Twelve Months Down the Rabbit Hole

Twelve months ago, my husband Dave, myself and our cat Edward moved into our Wilderness Travel Trailer full time.  It is a 27 foot long travel trailer with less than 150 square feet of living space.  A tiny studio apartment on wheels.  What an adventure we have embarked on, to say the least.

I love my husband.  I love my cat.  I do not love living in such a small space through the winter months in Oregon with my husband and my cat in a trailer.  When you think of a trailer you might think I mean a 5th wheel or a motor home.  I do not mean either of those. I would love to live in either of those, but I don’t.  I live in a travel trailer.

That is pretty much it… The fridge is like one you would have in a dorm room.  The shower is for small people.  And my trailer has not looked this clean since the day before we moved all of our stuff into it.  It has been a challenge to be organized, to keep things clean and to be hygienically conscious as I was when I had access to a human sized showed full time.  I have noticed that women that live in an RV full time (more often these women are RETIRED and not still working full time like me) have short hair.  I have very long, thick hair and refuse to cut it regardless of how much of a pain in the butt it is to keep up on.

My life is very different today than it was a year ago.  I am VERY close to being debt free.  THAT is why we embarked on this path to begin with.  We (Husband and I) were looking for an alternative to renting.  We were tired of paying 70% of our income towards our cost of housing.  I know that renting expenses are high in most of the country.  But where we live in the Portland Metro Area of Oregon, it is insane!  Our rent on our 2 bedroom apartment had been going up every year when our lease was up.  Instead of getting preferential treatment for being good renters, we were getting bumped up $170-$250 every year.  By our 3rd year in this apartment we had seen over a $500 increase.  We were never going to get ahead financially or ever be able to save for a house.  When we took the leap from renting to buying a trailer (with cash, btw) and moving into it full time, we actually had light at the end of the tunnel.

Now that we are on the other side of our 1st goal – living in this paid for trailer for 12 months – we can say that we did it.  And, after filing bankruptcy last summer, we are going to keep doing it.  I estimate that we can get our credit in a favorable position to be eligible to be able to qualify for a house in 12-18 months from now.  TWELVE TO EIGHTEEN MONTHS FROM NOW…..

That can go one of two ways for me.  Yay, we can do this for another year-year and a half and buy a house!  OR…. I HAVE TO DO THIS FOR ANOTHER YEAR-YEAR and a HALF??? Are you out of your ever-loving mind???  Ok.  Take it down a notch, right?  I am torn.  Do I love saving money and having a goal focused agenda or do I love modern conveniences of showering and my own personal space?

I would love to upgrade to a larger trailer.  I think that if we did that and I had more room, I would be able to withstand the long, rainy winter a little better.  This past winter was hard!!  When we first moved into the trailer and started the summer last year, I felt like I was on a full time camping trip.  I love camping, so this was perfect.  The hot days and nights lounging outside, tending to my flower pots and drinking wine.  The day that the rain hit last fall was a sad day.  I had to put away all of the patio furniture and vacate the great outdoors.  I traded in my lush, sunny garden for the small cluttered trailer.  I felt like a prisoner locked up in a tiny tin box.  Now that the weather is turning nicer again I can feel my spirit lift and my camping goddess has reemerged.

My husband is telling me to stay the course and don’t veer from the mission of being debt free – meaning, we are not upgrading and getting into a monthly payment situation.  I guess we will see who wins this battle.  We are saving a ton of money every month so I know we can afford a small payment.  It is going to come down to what he wants to face in the fall – spending money on a bigger trailer or having to live with me being locked up in the tiny tin box for another winter.  I will keep you posted!

Thanks for reading and I promise – as I am back outside enjoying my camping life, I will write more!

Cheers,

Michelle

 

My little fabulous life

I had a breakthrough this week.  I really, really, really freaking love my life!  Let me rewind…

About a month ago, a coworker came up to me and asked if I liked dogs. Of course!  I love dogs and dogs love me.  She was planning a vacation with her family and hates boarding her dog.  Or, her dog hates being boarded.  At any way you look at it, she needed a dog sitter.  She was generously offering me cash to stay at her ginormous house with her dog.  I happily accepted.

