What I haven’t talked about is what got us to this point. I grew up in a small town in southwest GA, moved to metro Atlanta in 1996 and stayed there until last year.
We had a house built in 2016 in the northern burbs and thought we had our “forever home”. All the time from 1996 -2020 I bumped around between 7 jobs as a journeymen “enterprise dev”.
My wife had lived in metro Atlanta all of her life. We got married in 2012 (both on our second marriage).
Everything changed in 2020. Our youngest son (my stepson) graduated from high school, Covid happened (didn’t fatally affect anyone in our inner or outer circle) and I fell into a remote job at BigTech.
When things got back to normal around 2021, we both realized that life is short and we wanted a change. That’s what caused us to blow up our life and we are both happier now that we really can’t acquire “stuff”.
When we left our condo in March to start our six month trip, we put it in the rental pool, it gets professional managed like a hotel room and we get half the rent to cover our mortgage.
We don’t own a car. We take Uber for six months once we hit a city and we have a Sixt subscription and we rent a car by the month when we are at home.
But you don’t understand the other part. I’ve done the landlord thing before. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever be a landlord again. The entire purpose of it was never to make money. But to have a place to stay for six months, a legal residence in a state that didn’t charge taxes, and for it to pay for itself when we are not there.
When we leave every year, we pay a one time $110 cleaning fee and don’t think about the place again until we come back in six months. The income comes in the same account where the mortgage is paid automatically.