I thought I’d post an update to this thread, as I figured people might be interested in the aftermath of a case study discussion here. I returned stateside in July of last year (2019) and have been in the U.S.A. since. As noted in earlier posts in this thread, my original intention was to buy land somewhere and build a cabin. After I started this thread, however, I visited friends in Europe on an R&R, and a very good friend told me he worried about the prospect of me being alone in my cabin in the woods all day long. I believed I could be very happy in solitude in nature, but I did think about his words, especially since purchasing land and building structures was involving and could be difficult to walk away from if I found the lifestyle didn’t suit me.
Then another friend told me about a gap year he had spent in Australia after finishing grad school. He bought a camper van and had traveled along the coast and the outback, stopping wherever he wanted and taking gig jobs as he could find them. He said it was the happiest time of his life, and that he would be doing it today if he weren’t married with two children. And he encouraged me to get a camper van myself and to do something similar.
So, I came back from overseas in July of last year and bought a rig. It’s not a van; it’s a truck camper (slide in) on a one-ton Ford diesel truck. I’ve been living in it since then, and I have traveled from northern New England down to Florida, along the gulf, and through Texas. I am currently in the Sonoran Desert. I’m planning on doing this for at least a year, and my tentative idea is to complete a circle around the continental United States, as I want to go to Alaska in the spring and then cut across the plains to make it back to New England in the fall.
Regarding my portfolio, at the end of the year it was -- and currently is -- about $850,000. That’s after I took out $50,000 to purchase my rig, for which I paid cash. So I have no payments on the truck or camper and still have no debt of any kind. I spend roughly $900 a month on food, health/auto/camper insurance, phone and hotspot bill, eating out, groceries and supplies, propane, water, etc. If I am traveling a lot, diesel can be a major expense. My truck gets roughly 12 MPG with the camper on, and so I spent $700 on diesel alone in a week to get from Florida to California. But if I am staying put somewhere for a while, I don’t use much diesel.
I boondock exclusively, so I do not pay RV park fees, dump fees, camping fees, etc. I do not need to be plugged into anything; I have a solar system that generates my electricity, and I fill my water tank from outside hose lines. I have a cassette toilet that can be emptied in a residential toilet. My only utilities are my hotspot fees and refilling my propane tanks, which I do about once a month and which costs about $15.
So running some numbers, it looks like this lifestyle should be sustainable indefinitely (if I wanted to continue doing this indefinitely). I have only been living this way for six months, but if my expenses remain at the general level of the past six months, then I would guess I will spend about $14,000 per year, adding in a few extra thousands to account for incidentals and unforeseen expenses or repairs. I am not actually “trying” to be frugal these days. I eat out whenever I want to, but that is surprisingly seldom, as I have plenty to eat in my camper, and I actually enjoy cooking in my propane oven and on the range. Who would have thought? And I have always enjoyed little pleasures. A good bowl of Pho is something to be celebrated. The sun over the mountains is to be celebrated. I do not desire anything more.
Feelings of gratitude and joy in simplicity have come strongly into focus since I started this lifestyle. I wouldn’t say that I felt “gratitude” for the apartments or hotels I stayed at while in the Foreign Service, no matter how luxurious they were. But this camper fills me with gratitude. And I feel that way about a million tiny things now. In fact, I had better get back to the topic at hand, or I will start writing poetry. That is something else I have been doing lately, and something I have never done in 40 years.
Anyway, I also ran some Monte Carlo simulations on my portfolio -- assuming my portfolio would have to last until I turned 62, at which time I could collect a federal pension and Social Security worth about $30,000 per year -- and it appears that my portfolio would stand a good chance of sustaining a withdrawal rate of $48,000 per year. That is a simulation based on assumptions -- such as that I would only want/need it to last 22 years -- but it just illustrates that my portfolio should be able to comfortably cover my current lifestyle, with flexibility and resiliency built-in, as I could probably stand to spend more than I currently do.
Wild cards are if I get married and have children (and a decision is made that more money is needed), if Obamacare is repealed and a dystopian, medieval healthcare system is implemented which somehow forces me back to work, or if I just decide to go back to work or to do something else… or to build that cabin in the woods. I can tell you that, having had this time to reflect on the road, I believe I could be happy in a cabin in the woods, too.
What I cannot imagine being happy doing right now is returning to work. Not today. This afternoon, I got an email from a State Department office in some bureau in Washington, DC regarding a minor procedural issue. All I could do was laugh… completely disassociated. You see, I was looking at a mountain range in the Sonoran desertscape and was just chatting on the phone this morning with my former boss from my first government job. He has been retired from the federal government for over a decade now. He was telling me about his art and his home and community, and I was telling him about the desert and the poem I wrote last week, and he remarked to me that, as he thought about the universe and its many splendors… he struggled with an answer to the question of whether there was anything more ridiculous in the universe than a government bureaucrat. I might have had a retort a few years ago.