I started fantasizing about long showers, cooking multiple dishes and doing laundry at my leisure.  I talked to my husband about the offer.  I made sure he knew that I would be staying at the house overnight for about 10 days.  (He forgot entirely about this conversation when the first night came…)  The night before they left on their vacation I met the potential house host, Madison.  She is a larger dog with unknown origins that is very pack oriented, loves her humans and loves food.  I knew we would get along perfectly.

The house is huge and in a very nicely manicured neighborhood that is only about 2 blocks from my trailer park.  As I got settled the first night – meaning I took about an hour long shower and did 3 loads of laundry while polishing off a bottle of wine, I started feeling uncomfortable about the amount of space I was in.  I mean, after a little more than 3 months of living in my trailer (150 square feet of space) I am really not used to having room to roam. In this massive 3000 square foot home, I was feeling a little lost.  As I climbed into the Beauty Rest Sleep number king sized bed with just me and Madison, I was really feeling awkward.  I must have laid there for an hour just listening to the echos of the silence.  The next day I got up and went straight to my trailer to just sit and re-group.  As I sat there that first day, I felt home. I didn’t want to go back to that house – ever!  I knew that this was going to be a challenging week.  I decided that I would need to find balance between the two spots.  Every day and night since this adventure started, I go home to the trailer for lunch to hang out with the kitty.  Then after work I go to the house and walk the dog then head back to the trailer for a couple hours before heading back to the house. Not to mention my cat, Edward is also very pack oriented and misses his mama intensely.  With the husband on the road for work during the week, he gets pretty lonely.

Now that I am at the end of my Madison sitting adventure, I am so excited to get back to the trailer full time. I have been wanting to go camping or take a beach trip all summer.  But, after the last 10 days, I just want to be home.  I can honestly say that this was a good week to put things into perspective.  Of course I miss the conveniences of conventional housing – having a yard, a full size fridge, city plumbing – but what I don’t miss is all the room to keep stuff that I don’t need.  I don’t need a garage.  I liked having a garage when I had one – especially in Oregon when it rains 9 months out of the year.  But, when I did have a garage I would fight with my husband over the space.  He wanted to convert it into a man cave or a full time wood shop.  During the summer I parked my car on the street so that he could utilize the space, that was our compromise.  But how many people actually use their garage to park their car?  I know the house I am staying in for my co-worker is packed to the gills with stuff.  I had that much stuff at one point.  I had 15 boxes of Christmas decorations, 5 boxes of memories from my kids childhood and shelves crammed with camping gear, paperwork, tools and other crap I didn’t even need. Now that I don’t have that space, I don’t have all of the crap to fill it.

My kitchen was full of every gadget you could think of.  Every appliance and do-dad that you can only buy on TV.  I had at least 15 wooden spoons.  Who needs that many spoons?  You use it, wash it and use it again.  What are the chances that I am going to have 15 different dishes going at the same time that I need 15 different spoons?  It’s ridiculous.  I am even reexamining my bed sheet supply.  Do I need 5 sets of bed sheets in a trailer?  I think I might need 2. One for the bed and one back up when I need to wash the one on the bed.  Actually, I have just been washing the sheets on the bed and putting them back on when I get back from the laundromat.  It’s actually working out just fine!  But, I realize I might have the kids come stay the night and need to make up the spare bed – aka the couch.

What I am getting to is the concept of space and stuff.  I am finding that the less space and the less stuff, the less stress and the more happy I am.  When I sit on the couch at the big house, I look around at all that they have and all of the space.  Is this what they work for?  They have kids and have good jobs, so I don’t really think it even phases them.  But it’s not me.  It was me at one point – but for now, I am enjoying simple.  If I lost my job tomorrow, I know I have somewhere to live.  I can still afford the space rent for the trailer on one income.  We don’t have any utility bills or anything else that we would need.  That right there is a peace of mind that I have never had before.  Living paycheck to paycheck is stressful.  Paying more than 50% of my income was stressful.  Shacking up in 150 square feet of living space, nope – not stressful at all.  🙂

I think the biggest thing that I took away from this week is how grateful I am.  I decided that real happiness is anchored contentment in THIS moment.  Being happy now.  Being happy and content with what I have created for myself.  I love my trailer and all that it represents to me.  It represents embracing simplicity and peace.  I hope that you can find that same contentment in your life.  What is anchoring you to the “now”? Are you absolutely in love with your life?  And if you can’t answer that, what can you do about it?

