Downsizing Our Lives to Become Nomads
Garner and Phinny in the moving truck as we leave Los Angeles in the rear view mirror.
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It was a leap of faith to sell almost everything we owned, say goodbye to the friends we love, and leave the life we knew behind to become nomads, but it was absolutely worth it!
December 30, 2020
How do you make the decision to become a nomad? For us, I wouldn’t say that it was the easiest decision, but once we made it, life was all about obtaining that goal of living a simpler life with more emphasis on travel and experiences rather than owning things (like way too much yarn!).
I think it was around the beginning of 2016 when I remember sitting in our family room . . . very early in the morning hours (I was burning the candle at both ends) . . . in my pajamas . . . watching a show about travel on our big screen TV
. . . working on a project that had a deadline quickly approaching . . . wondering “Is this my life now?” I wasn’t really complaining and I wasn’t unhappy. I absolutely know how lucky I am to have the job I do. I get to knit for a living!!! That’s about as cool as it gets! But there I was, exhausted, wanting to explore the world, and feeling a bit unfulfilled.
Our home in Los Angeles that we loved, but it was time to say goodbye.
During those long stretches of TV-watching knit-a-thons, I was thinking about when our next vacation was going to be. Was my husband, Garner, going to be able to get time off work? How long could we be gone for? What cool things could I pack into that short amount of time? And did we really have to come home? It was more than wanderlust. It was a desire to change our way of living. I didn’t want to work to live, work to explore, work to adventure, work to travel. I wanted to work WHILE I did all those things.
My job is portable. I just need to be able to send and receive packages and have access to my email—that’s it! There had to be a way to make this happen. I grew up camping in our motorhome and those memories are some of my favorites even to this day. And so I pulled out my phone and I searched a few key words about working while living in an RV. I couldn’t be the first one to think of this.
I definitely was not!
This was a new trend happening all over the country and across many age groups. And there were a lot of people talking about life on the road. But I wanted to find out if I could actually work from the road. That’s when I came across The RV Entrepreneur Podcast and a newly married couple, Heath and Alyssa, who were traveling around the US in an RV and working from the road. I’m not a podcast listener, but I downloaded the podcast app and a few of the episodes. I listened to them as I sat in the ridiculous Los Angeles traffic to go anywhere that wasn’t the grocery store.
Heath Padgett recording his Podcast: The RV Entrepreneur.
Over the next few days as I listened to those episodes, I realized that my dreams didn’t have to be a dream. If I could convince Garner that this was a good idea, we could be on an adventure every day of the week (with my knitting along for the ride, of course). I wouldn’t be watching other people’s adventures on TV anymore - we would be living our own!
It took some long talks with Garner and a lot of running the numbers to see if it could actually be financially feasible. I started to figure out how much the costs were and how to make it work for our lifestyle. For the first time in our adult lives, we were actually comfortable with our bills and here I was uprooting all that we had worked for to become crazy nomads wandering the earth. I sent several emails to our CPA, a portfolio manager, and countless texts to my dad asking for advice on how we could make this happen. This was not a spur of the moment decision and it was not very easy to talk Garner into leaving a job and city that he loved.
That’s me as an 8-year-old in front of our motorhome with my dad, brother, and Uncle Rick. We spent a lot of time adventuring as a child in our RV.
After living there for twenty years, I had fallen out of love with Los Angeles. Out of love with the traffic, the noise, the pollution, the high cost of living, and honestly out of love with the maintenance of a big house. But I’m only 50% of the decision makers in our marriage, so it was a bit of an uphill battle convincing my better half that this was a good idea. Some might laugh at that percentage because I’m definitely the one with the crazy ideas, but one thing about Garner is that he won’t do something he doesn’t want to. If he wasn’t onboard, then it wasn’t going to happen.
We also wanted to break the news to our families so it wasn’t a shock when it finally happened. My parents were super supportive. They had no desire to travel to LA anymore now that they had moved back to Arizona. They would still come visit, but it wasn’t their choice destination! And then we broke the news to Garner’s parents, who were also super supportive. They live in Virginia and our vacations to visit them were usually short and during the busy travel seasons. With this new lifestyle, we were going to be able to see both families more often. Both our parents own RVs, so meeting up at campgrounds throughout the year has been something we try to do often. Now that the inner circle was in the loop, things were getting real and this massive lifestyle change was on the horizon!
Phinny loves being a nomadic cat!
