them. We’d be briefly excited, focus on the positives, but eventually the excitement would fade as we considered the negatives, things we weren’t sure we could or wanted to do or overcome at our ages. Obstacles ranged from having to learn a new language to obtaining required visas, getting Kaipo safely moved, the expenses attached to the moves and/or high cost of living, the distance from our children, and most discouraging of all, having to set up housekeeping somewhere yet again from scratch. We also realized after my last round of medical procedures that we do not want to give up our current health care benefits no matter how affordable health care is elsewhere.

Brett and I had began thinking about the purchase of a small camping trailer a few months ago (like a teardrop for weekend camping), but the longer we looked at those the more thoughts of a full time road trip began to fill our heads and eventually our heart. A full-time road trip is something we have considered several times previously but we’d always been able to talk ourselves out of it. This time we couldn’t.

We investigated Class B camper vans (again) and decided they were too small, and we wouldn’t last long living in one. We looked into Class C campers (no monster Class A’s for us, thank you), and eventually decided the best way would be to pull a trailer as it would provide both the amenities we want and the ability to detach our tow vehicle to get out and about wherever we went.

At the same time, we knew the purchase of a trailer for full-time living would be a considerable investment at this time in our lives, and require outfitting. There would also be the maintenance and upkeep that goes along with owning an RV, as well as a full-time camping lifestyle. So, we added an alternative to think about: staying in Airbnbs around the country as we go and pulling a small trailer for times when an Airbnb wouldn’t be feasible. This type of traveling had previously been unaffordable, but with no debt at all it’s now something we can do. Currently we are leaning toward the Airbnb + small trailer solution as it would be a much more accommodating way to travel with a dog along, but we haven’t given up on owning a full-size trailer either.

The Nissan Armada ended up in the top three vehicles for what we needed and wanted, especially as a potential tow vehicle. The other two choices were pickup trucks, but we really are not truck people, so the Armada became our top choice. A little less than a month ago we serendipitously came across an ad for a previously-owned Armada with the price, low mileage, and regular maintenance we wanted and a lifetime drivetrain warranty as well, and decided it was too good to pass up. We traded-in our Tucson and now have our road trip vehicle! The gas mileage isn’t as great as the Tucson, but so far not as bad as we were afraid it might be.

No matter which way we choose, the Armada purchase sealed our post-Tennessee plans. We are committed to becoming full-time nomads once again. Living full-time on the road will require the utmost in simple living, something we’re looking forward to. And, whichever direction we go will be the final stop of our downsizing journey. For the next 20 months though we’ll continue to save, save, save and get ourselves ready for Big Adventure II: The Great American Road Trip!

Happy Changes To Our Christmas Plans

Posted on by Laura & Brett

We typically begin to plan for Christmas in September, and this year we were thinking we’d have a small, relaxed Christmas, celebrating with just our son and family while the girls gathered in Massachusetts.

Those plans didn’t even last until the end of the month! Meiling called us during the last week of September to let us know that while she and her husband were going to spend the actual holiday with his family in Oregon, they were going to stop over in Tennessee and spend three days with us on their way. They will arrive on the 19 and depart on the 23rd and stay with us in the apartment while they’re here (which is why we bought a sleeper sofa!).

A couple of hours later we received a message from WenYu: Can YaYu and I come and spend Christmas with you too? Of course! we said, knowing it would be very “cozy” in the apartment for a couple of days with everyone here.

Brett and I spent an afternoon thinking and worrying about how we’d fit everyone into our tiny apartment but eventually came up with a plan: we will leave the apartment to the girls (and Kaipo) at night and stay in a nearby hotel (with free breakfast) for the time they’re all here, sort of a staycation.

I told the girls I am putting them in charge of the food preparation this year, but there will be nothing fancy or extravagant going on like last year. We’re sticking to frugal family favorites this time around. YaYu will be our chef de cuisine and is already looking forward to cooking for all of us.

Presents will also not be as extravagant as they were last year.

Brett and I are beyond thrilled that the girls will be coming to Tennessee. We love that our entire family will be together again, even if just for a few days. We were especially moved by the girls being unable to imagine us not being together for Christmas, even if just for a few days.

So, out with the old plans and in with the new!