Thanks for reading!

Simply yours,

Michelle – Penny Wise Living

Simple Pleasures Living Simply

“We survived the recession!” “The job market is back up!” “Unemployment is at an all time low!”

I am sure you have heard all of these discussions over the last 6 months in the media.  I have first hand experience on the topic.   Struggling with unemployment and now underemployment, a surging rental market that does not even make sense compared to my underemployed income, rising healthcare costs, food expenses – the list goes on and on.  It is enough to make people do crazy things…

Being a divorced, single mom for years and not having a college degree, I have struggled to find the right job that wanted my skills without that piece of paper to prove that I was capable, smart and had an amazing work ethic.  Since I brought up divorce, lets touch on that for a minute.  The x-man in my life was not a big fan of paying child support.  Ever.  But he was a fan of screwing me financially in the divorce.  After moving out of state and trying to start a new life for me and the kids (who are absolutely AH-MAY-ZING, BTW)  I never had a chance to get back to school.  I never had a chance to pay off all of the medical expenses I accrued while being unemployed.  I had found myself with crappy credit, a car that I had ran into the ground for 10 years and kids that I was sending off to college empty handed.  I met my new husband about 6 years ago.  TOTALLY opposite kind of guy – he would give his left arm for his kids.  And about $150,000 in child support – which we pay religiously every single payday.  With the bills, the child support (and lack there of, on my end) living expenses and kids off to college – what is left to pay off all of the other debt?  Shhhhh… bankruptcy.  What other choice do I have?

After my youngest kid graduated high school and went off to college last year, my new husband and I had another 6 months left in our rental lease.  I am a research girl – I was on the hunt for a new rental before the kid was even pulling out of the driveway.  But, with the Bankruptcy in the works and the bills still piling up how were we going to move?  Our credit scores were crap, we could not save a dime to come up with a down payment and our lease was coming to an end.  The Property Management company emailed me an offer to renew our lease… with an increase of about $300 a month.  WHAT?  $1500 for a 2 bedroom apartment with COWS living above us that sound like they wear cement boots every moment of every day and night AND are thoroughly enjoying their handy medical marijuana cards… video games till 2 in the morning and a dog that pooped in front of my patio and of course, it was too much to ask them to pick up.  Not to mention a parking lot that had “At Will” parking vs assigned spots. Cardio, anyone?  Let’s go grocery shopping and make 17 trips back and forth to the car parked in the back 40 to drag it all in.  No thanks!  I have a better idea.  Lets get the heck out!!

And the craziness begins….

Being in our 40’s and empty-nesting, we found the local Elks Lodge as a sweet spot to hang out and drink for cheap.  After mingling with the 60-something crowd for a couple of years and seeing how they survived the recession and embraced retirement, I started to get an idea.  If these folks can sell everything they own and buy a motor home to be their full time “home sweet home”, what am I doing in this over priced rental farm with the cows upstairs?

My husband has been talking about it for a while – I cannot take ALL of the credit for the idea.  I have to admit that I was stuck in the materialism zone and loved my stuff more than the idea of going to a tin box that we would live in at the RV park.  But one morning as I was in the shower getting ready for work, It hit me!  (All greatness manifests in the shower, right?)  I literally stopped mid suds of the shampoo –  I yelled out loud for no one but the cows to hear – “We are buying an RV!”

