Our strict criteria…

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At the end of my last entry, I promised to explain the strict criteria we have established to ensure the financial goal of our world travel: Our total travel expenses would not exceed the expenses we would have incurred to live in a $1500 a month condo in Arizona or any tax-free state such as Florida or Nevada.  Using an Excel spreadsheet we listed the normal expenses we would experience in our new retirement lifestyle, entitled “Basic Living Expenses”  

  1. Rent or mortgage payment: include association dues, if applicable
  2. Taxes: federal, state and property, if applicable
  3. Groceries: to include specialty items for our restrictive organic, gluten-free, low carbohydrate, sugar-free, wheat, and grain-free way of eating. All meals are homemade (no processed foods) utilizing grass-fed meat with organic produce, dairy, and eggs.
  4. Auto expenses: payment for a newer vehicle still under warranty, gas, maintenance, insurance
  5. Health: insurance premiums, co-pays, prescriptions, dental, vision, health club dues, alternative therapies, and supplements
  6. Other insurance
  7. Cable and Internet: including a few premium channels (we love Dexter, Homeland, Boardwalk Empire and Shameless)
  8. Cellphones: a smartphone with unlimited data
  9. Utilities: gas, electric, water, trash 
  10. Entertainment and dining out (carefully limited)
  11. Clothing, personal effects, toiletries, and grooming (all items discounted and purchased at the best possible price)
  12. Gifts: for family members/friends for birthdays/holidays, greeting cards, postage
  13. Publications: magazines, newspapers, online subscriptions
  14. Miscellaneous: occasional purchase or replacement of household goods, donations, cash for incidentals
  15. Pet care: food, treats, toys, groomer and vet (no pet now since we lost our WorldWideWillie last April) but we would have a new dog if we settled into a retirement lifestyle
  16. Banking fees; interest on credit cards, if applicable; 
  17. Savings
Upon keeping our costs as low as possible, in an effort to live a relatively conservative retirement lifestyle we had a total. Thus…

Criteria #1:  Do not have a permanent home!
With these numbers in mind, we created the next worksheet in our Excel workbook, entitled “Fixed Living Expenses” which were those we’d incur if we traveled but didn’t have a permanent home. Although we are not accountants nor possess a degree as such, we labeled the tabs that we felt best represented the analysis we chose to perform. These were expenses we’d have whether we were on a cruise, temporarily living in Spain, or on a safari in Africa that didn’t include travel expenses.
  1. Taxes: federal, state and property, if applicable
  2. Groceries: to include specialty items for our restrictive organic, gluten-free, low carbohydrate, sugar-free, wheat, and grain-free way of eating. All meals are homemade (no processed foods) utilizing grass-fed meat and poultry with organic produce, dairy, and eggs.
  3. Health: insurance premiums, co-pays, prescriptions, dental, vision, supplements 
  4. Other insurance 
  5. A cellphone (one between us):
  6. Clothing, personal effects, toiletries, and grooming (all items discounted and purchased at the best possible price)
  7. Gifts: for family members/friends for birthdays/holidays, postage
  8. Banking fees: interest on credit cards, if applicable
  9. Savings
Criteria #2:   Do not own cars!  (And resulting payments, depreciation, storage, insurance, gas and maintenance)

We will sell both of our cars before we step foot out of this country, instead of renting a car if necessary. While calculating our auto expense, considering the two payments, insurance, gas and maintenance, the total was $1523 per month, which more than covers all of our upcoming flights, trains, ferries, taxis and rental cars (three of our credit cards provide free rental car insurance when the card is used for the rental car charges)!
Then we took the “Fixed Living Expenses” and created an “Average Daily Expense” which, no matter our travel expenses or living arrangements, would always be relevant numbers in our financial planning.

Criteria #3:   Do not stay in hotels other than the short term! How is it possible to travel without staying in hotels? Sleep in a tent? Hardly! Rent an RV? Too expensive! Mooch off people you may know that live in exotic places? Never! Staying in a hotel requires the expense of meals in restaurants, tips, city, county, state and local taxes, outrageously priced cocktails and beverages, and of course, and the tempting “tourist trap” shops and services. 

