Just over 10 years ago, we found what was supposed to be our “forever” home. It was on a quiet street in a nice, older, established neighborhood, and the house itself backed up to a lake. There were western sunsets every day. The house was beautiful, the yard was gorgeous, and the view was amazing. We hosted family get-togethers, and the house served as the home to which each of our children returned as they finished school, suffered break-ups, and needed a place to stay while they were getting their lives together. It had a two-car garage with brand new Jeeps inside, a long driveway with extra places to park, a library, a giant sunroom, and a swimming pool. When our youngest moved home with her daughter, we purchased the house next door, and had a tall, wooden gate installed in the backyard fence, so our granddaughter could come and go as she pleased. That’s the background. We had over $300,000 debt at any given time over the past few years, which may not sound like a lot, but this is the low-cost midwest, and with the salaries from our jobs, that was a lot of money.
We had actually been paying extra on our bills, via the “modified” Dave Ramsey Snowball Method (modified because we have a hard time following instructions to the letter, and created our own system over time) since purchasing the home in 2011. If you aren’t aware of how the snowball method works, we were paying the debt with the highest balance (saving the mortgage for last) first – throwing all of our extra money towards that debt until it was gone, then we focused on the debt with the next-highest dollar amount, and so on, until only the mortgages were left, and then we would tackle those last (We know there are other methods where the highest interest rate debt is paid first, but we found that to be overwhelming when we started). Debt snowball was the plan, circa 2012. Honestly, we didn’t have a lot of non-mortgage debt. We didn’t have any student loans. We paid off our credit cards in full, every month. Our home was older, and we opened a Home Depot credit card (not part of Ramsey’s plan!), using their 2-year-no-interest program to our advantage so we could make home repairs and renovations that were desperately needed. We even made spreadsheets that we posted on the fridge, so we could see our progress. The problem was: it seemed like there was always something that we kept adding to that debt – a hot tub, new Jeeps, and a motor home! I think at some point, we just accepted that we would be in debt forever. Yes, the debt was essentially under “control,” meaning that we made enough money to cover all bills, and have enough left over to feel that were were attacking the snowball. We weren’t. We were basically adding to the debt every year, and our debt payoffs had a lot of time between them, because we weren’t “gazelle intense” yet. That all changed in 2016.
When Dave is talking to people interested in his program, he talks about being “gazelle intense,” meaning that debtors should be so focused on paying off debt that nothing stands in their way. He tells people that they need to sell their stuff, lower their expenses, or make more money. In 2016, we chose to make more money. We began thinking about retirement, which was more than a decade away, and we started feeling the urgency to get out of debt and build up our investments in hopes of having a nice nest egg so we could enjoy that time when it came. We had this idea of having “time freedom,” meaning we could do whatever we wanted – including quitting our high-stress jobs for something we enjoyed doing – like travel. We had already started “selling our stuff” via eBay and Craigslist, and had sold the Jeeps and downsized to “paid off” cars when a box of collector cards found for a song at a garage sale started a journey that we are still on to this day.
We started seriously selling items on eBay – mostly toys, games, videos, books, and small electronics. We opened an actual eBay online store and started slowly adding items. Our sales that year were well under the then-$20,000 threshold that would trigger a load of paperwork from eBay, but enough that we had to see an accountant for the first time to help with taxes. All of the money we made from our eBay store went directly to debt. We didn’t miss it because we didn’t really see it. Each week, I would transfer the money directly into a business account we had set up at the insistence of our accountant and took drawdowns that went directly into debt payoff. In the early years, it was about $1000 extra per month (after obligatory taxes, fees, and business expenses). Later, our eBay income easily matched either of our W2 salaries, and many months, it was more. It was like having an extra full paycheck every month! However, we didn’t spend it on anything but debt. Our first big payoffs were the new jeeps we had purchased – each on a six year note! Interestingly, once they were paid off, we became even more motivated, and sold them for not much less than we paid for them. We purchased nice, older, used cars, and I would like to say we put all of the proceeds from the jeep sales onto the debt pile – but we didn’t. We were going to, but we had been looking into the idea of full-time travel when we eventually retired, so we bought a motor home!
It was a 25-foot Forest River FR3, and it had everything we needed. We camped in it for about a year, when we realized it was just too small for us if we were seriously thinking about full-time RVing. The following year, 2018, we sold it for the price we had paid the year before, which was good, and purchased another RV. Our current RV is a 40-foot 5th wheel, which we love. We got it from our credit union as a repo – the former owners had taken all of the seating and electronics, so we got a fantastic deal. We used it mainly in the summers, and have a group of friends that we travelled with – as time allowed. Our 5th wheel is literally a rolling apartment, and once we outfitted it the way we wanted, we began seriously trying to figure out how we could live in it full time. It didn’t make sense at that time to sell our home and move into the RV, but it was the final push we needed to end the debt once and for all, so we could. We decided to halt all “big” vacations and frivolous purchases (Covid helped with this, too). We spent our time building up our eBay store and paying off debt. Finally, at last, we made our final debt payment in January of 2022. Even better was the fact that between 2016 and 2022, we had taken over the management of all of our finances, had discovered the financial independence movement, and had built up our savings and investments so we could retire early. We did just that a few months after paying off all of our debt. Two of our three children asked to purchase our homes, and we will have steady income and savings from those sales for the next 15 years. We downsized over 50 years of stuff in three massive garage sales, and gave away as much as we could. We built an emergency fund that would cover over two years of expenses, and we moved into our rolling apartment. I worked in education, and will collect pensions from two different states, and Mike’s greatest retirement benefit is that we get to keep our health care coverage – which is fantastic – at the low employee rate for the rest of our lives. Both of us will also have social security, and we both have generous Roth accounts in addition to Mike’s work retirement account.
Our motivation? We just wanted to be free. We wanted our time to be our own, and we didn’t want to have to depend on a W2 job – nor did we want to give all of our time to those jobs. We made deliberate financial sacrifices so that we could have our time freedom. Many of our friends and family didn’t (and many still don’t) understand, and that’s okay. We wholeheartedly support the fact that this lifestyle was, and is, not for everyone. Once upon a time, I wanted the big house, the fancy car, and the fabulous vacations too, but honestly: that’s not me, and that’s not Mike. We are frugal by nature, and by NOT having those things, we CAN have time and financial freedom, which is more important to us than any “stuff” we can buy. Yes, we still have a home (on wheels) that is our base, and yes, we are still winding down our eBay operation, but our footprint is much smaller, and our happiness is so much greater than when we were living in 2000 square feet filled with possessions from floor-to-ceiling. We feel free and calm and alive. From this point forward, for the foreseeable future, our time and money will be spent on making experiences, not buying stuff. We have held over enough money in case we ever decide to buy another property, but for the next few years, we would like to see our country and the world. As I write this post from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, Mike and I are on a 20-country tour that will keep us away from home for most of the next few months. The financial choices we have made enable us to do this, and I hope our journey inspires you, if you would like to do the same!
We are Mike and Kristi, and we spent the last decade getting out of debt, saving money, and becoming financially independent so we could retire early and travel the globe. You can also follow our journey on Instagram at MKAlmostThere https://www.instagram.com/mkalmostthere/ and eventually on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6VD3QdcfN_2IIHkjk7V-Q