Our perpetual virtual cruise will start in 6 days. In order to get to this place, this travel from cruise ship to cruise ship in order to get the most out of our retirement, there are important steps that we would have taken.
We decided that we would not maintain a house while we traveled. It just didn’t make financial sense to have an empty house that incurred expense and worry. Our house isn’t in an area where we could rent it out as an Air BnB. Perhaps if it was in an ideal location, this would be an option. Even then, someone would need to manage the rentals, make sure the house was cleaned and maintained. We expected that we would be downsizing our house anyways – so we sell our house and are in between homes while we travel. I cannot imagine ourselves as homeless – so saying we are in between homes gives us some security. This is a deliberate choice – right? Right!
We decided that we would only keep the best of our furniture and only those items without cloth. So we keep the bed, toss the mattress. Couches were sold or taken to the dumpster. We packed the items we want to keep in a storage unit except for our valuables. These we leave with our adult children for safe keeping.
When we decided to do this several years ago, we decided to let our cars age out. We are able to sell the cars and minimize our insurance expenses. We aren’t at retirement age yet, so some of our retirement expenses will be for health insurance.
There is so much to take into consideration. That is why we are doing this virtually before we really take the plunge!
Denise