Simple answer: Only stay in houses, condos, townhouses, villas, apartments, and other such property owned, but not currently occupied, by private parties. Property owners are often anxious to rent their own homes and rental properties at reasonable rates knowing full well that the distraught economy and worldwide strife has tempered world travel. We have found that we prefer to rent houses and villas as opposed to apartments, which are often noisy and offer fewer amenities.
Criteria #4:  Do not pay more than what we were willing to pay for rent in our chosen retirement community!   The above described $1500 month was the magic number that fit into our predetermined budget. How is this possible? Only $1500 a month for a house? Yes, the gorgeous 17th century, totally renovated villa in Tuscany, Italy is $1400 month! Yes, the amazing little beach house in Placencia, Belize is $1250 a month! Yes, the charming house in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, surrounded by the free-roaming wildlife is $1387 a month! We will share more about these astounding rentals as we continue here.
There is so much more to share, including the remaining Criteria, how to calculate total expenses, why we have booked five cruises thus far with two more waiting to be posted. How and why we have booked ahead 571 days from this coming Halloween, Tom’s retirement date. How we will experience the first 10 months of our adventure without ever stepping foot onto an airplane? 

Certainly, we have a “to-do” list that is daunting. Certainly, there is a degree of risk. Certainly, there is some blind faith that we are going to enjoy our new lives, free from all the familiar comforts that we have reveled in all these years. And most certainly, our love and devotion to one another will see us through all the challenges we encounter along the way.  

We have mutually agreed that if at any time, one of us is tired, bored, or tired of being on the move, we will stop and find “home’ wherever that we may be.

A dream is born!… Is it affordable?…Are we crazy?

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We are everyday people. We aren’t wealthy. Tom worked hard for 42 years on the railroad. My career mostly consisted of owning a small real estate company experiencing varying degrees of success and failure, always subject to the turns of the market and my own life experiences, ups and downs.  

We’ve lived in a fabulous lake house with the upkeep that sucked up most of our income but rationalized it that the joy of living here together was worth the expense and sacrifice. Our retirement income was growing due to Tom’s contributions and we didn’t really worry much about the future.
Then the economy burst and we, like so many others, lost a chunk of security while at the same time my desire to battle the failing real estate market waned day by day. I threw in the towel and retired eighteen months ago. Good grief, I applied for Social Security, after paying in for 45 years. It was hard to believe that time flew by so quickly. It was only yesterday we were chugging Vodka Gimlets and dancing at the disco.

I had often said that I’d never retire having loved the clients, the excitement, and the gratification of helping people make the biggest financial decision of their lives. It was now over. I felt sad. What would I do but wrap myself up in the eventuality of Tom’s retirement?

My goal was to come up with some ideas to present to my exhausted husband on the weekends who still working twelve-hour days this late in his career, along with the two hours of driving time. I had felt a little guilty being home, not contributing more than packing his three-meal-lunch each day and the basic, relatively easy everyday running of our two-person household.

The days until Tom’s upcoming retirement had been a daily reminder in an app I had installed on my DroidX phone, Retirement Countdown Free that today says: 7 months, 16 days. I look at it every day. It doesn’t seem to move. But it does. It’s Halloween. I keep counting on my fingers to ensure it is accurate. It is.

Strangely, during this time, we negotiated a deal, albeit at a loss, to be rid of our house to free us to move on. Not what we had wished. We knew that living on a retirement pension the upkeep would be prohibitive forcing us to live the last third of our lives in a perpetual state of stress, leaving no room to travel. We hadn’t been on a real vacation together in over fifteen years never wanting to spend the money or to leave, or a beautiful home.
Invariable, Tom and I spent the bulk of our vacation time working on projects around the house, him oblivious to his skills as a hard-working handyman. He can fix just about anything. I have been “the helper” washing the insides of the windows, cleaning, doing laundry, and happily cooking our favorite meals and desserts (more fun when we weren’t low carb, gluten-free).  

