Minimizing our life to what we can carry in 2 suitcases

7 Reasons we’ve decided to live in Airbnb’s for 1 Year…

My wife and I decided on a whim (sorta but not really), to sell all of our belongings in preparation to travel the globe. We are a two black women who have decided that there is too much about life that we don’t know and too little of the world that we haven’t seen.

We are over waiting on the break or miracle that should magically come along for the struggling minority, or should I say majority?

The circumstances that led to this life altering decision took place one Sunday morning in late November. I opened the front door and a hand addressed letter to the landlord of the home we are leasing fell to the ground. No stamp. No addresses. Just the landlord’s name. What did I do? I opened it.

The envelope contained paperwork for a short sale of the home and other alternatives that we concluded would only mean one thing for us… we were going to get screwed.

Where the hell was the twenty-one hundred dollars a month we were paying in rent going if not to pay the mortgage on the house?

Now I’m going to be completely honest, my wife and I have never really prioritized credit. Instead we’ve had to primarily focus on providing for our kids until they were on their own and paying the bills that kept a roof over our heads and the lights on. We haven’t had family to depend on financially which meant that sometimes we’ve had to make choices that have negatively affected our credit.

We’ve been surviving.

As a result, when we moved in, we paid nearly five-thousand dollars for the deposit.

So when I opened that letter there was only one thing that stood out to me with shocking transparency.

We were not going to get our deposit back. It was devastating to then learn via a quick goole search, that there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it according to Texas state law. As a matter of fact, if we decided to stop paying the rent and have the five thousand dollar deposit go toward the rent over the next couple of months at the very least, we would be the ones breaking the law.

After considering our options and understanding the consequences, we decided to stop paying the rent.

But we didn’t stop there. Why were we paying as much as we were for two cars plus insurance? Tina was now working from home and yet we were paying nearly fifteen hundred dollars for the three of these bills combined and because our car notes were consistently thirty days behind and we were upside down on both of the cars and one of the cars was starting to have some serious mechanical issues… it started to make sense to let one car go.

Initially I’ll admit, I panicked. What about our credit? A repossession on our credit would affect our ability to get things on credit in the future. It was then that my wife reminded me, “We’ve always had crappy credit, and gotten screwed because of it. Yet we struggle paycheck to paycheck to pay bills. How is it possible to get ahead while participating in a system that isn’t designed for people like you and me to live freely?

We have to stop participating.”

So here we are. Nearly one month later and we are really doing it. We have plans to live abroad at the end of 2020. In the mean time we are preparing ourselves for an adventure of a lifetime by living out of Airbnb’s starting in February for the following reasons.

Currently we are in the process of selling all of our belongings. We are also discovering our attachment to stuff. We are giving away and selling things that have become a part of what we’ve considered home, therefore a part of us. There is so much that we cannot bring along and if we stop to consider what we are really losing it would be debilitating; so we don’t. We sold our fifty-five inch Led TV for $125. Beds for $200. Everything must go, and at a cost that will make it go quickly. We listed our things on facebook marketplace and Nextdoor, the neighborhood app. Then we bartered with complete strangers over the worth of things that have somehow, over the years, become a part of us by way of daily routines and nostalgia.

Knowing that we have to find a new home for our dog has been the one thing that we’ve struggled with the most.

Unlike our material possessions, Jax is a living breathing part of our family. He was a baby when he joined our family and snuggled his way into our hearts.

Four and a half years later he is still our baby boy. We’ve struggled to find a solution where we can have him with us that doesn’t greatly reduce his quality of life. We don’t want to have him quarantined or kenneled underneath planes just to have him with us as we travel internationally. We realize that the best thing we can do is find the perfect home for him. We are taking our time doing just that but it sucks and it’s the one thing that neither of us feels very good about while readying ourselves to move.

As we’ve considered the advantages and disadvantages of what we are about to embark upon, one thing continues to excite us both. The pros to hopping on a plane and traveling without paying the overhead for two locations although we are only occupying one at a time. Think about that. When you travel, whether it’s for an extended weekend or two weeks, you have to pay for where you will stay while away as well as maintain your ongoing household bills back home that are constant. Living in Airbnb’s instead of renting allows us the ability to pay for the space we are currently occupying and that’s it! That frees up monetary resources to be able to stay as long as we want, when we want and wherever we want. We get to be spontaneous in a way that we never have been able to before. We get to live in different states depending on what we have going on in our lives. This possibility even has me exploring remote job opportunities to take advantage of our new found freedom. More to come on that later!

We are thrilled at NOT being locked in a mortgage or rent contract that consistently consumes a third if not more of our household income.

When we plan to travel, and need a substantial amount of cash to do so, we can simply adjust the amount of money allocated for our housing to save for the upcoming trip. Maybe instead of renting an entire place to ourselves we just rent a room for two weeks, freeing up nearly a thousand dollars! The point is that we can be as creative as we want to be.

This sort of planning gives us better control of what we can save throughout the year in anticipation of our move out of the country.

We can’t be certain the type of living conditions we will have in the different places we may end up living. We also don’t know how often we will move. Being always prepared to relocate or move on a whim is something we want to be ready for.

Like I said before, having a mortgage or renting seemed to be the only two choices that we had until we realized that this was also something that we could do. Hardly anyone is doing it, and for us that’s a good reason to give it a try. We feel that taking risks is a vital part of living, and not just existing. It also adds an element of excitement and adventure to the upcoming year that is otherwise missing. When we’ve talked about what it would look like to go back to life before we made this plan, everything inside of us screams, Don’t Do It!

We’ve always lived in the burbs. We don’t know how much we’ll like living in the city, but we’ve been curious about it and living in Airbnb’s is a good way to find out. If we don’t like where we are living, it’s really super easy to pivot and adjust. Would we like living inside an area that has a shopping center and has great restaurants and cafes within walking distance? Or would we prefer the quietness that typically comes with living further out and away from the city? Would we take advantage of what living inside a major city has to offer or would we continue to be homebodies making it pointless to pay for the conveniences associated with city life?

They say home is where the heart is, we’re about to put that to the test. We love our comfy king-sized bed. We love our kitchen with the ginormous quartz countertop with room for cutting boards and my Vitamix (I actually plan to take that with me). We are comfortable in our home, from the familiar scents that greet us when we walk through the door to the habits formed over the months and years spent living in one space.

Will living in different spaces feel like we are never home or will we learn to make a home of the places we are? I’d rather figure that out in the US to have some idea before living abroad. And what about mail, if we don’t have a permanent address what do we do with our mail? What do we write when filling out paperwork?

We have so many questions that we don’t know the answer to, but that’s ok. We will figure things out as they come up. That’s life, no matter how you choose to live it.

We know that the reason you choose to make drastic changes to your life is not nearly as important as the change itself.

If you are planning or doing something similar we would love to hear from you.

Related posts:

Some regergitate exact copies of what they have seen and heard. Others allow themselves to create new stories and ideas from what they have witnessed. Most are a blend of both. Art is not creativity…

An important component of overall health and wellbeing is maintaining good oral health. It’s critical to inform people of the value of good oral hygiene and the effects it can have on their daily…

Here is the Certified Information Systems Auditor Exam CISA Exam Dumps 2019. It is the most high rated Pass Guarantee Practice Tests, It has got 800+ Exam Question and Answers with detailed…