If you could only see the looks on my co-workers faces when I started talking about this crazy Idea I had. It was not possible for them to mask the fear and judgement that was so evident on their faces.  One of my co-workers was visibly disturbed.  I started researching that day.  I think my husband was even a little taken back by my new found enthusiasm about this project.  I had been trying to get him to look at rental houses for weeks.  The cheapest we could find was $1200 a month with 1st, last and security deposit – depending on credit rating.  So, I started hunting on Craigslist, RV Trader and several other used RV sites.

I noticed that there was an RV show scheduled in March of this year at the Portland Expo Center.  I was so excited!  I knew a brand new RV was out of the question, but the thought of walking around and seeing all of the options was going to be so fun!  Till I got stung by a wasp waiting for the doors to open that morning in the lobby of the building – but that is a different story!  An hour later after the EMT’s let me go when they were convinced that the huge stinger in my forehead was not sending me into anaphylactic shock, off we went to go get some research done.  I found the wine garden.  (Sorry, another story.)  Then we found a Dealer that was showcasing Arctic Fox.  OMG!  I fell in love with these RV’s.  Then I saw the price tag.  $40+ THOUSAND Dollars for these RV’s.  And that is just a basic.  What?  And the financing options…. 15 year loans? I don’t even want to talk about what that amounted to with interest.  It was unbelievable. People were signing up left and right.

I am so glad they did!  Most people that are RV-ers, trade-in what they have for something bigger and better.  I love these people! If it was not for people like that bringing in their used crap to the dealership, I would be homeless right now.  The Owner of this particular dealership was super nice.  He wanted to run our credit, just for kicks and giggles I guess.  I knew it would be bad and I was right.  I wrote them a $100 check to hold the beautiful Arctic Fox that I fell in love with and pictured myself sitting on that little couch, watching “the Biggest Looser” next year.  I kissed my trailer when we left and assured him that a new mommy would come along with amazing credit to take him home.  After saying my good byes, we left.  That following Wednesday the husband called me at work to tell me (shocker) that we did not qualify for a 15 year loan for my little fox.  But, the owner called him personally to ask us to come by the dealership sometime and see what trade in’s would be dropped off from the people that were purchasing the pretty new trailers at the show.  Husband was super discouraged and much more let down than I was.

The kids came home for spring break in the next few weeks and were going to bus it back down to school on a Saturday.  I had been sick, so the amazing Mr. Husband offered to drop them off for me at the station while I slept in.  About an hour later he called me very excited.  He went by the dealership and shopped around checking out the trade in’s that had been coming in since the RV Show a few weeks prior.  He found a deal.

An older couple had literally just pulled in when he did with their 2006 model.  The owner saw the husband scoping it out and went over to say hi.  He told the guy that we had been looking online for deals and were pretty discouraged at how expensive everything was.  He gave him a run down on the Bankruptcy and our current financial situation.  We had previously discussed that if we were going to do this, it was going to be a cash deal.  We came up with $5,000 that we could pull together with paychecks and selling everything we own.  When the husband called, he spoke the magic number.  We were going to get it for $5,000!  He put $500 down as a deposit and signed a promise to pay the rest by the end of the next month.  We had 4 weeks and a few days to come up with $4,500.  I went to work.

I started packing and selling like a mad woman.  Craigslist, Facebook Groups and a new ap I learned about called “Offer Up” were my tools.  We made more than $5,000 and paid off the trailer and moved into it a week earlier than scheduled. We handed in the keys to our rental on April 24th and headed to the trailer park to start our new life.

I could not be happier with our decision.  It was such a whirlwind adventure in April getting rid of so much and downsizing to what we actually needed with us at the trailer.  We still have some things in storage that we didn’t get a chance to sell yet and not everything fits in the trailer the way I had envisioned it.  But I can tell you that I appreciate the space I do have and the items I thought I needed, I really don’t need at all.

I decided to start this blog to share the wisdom of the initial experience and the things I am learning along the way.  Now that we have been in the little tin house for almost 2 months, I am really starting to figure things out.  I hope that this blog inspires people to take the jump to smaller housing and simple living, and also to connect with people that have experience to share.  I hope you enjoy the blog and please let me know if you do!

Simply Yours,

Michelle