Neither of us ever minded the definition of the stereotypical male/female roles. We grew up in an era when gender roles were more defined than today. We never fought it. We never fought with one another over it. We relished in giving each other the very best we had to offer, without complaint, without judgment, without “snipping” (in itself, the secret to our marital success).

So, as we counted down the days, each weekend we began talking about that which most Minnesota “Snow Birds” do; move to a warm climate in an income tax-free state, downsize our “stuff,” sadly say goodbye to our family and friends, sell one of the two cars, and occasionally go on a Viking River Cruise with other “old timers” like ourselves.  

We finally relented buying the proverbial AARP card, good for a full five years. Wow, we can get a discount at Denny’s in Las Vegas, Perkins in Rapid City, or Old Country Buffet in Miami! Here come the Golden Years! Ouch, more than those crunchy joints are hurting!

In our typical fashion of online researching of literally every thought, our brains regurgitate, we investigated best places to retire in the US,  buying an RV, moving to a retirement community, or simply renting a condo in Scottsdale, Arizona while we think it over. Although not an income tax-free state, the climate is good in the winter, the desert appealing for its mysterious beauty and the population not unlike ourselves. A good temporary solution.
On my laptop, an Excel spreadsheet in front of me, I plugged in formulas and numbers to create a “feasibility study” to determine our future financial life considering the average rental cost of a typical condo, utilities, groceries, health insurance, medical including prescriptions and co-pays, cell phones and Internet, food and entertainment, etc. We could survive, we determined.  
It was Saturday afternoon, January 7, 2012. We had just reviewed the numbers in the spreadsheet while sitting in our usual comfy chairs in the family room, the TV on quietly in the background, freshly poured frosty glasses of iced tea on the side table, the smell of pot roast in the oven wafting through the air (love that word!) and we looked at one another, our eyes locked in a gaze as powerful as an embrace.  Tom took a deep breath and quickly blurted out, his words running together awaiting my reaction and said, “Let’s not have a home and travel the world instead.”  
I gasped. I paused. I said, “Wait, give me a minute.” I looked at the spreadsheet. I removed the rent, the utilities, the car and its insurance, the annual vacation, and all the expenses that would go away if one didn’t have a home.  

I added back the following onto the new worksheet: visas, taxes and tips, airfare, ferries, taxis, auto rentals, cruises, food (eating in 6 days a week, eating out once), a monthly (or longer) vacation rental home fully equipped with kitchen and all household goods, entertainment, unexpected expenses and on and on. We talked. We giggled. We dreamed aloud. We accepted that our preliminary numbers were subject to change as we completed more research.

The pot roast was done. The time had flown. We inhaled our dinner anxious to swallow the next bite in order to say something more, interrupting each other, as we often do. We couldn’t watch the favorite shows we had taped during the week. We talked all night long. The remainder of the weekend was a blur, fingers flying across the keys in our relentless pursuit of more and more information. 

Tentatively, tempering our enthusiasm, over the next several weeks, we came to this startling realization: If we didn’t have a home, with its fixed monthly expenses, we could travel the world as long as we wanted to, living off of our monthly income alone, as long as it met strict criteria.

Now, two and a half months later, after hundreds of hours of research, we have booked and paid deposits for 492 days beginning October 31, 2012, with more plans brewing imminently. Planning is a full-time job in itself.  

The next post will include: the strict criteria to make this possible. And soon, the set itinerary thus far, the resources we have used to make this possible, the endless list of “to do’s,” the amazing people we have encountered all over the world, and most of all the preparation we are making for all the “what if’s” that we will surely encounter along the way. Then, of course, there are the “unknowns” that we choose to acknowledge exist and pray that our good sense and resources will guide us along the way.

Fearful? A little. Joyful? A lot.

