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[return to "In praise of blowing up your life"]
1. scarfa+0m1[view] [source] 2023-06-13 07:49:33
>>jger15+(OP)
I’ve mentioned the last year of my life on HN where my wife and I decided to get rid of everything we own that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases including our cars and we became “hybrid digital nomads”. We fly to different cities across the US and stay in midrange extended stay hotels and stay in our own “Condotel”[1] the other six months in Florida.

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.

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2. beaugu+374[view] [source] 2023-06-13 21:21:43
>>scarfa+0m1
My girlfriend is an oncology social worker and sees patients who lament that they waited until retirement to fulfill all their dreams of travel, etc. and then got cancer and realized there's a big chance they will never achieve almost any of them.

For this reason we decided not to wait to live life and moved onto an RV two years ago and have visited 20 states and two Canadian provinces while I work full time and she works part time, both remotely, often over Starlink (as I type this now from a small RV park in the Yukon).

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