Budget - Could We Do It?
Bringing the budget together and making sure we’d be ok retiring early was a BIG concern and we had to satisfy ourselves that it would work for 2-10 years or so before we could commit to the plan. We started out asking other full-timers what their budgets looked like and they gave various monthly items like: Campground – $400-$600; fuel - $800, etc. We took our everyday budget of expenses with a home and then cut it down to what it would look like with no home and put some estimates in there that were mostly a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) but also incorporated some of the inputs we had received from others. We also had some personal stuff in there others may not have had. For instance, I am a college football fanatic and want to keep Dish network so I can watch the games at least until I find a suitable substitute.
I built a spreadsheet (yes I’m a geek) with those items in there and then put our expected incomes in there which I admit, were much lower without my Government Civilian job and Kim’s job! I then added columns for 3 years down the road when I could take early Social Security. I receive a monthly retirement amount which is the only expected income for us for about the next 3 years.
We added the expenses up and then the expected income for each of the example out years and subtracted them to find our net income remaining. One word of warning about these numbers is to be sure to either use gross or net numbers and be consistent!
Other considerations that went into the budget was that we planned to stop investing and determined when we could pull from our investments. As we are several years apart in age these were significantly different years in the future for each of us.
Ultimately we checked the bottom line (income – expenses) and not surprisingly saw that we were in the hole. I’m a few months out from 59 ½ so we can begin pulling from investments this winter and factored that in. We are pretty sure we have enough to cover the gap so we were comfortable with that for a few months. That bottom line told me how much we needed from our investments to make ends meet monthly.
I hope that gives you an idea how we approached the decision to sell the house and quit our jobs to go traveling with some comfort in our decision. We will have to watch that we don’t live "high off the hog" as they say but we should be comfortable at least and have some money for “vacations” which will be cruises or staying at more expensive RV resorts (Margaritavilles and Yogi Bears are very nice!)
UPDATE: Late October 2024 - We've had two months of actual expenses now to update our estimates we used earlier. As we feared, we were a bit too conservative in our cost estimates. I don't know who gave us the figures for campsite fees per month but they are definitely double what we planned. We also realize that our current "travel to see things" style of camping is the MOST expensive way to do it since we are changing locations so often. We can't take advantage of weekly or monthly rates yet and have to plan for that! In addition, we logged 4700 miles in 6 weeks on our first real trip and that blew up our fuel budget! We did make some cuts to our expenses. For instance, we dumped Dish Network in favor of Youtube TV which allows me to catch all the college football games I can stand! We are also planning future trips with weekly rates in mind.