Sounds glamorous but quite worrisome…

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When we decided to travel the world beginning this upcoming Halloween, Tom’s retirement date, we knew the tasks associated with changing our lives to this degree would be daunting. We have made a purposeful point of not getting caught up in the excitement by staying task-oriented and preparing for endless “what ifs” by playing our own devil’s advocate.  

Doing so has resulted in some sleep-stealing worrying one does at 3:00 am. We are not strangers to this particular effect of worrying. Last night we both lay awake between 2:00 am and 4:00 am, tossing and turning, aware of each other’s state, trying not to talk to further our alertness. Finally, we drifted off only to have Tom’s alarm clock startle us both at 6:50. We got some good worrying in!

We ask ourselves so many questions, not so much to put a damper on our adventure, but to maintain a sense of the reality of what is yet to come. “They say” that worry is a useless emotion. If worrying prompts or motivates one to take self-preserving measures, then worry has some unmitigated value.  

Fear in itself is a powerful motivator. Overcoming fear is next in line. The healthy self-love and appreciation we experience after overcoming fear are the greatest rewards life has to offer us in our continuing search for personal growth and self-discovery.  

Oh, good grief, does this mean we will zip line or bungee jump when we spend three months in Belize, beginning in February 2013? Or, will we ride an inner tube through the water caves in the rain forest, the roofs covered with guano (gee, I always wanted to find a use for that word, meaning “bat poop”, if you didn’t already know) while I am terrified of bats? Or, will we ride a hot air balloon in Kenya (during our three-month stay) over the Great Migration in the Serengeti National Park? Or, will we welcome a 275-pound warthog into the kitchen where we will live for three months beginning December 2013 in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, living among the wildlife with no barriers?

Warthog in the kitchen doing “crumb patrol.”
We won’t have to do any of these, but most likely we will do some of these, finding ourselves exhilarated by the life-changing experiences, to finally be “stepping outside the box,” taking the risks and reveling in the process together.

What if we show up at one of our many prepaid vacation homes throughout the world to find out that we were scammed, with all of our due diligence when no such owner or house exists? We’ll take a deep breath, get online as fast as possible, and find a place to stay for a few days while we figure it out. We’ll have lost up to three months’ rent, the maximum time we will stay in any vacation home. But, we’ll continue on, knowing full well that we chose this risk as part of the adventure.

What if one of the five cruises we have booked thus far encounters a storm and is unable to “drop us off” to our desired location a day or two prior to the end of the cruise and instead goes to a different port some 500 miles away? We will go to the next port, get off, and find a flight, a train, a ferry to our planned location.

What if one of us has a gallbladder attack requiring surgery while we are in a remote location? We are purchasing emergency evacuation insurance that will take us back to the states to our desired location or at least to the nearest big city hospital.  

What if our passports or wallets are stolen? We are getting second passports to be kept separately from my purse and Tom’s wallet. We have scanned all of our credit cards with contact information, driver’s licenses debit cards, and banking information to a secure cloud. All we’ll ever need is a WiFi location to immediately contact the necessary parties.

How will we, both gluten-free, not eat the homemade pasta, bread and pastries while spending almost three months in a 17th century stone farmhouse in Tuscany, beginning June 15, 2013? We will either try it and pay the price or, we will choose not to try it and instead enjoy the local produce and meats.


So, worrying we will do! And, surely along the way, we’ll be surprised, disappointed, scared, and “ripped off” asking ourselves how we let this happen, how we made this mistake, why we left our family and friends behind to seek out adventure.  

Then again, we’ll be amazed, enthralled, enriched, and enlightened and most of all, grateful, to be sharing this experience together for as long as we choose, and for as long as we can. So we’ll miss the ferry, the flight gets canceled, the mosquitoes are biting, the heat is overwhelming, we can’t get online, and then, the giraffes are hogging the road when we are trying to get to the grocery store!

A herd of Giraffe hogging the road in Marloth Park, South Africa (not our photo).

