THE BIG QUESTION: We are all faced with the question of how long we will be on this earth for? Yes it’s a morbid question but I bet it has crossed your mind. For us we have had a few reality checks when it comes to how short life can really be and how our health can decline so quickly. These events in our lives caused us to think about what direction we wanted our life to head in and what our goals were in life.

Travel, camping and seeing new places has always been something we enjoy and we were always planning or talking about our next holiday or new camping destination. But in the back of my head in particular I was always like ‘ people don’t just stop work and follow their dreams, it’s simply impossible’! And ‘how can you live without working and pay the bills’? I realised I wasn’t asking the right questions I should have been. The questions we should have been asking ourselves were ‘ In my current situation how can I make long term travel a reality’? And ‘ What steps do I need to take to make my realistic dream a reality’? Notice I said realistic dream not ‘DREAM’ in that last sentence. All plans need to be realistic in your situation. If your dream is travelling in million dollar style, then your financial situation needs to reflect that.

So we looked at our situation, bank savings, job flexibility and how long was a realistic time we can and wanted to travel for.

THE PLAN:

Then we started our plan to achieve the goal we set for ourselves……. we knew we wanted to travel around Australia, to see America and if we were successful in finding work along the way to travel to South East Asia.

We wanted to dream big, but also have the reality that we will have to go back to work when our funds run low to continue our travels in the future.

Long story short of our planning process, we worked out we could use my long service and holiday pay and take it as half pay to stretch the holiday out. We decided to sell the house as use some of it to help fund our travels. It was a big decision to sell the house but worth the risk for the reward to travel for a large amount of time.

Our end goal is we wanted to be able to travel while we were both young and able bodied, to share the experiences of different cultures and history to our son. We want to create memories and grow ourselves instead of just working to pay bills and die.