Making change; risk versus reward.

The 9 to 5 grind doesn't compare

Alicia and I are in a similar predicament to many other families—oftentimes, life feels like Groundhog Day, a weekly grind where nothing really changes. We have this urge, or desire, or maybe it’s both, that it’s time to add some excitement and meaning into life—further to the excitement and meaning that kids bring. Maybe it’s been the COVID thing over the last few years, maybe it’s the feeling that each day seems like every other, or maybe it’s because we feel like we’re not doing anything with our lives. I mean, we’re trying. When we’re not working, we’ve been putting a lot of time into getting a business off the ground. But it’s been a rinse and repeat lifestyle for a few years now—same routine week in and week out, feeling like we’re not getting anywhere or achieving a great deal. Alicia and I are both reasonably well travelled and, with Alicia having family in France, the plan has always been to frequently travel back to see family, at least once a year, and throw in a little holiday within the holiday at the same time. So, more travel has always been our plan. But, like most families, it was always going to be a cycle of working hard, saving your money, and your annual leave, and making that one big trip each year for 4 weeks or so.

Enter Alicia’s Dad, a somewhat enthusiastic YouTube watcher, who stumbled across Grizzly n Bear some time ago. If you don’t know of it, it’s a YouTube channel about Stephanie and Leigh, who are travelling the World in a Land Rover Defender 130. He loves it not only because they travel through some extraordinary places, but also because it reminds him of Alicia and me, as Stephanie is French, and Leigh is an Aussie—we started watching too and were hooked. And then of course with the YouTube algorithm bringing up suggestions, we started watching other videos, particularly those involving travel around Australia. We’d not really considered travelling Australia before—we had plans to see more of other parts of the World first—and we certainly had no interest in caravanning. But…this travelling Australia thing seemed to grab our attention. Before long we were asking ourselves the question—how do we make this happen?

For us there are really only 2 options. Okay sure, you could argue that there may be other options to consider, however, for us, it really came down to these 2.

Option 1.

Rent out the house, borrow against the equity and buy a suitable vehicle and caravan. We could get a decent rental return on our home, however, renting out a home is not always smooth sailing. There are certainly benefits, namely, no matter what happens, we will always have our home. But there are also a lot of headaches to accompany the security of knowing you have a home to come back to—bad tenants, ongoing maintenance expenses, and, the big one, we may not be in a position to be able to afford the repayments on a car and van whilst we’re on the road.

Option 2.

Sell the house. This is my least favoured option. Honestly, for me, having our own home, albeit with a mortgage, provides security in that for as long as the repayments can be made, whatever happens, we will always have a home. And I suppose we’re fortunate in that, in the current economic environment, repayments are less than what we’d be paying in rent. And when it does come time for us to finish up our travels, we’re sure to be looking for home to rent, and with that there is the likelihood of ongoing of rent increases, or the house being sold or taken off the rental market. A further worry is that when we finish up travelling, we may not be in a position to be able to afford to buy another home.

There are likely other options, or options within those 2 options that we haven’t considered, but again, at face value, they are the 2 we have. And with that, there are some difficult decisions to be made. I’m not much of a writer, but our plan is to release regular blogs and share our journey with you. Nothing is set in stone—we may decide that the travelling lifestyle isn’t for us, or, that our dream of travelling is either unrealistic or unachievable due to finances or any number of other barriers we could uncover. We really hope that there are many more stories to come, because that would mean we’ve turned this little spark of a dream into reality—let’s see where we end up.