Snail mail solution…Tasks piling up…

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I don’t like snail mail. Every day between noon and 3:00 PM, the white rickety US mail trunk comes bobbing down our bumpy private road, the driver bouncing about, oblivious to the numerous potholes, the narrow road, and the little dogs.  

Living on a private road of six homes, situated on a narrow peninsula, the little dogs can roam freely. Sorrowfully, about 15 years ago, our little five-year-old Aussie, Bart, was run over by the then mailman who later commented, “Yeah, I’d thought I hit something but didn’t think I needed to stop to investigate.”

Had it not been for the second kiss goodbye to Tom that day that inspired me to follow him outside and kiss him through the open car window, I wouldn’t have noticed Bart lying dead behind Tom’s back tire. He would have backed up driving over him, assuming he had killed him. Thank goodness, Tom was (and still is) deserving the second kiss. 

That’s one reason I don’t like the mailman, the truck, or the mail itself, an endless barrage of junk indicating we are on some kind of arbitrary, categorical list that perpetually invades our privacy. 

The second reason I don’t like the mail is simple: about halfway through every vacation, I start thinking about the fact that this glorious experience has to come to an end. And, what is the first thing you do when you get home from a vacation??? GET THE DARNED MAIL!!! The therapeutic benefit of this much needed time away turns into a dreadful experience of wading through the annoying pile of useless paper. (We went paperless years ago on all of our monthly/annual/quarterly obligations).

After rifling through this mess, there remains perhaps one item worthy of a toss into the pile on the kitchen counter, which invariably requires some type of task in order to warrant its eventual disposal. I hate mail.

In my mind, one of the major contributors to my desire to travel the world is this: We won’t have to come home to the mail! Ah, but who are we kidding? Do you think it’s easy to get rid of mail?  Mail is relentless! Mail seeks and finds. There is no freedom from the mail!

So, when we started making the daunting “to do” list that will make this many years-long adventure possible, at the very top is “what do we do about the mail?”  

It’s not that simple. One might think we should get a PO box, sending all the mail there. No, this won’t work.  It piles up and then what? Have a family member collect it, go through it, and send it to us? No, that’s too much to ask with everyone’s busy lives and their own mail to contend with. 

Every dilemma has a solution, right? We’re assigning a mail forwarding company the task of our mail. They give us an address, receive the mail, toss the junk, scanning, and sending by email anything we may need to review and assess its value.  

If we choose to touch it for some odd reason, they will snail mail it to us anywhere in the world, overnight if need be. It’s not costly and requires little time commitment plus, partial mail freedom. Full mail freedom only occurs a period of time after one’s demise. We’ll settle for partial. Cost: about $10 month plus additional fees for scanning mail and for sending us anything oversees. One task, resolved. 

Now back to the required second passport for obtaining visas; the visas themselves; the scanning every photo we’ve ever taken; the international health insurance issues; the medical evacuation insurance; the immunizations; the process of renewing prescriptions; the packing of two suitcases each with enough to last us for however long; the disposal of everything we have owned for 26 years; the estate sale at the end; the international cell phones and new computers with an external hard drive loaded with 100’s of movies, TV shows, e-books; the ability to have Internet access worldwide; Tom’s retirement party; the comprehensive spreadsheets of all projected expenditures including fixed expenses, taxes, banking, exchange rates and of course, the itinerary including cruises, ferry rides, air travel, train travel, vacation home rentals, the safari, all of which is already booked out to January 2015.

Oh, oh, I just heard the mail truck bouncing down the bumpy road, the bobble-headed driver behind the wheel. I’d better go check it out!  Just think, only 7 months and 21 days left to partial mail freedom. Yeah!

Changing clocks…Changing life…

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Sunday morning we both jumped out of bed at 6:00 am with a peculiar sense of urgency to begin the painstaking process of changing the myriad clocks in our home. Daylight savings began during the night.  