There was a lot of work to be done and we had to keep the plans hush hush because we didn’t know how long it was going to take to sell the house (nearly forever, as it turned out). We didn’t want Garner’s work getting wind of the plans until we were ready for them to know. We set a goal of being out of Los Angeles by the summer of 2019.
The first step to downsizing from a 2300-square-foot house to about 244 square feet on wheels was getting rid of all the stuff we had accumulated over the last few decades of our lives. I knew we were going to need to rent a storage space. Garner is a musician who plays a lot of instruments that I knew he wasn’t going to be willing to sell. My goal was to get us into a 5’ x 10’ air conditioned unit near my parents’ house. If it didn’t fit into that unit or our RV, then it had to go.
Downsizing was actually easier than I expected once I got the ball rolling. I read many articles about how to downsize and the method that seemed the best for me was this:
On day one of the month, find one thing to get rid of.
On day two of the month, find two things to get rid of.
On day three of the month, find three things to get rid of.
And so on . . .
By the end of a 30-day month, I would have gotten rid of 465 items! Now an item could be as small as a pencil or as big as a piece of furniture. After doing this for a couple of months, I had found my groove. I was learning to detach from material things and it almost became a game. I started going into each room of our house and finding five things that I could do without and into the “garage sale” pile they would go! We had three garage sales over the course of that spring in 2019 and we had become kinda famous on our street as being the best garage sale in the neighborhood! People were even giving me their numbers and wanted me to let them know when the next one was!
Phinny, Garner, and me enjoying a beautiful day in Glacier National Park!
Downsizing clothes and kitchenware was pretty easy, but let’s talk about downsizing my yarn stash. THAT wasn’t easy! I had a stupid amount of yarn. Like, seriously . . . it was embarrassing how much yarn I had. The deal was that my tubs of yarn had to take up as much as or less than the amount of space that Garner’s music gear occupied. He had an organ, countless percussive instruments, a drum set, stand up bass, and many, MANY guitars, so I at least had some space to work with! I went through and made my first yarn pile of “must keeps” and then from there I went through a couple more times and had to really ask myself “am I going to use this?” If there was any hesitation, into the “garage sale” pile it went.
When you look at the goals you have in life, you make decisions based on how they will help you reach that goal. If you’re trying to lose weight, you have to ask yourself, “Do I really want to eat this? Will it help me reach my goal?” Based on those answers, you make a decision. Downsizing is the same. “Is this item something that I need in my life? Can I live without it?” and then you put it into one of three piles—keep, garage sale, or donate. I was on such a purging storm that I think Garner was afraid he was going to be put in one of the two latter piles!
The (crude, but true) joke was “our moving truck was packed so tight that you couldn’t fit a fart in there!”
Plans were going along pretty well, but as the months ticked by, we started to get a little concerned about our leave date. We had a trip to Tanzania planned for mid-August 2019 and we thought our house would be sold by then and we would be done with Los Angeles . . . but the real estate market had other plans. We hadn’t sold the house yet and Garner’s work wouldn’t give him the time off for the trip, so when mid-July came, Garner put in his two week notice and the rental truck was scheduled. We packed up the rest of our things, handed our keys to the realtor, and off we went to Arizona where our storage space, travel trailer, and new adventures were waiting for us! It was stressful to be paying mortgage on an empty house, but somehow we just knew that things would work out eventually (that’s at least what we kept telling ourselves!).
We have officially been nomads since August of 2019. Our plans for 2020 and 2021 were drastically changed thanks to COVID (so what do nomads do when we have to quarantine?), but plans for the coming years include a lot of travel around the country and to many places all over the world.
The view of our home constantly changes in the most stunning way!
I think that Garner would agree that we made the right decision. We definitely miss our friends and Garner misses playing with his bands, but the experiences we have had and will have make up for the things we miss. I don’t miss any of the material items we left behind (okay, that’s a little bit of a lie! I miss our big soaker bathtub like crazy!) and I don’t miss keeping up on maintenance for our house and yard. I miss our neighbors, my knitting ladies (shout out to #myvanityknitters), our friends, and maybe sometimes the LA weather. But waking up somewhere new, meeting new people, hiking in glorious places, and having the freedom to go wherever the road takes us is a dream come true.
Some might say we have downsized our lives, but the truth is, we upsized our way of life greater than I could have ever imagined!
Check out my interview with Heath on The RV Entrepreneur Podcast for a little further insight to the new way of life and how I’ve incorporated my work into it.
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