We’ve been asked so many times about our blog or social media pages. Needless to say, we haven’t had anything until now and haven’t posted on anything other than our personal Facebook pages. So, this blog was been born based on that type of feedback! We are excited to start sharing our journey, experiences, life lessons, stories (good and bad), struggles and so much more. So, WELCOME!
We started the Fulltime RV Life on August 31, 2023 and we’ve literally been from one end of the country to the other! We have so much to share with you guys and we hope you enjoy. Please feel free to shoot us an email and check out our Facebook and Instagram pages, @GetawayGosses.
As I sit here in Bar Harbor, ME at 10:30 pm on a Saturday night, nearly 1 year to-date that we sold our house and bought our home on wheels, I think about everywhere we’ve been. The unique situations, all of the life lessons Aiden has already learned, all of the memories and all of the future stops ahead. I am humbled to say I wouldn’t have done much of anything differently!
Let’s take this all the way back to mid-2022. WOW, so long ago it seems like! Lindsay and I had been going through several personal setbacks, family member issues, and facing some challenges with our son’s school as well as his peers. Given our hectic lifestyle at the time, we would often slip off to the Flint River for some R&R and that was where the whole idea started; after several cold beers and a lot of “what ifs”. We decided to give it whirl!
We ultimately didn’t have the actual plan at that time, but over a 6-month period, we crunched numbers, ran thru a ton of different scenarios and researched as much about the lifestyle as possible. At times we thought, “Are we doing the right thing?” But, life is short and you’ll never know until you try! So we decided to give it a go!
If we were going to do this, the first step would be that we HAD to start purging all of our stuff. We quickly realized this was going to take nearly a year to do! We had a lot of everything! We didn’t want to just throw it all in storage and we had quickly decided to sell our house. We ended up keeping just a tiny fraction of what we had started with and ultimately, everything fit in a 5’x5′ temp controlled storage unit!
We also had to figure out the kind of RV we wanted. We had been talking about buying a school bus to convert in to a RV, but decided that was going to be a project we didn’t really have the time to complete. We researched and researched all of the different types of RV’s and campers and ultimately decided on a 5th wheel toy hauler, but going with a 5th wheel meant I had to purchase a dually truck and sell our Jeep! That was one of the toughest decisions for our family! We all loved the topless and doorless rides! There is no doubt we will have one again!
After numerous yard and Facebook Marketplace sales we were almost finished with the “great purge” of the Goss household and had narrowed our RV and truck choices down.
Next it was time to figure out how to sell our home and analyze our current job situation. I had talked to my manager and my current position at the time was not a “work from home” position and Lindsay was in the same boat. With us not knowing what our job situations looked like, I went to Google and the plethora of Facebook RV Life groups we were members of. We both quickly learned that there are a ton of “work from home” job search engines and I’d say probably 50%+ are scams. Be careful with your remote, work from home job searches.
We ended up deciding on a realtor and ultimately decided to put our notices in and we left our jobs! I know a lot of folks thought we were crazy! Not only crazy for leaving good paying secure positions, but we were absolutely nuts for moving in to an RV to live in fulltime! I will say, it’s not for the faint of heart!
Lindsay had left her job a month before we sold the house and I ended up leaving my job on September 11th. I learned really quick that getting up at 5am to get ready for work was challenging because I’m not trying to wake everyone up but we just downsized from 2200 sqft to 399 sqft! In the meantime, I was going through some changes at work; my direct report manager was leaving and I had a couple meetings with some of the higher up guys to talk about what my future looked like with the company. I am please to say, as of now, I do still subcontract work for them as a data analyst/systems support technician. We did try a few Work Camper jobs (1 in Northern Cali and 1 on the Eastern Shore in Virginia). However, neither worked out. We’ll give more incite as to why in a later post however, we do recommend them if the employer can get you and your spouse/significant other on the same work schedules. This is a whole nother story in itself as well however, Work Camp jobs are positions where campground typically supply a campsite and no charge or in exchange for hours worked and a lot of them do offer a free site plus pay; just depends on the employer. Kind of a sweet gig if you want to stay somewhere for a season or so.
We didn’t know for sure exactly how we were going to bring in additional income or anything like that, at the time. We were relying on our faith in each other to make everything work out. That’s sorta how we’ve always been. I don’t care how much planning folks do or how much folks budget for whatever they’re trying to accomplish, the end results are always different! We crunched so many numbers and bashed so many different budget scenarios. A fulltime RV lifestyle is going to be a cheap as you want it or it’s going to be as lavish as you want it. It all depends on your personal preferences. I’ll write a blurb about this in the future, there are sooooo many factors!
Mid-August 2023, we had an Open House with 6 offers on the house. Super exciting but super stressful because we still hadn’t finalized the RV and truck purchases yet! We ended up accepting the best offer for our home with a closing date of August 31st! Sweet! But, the RV! the truck!? Still yet to buy them! I ended up finding a Ram 3500 mega cab Dually in Murfreesboro, TN the following week. Good! We got a truck now and we had to hurry up and finalize the RV sale; we had already decided on a rig but were waiting on it to go through inspection by a private guy I hired and it had to go through the dealership’s inspection and shop. We went back and forth with the RV dealer on some issues that were found and some other things, then they gave us a pickup date……. Pickup date August 31st!
Here we are, signing the sale of the house at 11 am on the 31st then immediately heading to the dealer to sign for the RV at 2pm! Everything we ended up keeping from our house was in the tiny 10’ U-Haul box van.
The RV we ended up buying is a 2021 Grand Designs Momentum 399TH, this is 45’ long 5th wheel toy hauler that weighs roughly 20,000 lbs. She’s a biggun! With the craziness of the sale done, I back the Uhaul back-to-back to the rear RV ramp and offload the Uhaul in to the RV! This was not supposed to happen; we were supposed to have the RV at the house a week prior so we could get it all setup. Once everything was loaded we looked around and there was no space left to walk. We still had way too much stuff! We quickly realized we were going to have to purge again asap. LOL, oh well, ya do what ya gotta do when ya have to!
Wow! That’s a lot in a short amount of time! Now we’re living in the RV, looking at each other saying, “well, we actually did it!” Now what!? We are pretty good at figuring things out as we go. But wait! There’s more!
Now we’ve sold the house, bought this 45’ 5th wheel, pulled our son our of school to be home schooled, and trying to figure out this new life we’ve started!
The “plan” was to park at our framily’s house in Madison, AL for a couple days to get things settled and organized! But that didn’t work out because the solar equipment wasn’t working properly and I couldn’t start our generator due the batteries being drained! That was learning curve number 1. We ended up settling ourselves in a hotel room for a couple days until we could secure a camp site. We ended up staying at Sharon Johnston Park Campground for the 1st month. This actually worked out well; it gave me time to learn more about our rig and allowed us to kinda get things in order before we took our 1st out of state journey!
With this all being said, this is just the beginning of an incredible journey.
Join us for this wild and crazy Journey! I write about all of the ups and downs, all of the good times and yes, the bad times. There are some folks our there that will think this lifestyle is “Living the Dream”. In most ways, yes! But as you’ll see in our future posts, there are some not so great times.
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