Over the 21 years that Tom and I have joyfully enjoyed life together, we seem to have assigned ourselves, which clocks we each change, two times each year. We scurried about the house, mumbling to ourselves as we adjusted one clock after another, realizing that this will be the last time we will change clocks in this house, in this state of Minnesota and perhaps in this country.  

In 7 months and 22 days from today, our journey will begin. Tom retires on Halloween after 42 years on the railroad (I retired 16 months ago) and off we go to the adventure of our lives, time being relevant to us in the future only in terms of the time of our next cruise, the time of our next flight, the time of the next ferry, or the time when we move into yet another vacation home.  

As we each finished our last clock, oddly about the same moment, I said to Tom, “We need a domain name for our future website and blog.”  

He chuckled, and said, “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.” It’s equally odd how couples often have thoughts simultaneously. We never cease to be amazed by this phenomenon.

We had been mulling over some names the past month, as we booked our plans well into the future, knowing the time to document this process was coming near.

Last year, I wrote my first blog, WorldWideWillie.blogspot.com as our beloved Australian Terrier, WorldWideWillie’s precious life came to an end, finding solace in the process. With over 400 followers, we found comfort in their invisible, lurking presence as I wrote almost daily from Willie’s perspective, his final days, days filled with love, humor, and tears.  

When Tom returned home each night, I read him the daily postings, often crying a river through the sobs that welled up in my chest. Tom cried with me, unashamed by his vulnerability, a charming aspect of his manly demeanor that which I have always adored.

We chose to honor Willie by using part of his name, WorldWide, by adding a 3rd word beginning with a “w.” Sitting at our computers we looked up all the “w” words that may be available as a domain. We stumbled across “Waftage,” a word that means “travel gently by water or air.”

How perfect a word when in fact this blog will be about us leaving our well-established lives here in Minnesota to travel the world, leaving our grown children, including our six adorable grandchildren, other family members, our longtime friends, our amazing neighbors and all of our “stuff,” to be sold off at an estate sale… days before we leave on Halloween, 2012. 

This blog will document a journey that at this point knows no end, a journey meticulously planned to be affordable and yet rich in comfort, visually stimulating, surrounded by nature, filled with history, all the while enjoying that which we have enjoyed the most, simply being together.

We’re lousy photographers, but we’ll post photos. We don’t like tourist traps, but we will visit some. We don’t care to buy trinkets, but we’ll surely buy a few.  

Ironically, neither of us has ardently enjoyed “sightseeing” but, we will seek out those that appeal to us. We don’t like crowds, gridlocked traffic, loud noises, or waiting in line, but we will experience all of these.  

We are both gluten-free, wheat, grain-free and sugar-free. We won’t eat bread, croissants, or pasta. I don’t drink alcohol, Tom drinks a little, but doesn’t like wine. Tom doesn’t like to go for walks. I love walks.  Occasionally, we’ll walk.

Then why will we do this? 1. Because we have figured out a way to afford to make this possible with some creative planning, which we’ll share with you along the way. 2. Because we want to!  

More than the concept of world travel in itself, we relish in the concept of stepping outside the box; getting out from behind our computers with fingers flying across the keyboard with our latest preoccupation; getting out of our comfy chairs while watching one of our big flat-screen TVs playing a popular premium hi-def series; playing another rambunctious competitive game of Wii Bowling or looking forward to the next great homemade meal.  

We have loved every minute of our lives, whether hanging out with family or friends or looking out the window for another delightful morsel Mother Nature tosses our way: an eagle swooping into the trees outside our house, a beaver building a den along the shoreline, a pack of coyotes looking for “little dog lunch.” We have loved it all.

So, we registered our domain name early Sunday morning. We poured ourselves a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, topping each cup with a dollop of real whipped cream, and sat down at the bar in the kitchen. We both smiled, eyes locked on each other. The little crinkles around his eyes made a wave of something wonderful wash over me.

We both looked up at the same time to notice we hadn’t changed the time in the big clock in the kitchen. We both jumped up simultaneously, and said, “I’ll get it!” We laughed. We have all the time in the world.