Right now we are closing in on full FIRE (my wife is basically FIRED now that she has finished home schooling our youngest, and just works a little at the restaurant that we work at/own a small share of), and I am working about 30 hours a week doing my pizza deliveries. We have assets of about 1,040,000 (that was fun to type in all those digits), but about 440k is our house. Once our kids, now 17 and 21, are fully launched and out of the house, say in the next few years (knocks on wood), with our assets having grown just a bit more in that time, and me being that much closer to ss (I'm 51 now) and wife that much closer to her mini cal strs pension (150 dollars a month eligible for her in 7 years), at that point in time FIRE really becomes more feasible.
It becomes really really feasible if we sold our house and followed a "location independent" lifestyle. What I dream about doing is something similar to what ARS is doing. Maybe renting apartments in different parts of the US for chunks of the spring and fall, spending the bulk of late spring and most/all of the summers in Europe (with some time in Croatia for sure as time spent there doesnt' count against the 90 day Schengen zone requirement, at least not now). A good deal of this time might be spent in some of the beautiful and restful Austrian lake districts, such as the Salzkammergut or Carinthia ( a land apparently unknown to most Americans who rarely travel south of the line Innsbruck, Salzburg, Vienna, when in Austria). Some might be spent in a busier city, such as Budapest, Vienna, Berlin or somewhere else, but with a nice balance, of several weeks in one spot, or more, thus very slow travel.
Fall might be spent in US spots with nice fall colors. November thru maybe March might be time for back to Northern California to see family and friends. If my mom is still living at her current home in this scenario, we could even rent from her for a month or so during this time, and maybe find a short term rental somewhere depending on where our kids end up living.
Obviously a whole lot of uncertain factors and logistical issues, but I just love the idea of summers in my alpine lake region (as a youngster back in the 80's I spent basically parts of every other year in Europe and speak passable German), interspersed with other European adventures, coupled with maybe a fall in New England, heading back to home base, family and friends over the holidays and winter months, when I'd rather be in California than most other places anyway. I don't know if my wife would go along with this, or if we would really enjoy this lifestyle once embarked on it, but it would have the advantage of freeing up lots of capital currently tied down in our house, and especially if we developed networks of places we enjoy staying over the years, the logistical issues would actually get better over time. As we travel more in the coming few years (east coast coming up next month, 17 days total, longest we have ever taken as a family) this will provide some trial runs of sorts of whether we would really like being in different places as a lifestyle.
Anyway, thats where I'm at right now. Anyone else have something similar planned, or finding too many drawbacks to doing this even if they wanted to do this?