Skoolie vs. Reality

As I was trying to come up with an idea for my next post, a question we had been asked on Facebook kept coming to mind.

“Once the debt is paid off, how much longer until the Skoolie can become a reality?” -BIL 

This is something Bethany and I have been talking, praying, and thinking a lot about lately with all the insanity and uncertainty that has come with this ‘overreaction to the pandemic.’ We want to be realistic about what the future holds for us.  We have two paths we have been talking about; full time mobile living, or live at a home base and just travel as much as we can.  

If we were to choose full time mobile we have three paths to that.

1. Build a Skoolie, a converted School bus
2. Build out a straight truck
3. Buy a RV

All three have three Pros and Cons.

Living in a skoolie would be fun! We could build it the way we want it. There is a huge community out there to learn from and ask for help from. You can buy a used school bus super cheap. All that being said, we would have to build it after we bought a bus; that’s 3-6 months at least for the build time. School buses are only so tall and raising the roof on one is a huge undertaking that has the potential for a lot of problems. This takes away the chance for a loft that would greatly expand our living space. Also, we would be looking at a 35-40 foot bus which  drastically limits the places we can visit, as a lot of parks and campgrounds can not handle such big campers.

A straight truck can fix some of these problems, such as getting a straight truck that is tall enough for a loft so we could go shorter with more space inside. A shorter vehicle would allow us to get into more places, and we would still be able to build it the way we wanted to. We also would have a greater chance of finding a manual transmission, which is something both Bethany and I really like. With a straight truck we still would have to take the time to build it. With the little I’ve looked into them, they seem to be quite a bit more expensive.

If we choose to go with a conventional RV, we would move in right away. There would be close to 100 years experience into the design and building of it. RVs vary widely in price from super cheap to ridiculous, and if we were going to live in it, we would need one rated for 4 seasons, which are hard to find used, and still fairly expensive. An RV would come with a black water tank, which is something we plan on eliminating with a composting toilet. Finally we would either need a motorhome or a truck to pull an RV. 

All that being said we have decided to have a “Home Base” and travel as much as possible. We have spent a lot of time in the past month praying and talking about this. Although we are still trying to figure out what we are going to travel / live in, on the road, you now know our top three contenders for that, we have been working out just what “Home Base” means.

We have come up with some options although we are still working on new ideas also. We can Keep our current house and either live in it or rent it out, or we can sell our house and buy another, or most likely, find a family / friend to “move in with” and share expenses. 

Keeping our current home adds some stability and comfort to our plan.  We know the house and the property, what needs to be done to it and roughly how much it costs to live there.  These are pretty convincing arguments, but it also creates roots to this area. We would have to worry about security when we are traveling and always keeping it up.  If we keep the house but rent it out we would have another form of income, plus we would still “own it.” ( By, own it, I mean the bank bought it for us and we are paying them back.)

We have talked about selling our house, which we are going to look into, to at least see what we could get for it.  Selling our home would give us the freedom of being completely out of debt, meaning no mortgage even, and give us some money to invest in our future. We would at least have enough for a down payment on a new place but then we would have to figure out where that new place is. 

Which brings us to looking into living with someone else, whether we build an apartment on our property and having someone move in, or moving in with someone.  This is a crazy idea in today’s world and has the potential to be catastrophic if not done the right way. There is a huge potential for a ton of drama and headache, but there is also an extremely huge potential  for both parties to live a way better life on way less money, if done right.  We are willing to look outside the norm to be able to live a life that we design.

The last major thing, at least for this post, is employment. Do we keep a conventional, 40 hour a week, work for someone else, on their timeline, job; or do we work for ourselves. With a conventional job our employer takes care of a lot of things, taxes, social security, ect… That being said we would be limited to weekend trips and 1 or 2 week long trips throughout the year. You may think that does not sound too bad, but we look at it like “ That’s it?”  If we work for ourselves, we can work on our own schedule. We can take a month, or two, and go to Alaska. While we are there we can still be making money and getting to do something we have talked about since we got married. We will have to do some planning and save money for things like that and we will still have to work.  

We want freedom in our life, that is why we worked so hard the past 11 months and have been working towards this for the 1st almost 9 years of our marriage. We want Lydia to grow up and have her realize the opportunities she really has in life. We have had and are having a hard time looking past the indoctrination we received in school telling us we need to go to school, get a degree (huge debt,) work at a conventional job for the next 30 years to pay off the debt, buy a house we can barely afford, work another 20 years, and then retire and hopefully have some quality of life left to enjoy, ourselves. We don’t want that for our daughter. So we keep asking ourselves, “How can we build a life we can enjoy now?”

Prayer requests; 

– To finish strong paying of the debt

– That we continue to keep God’s will in mind as we plan our future 

– For guidance with our income sources 

– For Lydia as most of her friends move on to the big preschool from the little preschool and she isn’t