I must be part female or something, I keep changing my mind.
Just when I had the entire plan for finishing the
renovation, buying the truck & RV, retiring, selling the house, and jumping
off all figured out and a hard date for everything all finished, I threw it all
out.
Several reasons really, but the biggest was that I would
have been running everything right down to the last dollar. There was very
little room for anything going sideways and we all know how stuff that I do
seems to always go at least a little bit sideways. So now the entire thought
about, dreamed about, researched, and studied plan has now gone into the round
file.
There’s now an entirely new plan that’s a WHOLE bunch
simpler and I came up with the whole thing in about 20 minutes. It’s that
stupid simple and I should have gone this direction a long time ago. It became
clear when I started what I call hyper-planning. I have a spreadsheet that I
plug in every little piece of information into and calculate out exactly when
and how much each step should take. It got to the point of being ridiculous.
The start of the turning point was when I was adding in the calculation of the house
mortgage payoff when it came time to sell it. Wow, that little? So obviously
the next question became one of exactly how long would it take to pay off the
house completely?
Hmm... Now there’s an interesting thought. If I were to sink
as much as I comfortably could into extra principle payments, how long would it
take to finally own the house outright? Well, did I mention that I have a
spreadsheet? So I started a new page and plugged all the information in and
Whoa! That cannot possibly be correct! Actually, my initial calculation was off
as I forgot that paying towards principle cuts down on interest, so I would actually
pay it off even faster. Double Whoa!
That all sounds great and all, but there are downsides to
going that direction. One is that the renovation won’t happen nearly as fast as
I had originally planned. Another is that I won’t be able to go see the country
for at least an additional two to three years. BUT, I could go RV’ing with a
paid off house in my back pocket which would afford me a home base to spend
winters and a place to land when I come off the road. Of course I could always
sell it off later if I wanted to.
So here’s the new plan in its entirety: Pay off the house
ASAP and finish the renovations as funds permit. After those two are complete
then save up for buying the RV, then retire, and then start ‘most-of-the-time’
RV’ing.
That’s it, that’s the whole plan. It’s basically the same as the old
plan but most everything is now in series rather than in parallel. The beauty
is that it becomes a funding driven plan rather than a calendar driven one. There's really no dates affixed to anything, it's all based on the funding becoming available. I can't move on to the next step until the last one is funded and complete.
The part that I especially like is that I can now finish the
renovations (kitchen especially) any damn way I please and not have to worry
about what is most marketable. Heck, maybe I’ll make the garage into a
man-cave. The truck doesn’t fit in there anyway.
I am kind of debating about possibly buying a small used
travel trailer that I could use to go camping around the state while everything
else plays out. Believe it or not, there’s still a whole bunch of places in
Florida & Southern Georgia that I haven’t seen. So maybe use it to travel
around on long weekends and vacations and then trade it in when I go for the
fifth wheel. Being a small trailer I could get into places that a big rig can’t
(like Bahia Honda).
I’d have to put a few bucks into the truck to freshen it up
(front end, transmission, etc.), but that’s ok, I think after 250,000 miles it
might be ready for a few new parts to get it ready for the next 250k. With the
new plan it’ll be a few years before I get rid of this truck.
So will I change my mind again before it's all said and done? Quite probably, but that's the feminine side of me.
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