Going Nomad! Why We’re Hitting The Road

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Making Changes

We’ve decided to make some changes. Some pretty radical changes. We’re taking a leap of faith and buying a bus, turning it into a tiny house, moving into it, quiting my job and then traveling around basically anywhere there’s a road we can drive down.

Pretty crazy, eh?

Maybe we should back up a little…

We’ve Always Been Nomads, Kinda…

April and I got married in 2008. Since then, basically because of my career, we’ve lived in seven states and we only felt like we were “home” in two of them. We always joked that we were nomads, but we never took it any farther.

Eventually, we wound up in Ohio when I got a chance to work for a company that seemed really solid and stable. The job gave us a pretty good work-life balance and we started settling down. It finally felt like we had found a home.

Eventually, that job started to destabilize and it was taking a big toll on our family. We had just welcomed August into the family and the timing of his birth coincided with my work-life balance taking a big tilt towards the work side.

The situation got to a point that we decided we had to make a change. I’m a professional pilot by trade, so we started looking into flying jobs that would give us a better quality of life. It didn’t take long for a new opportunity to appear on the horizon (or well, over the horizon in this case…).

Dreaming Big

I was offered a job to fly for a small airline in….. HAWAII!! It was a pretty bold idea to even consider, but we were very serious about taking the offer and moving to Honolulu. In the end we decided to stay put for various reasons, but maybe that idea of taking such a huge step outside of our comfort zone planted the seed for us to be open to a even more radical move in the future.

During this turbulent time was when we first came across the concept of Van Life. We saw some people on You Tube living in vans and traveling all over the place and that just seemed like the best thing ever…if it weren’t for that darn “real life” that we had rooted ourselves into. We just passed the idea off as cool, but too extreme for us.

A few months later I got an offer to fly for a company a little closer to “home.” It was a great deal, so we took the offer and moved, again, to Indiana. We bought a house and settled in. To be honest, it was pretty great. The work-life balance was awesome and we were very comfortable financially.

The Turning Point

Fast forward to January 2020. Even though my job was pretty good, we still felt like our family needs just weren’t being met because of the demands of being pilot. We realized that our family dynamic just wasn’t going to work as long as I was flying and spending a lot of time and nights away from home.

It was also becoming evident that my job wasn’t as secure as we thought it was. There had been talks of layoffs at my company but we were assured that our pilot staff wouldn’t be touched. Well, guess what?

Right at the end of January we had a last minute conference call and it was announced one of our pilots had been let go. This really made us start to think about what else we could do. What would do if I would have been the one let go?

What Are We Doing Here?

April and I sat down one night after August went to bed and asked that question. What are we doing here?

Our answer? We were living a conventional life, bound mostly by societal expectations.

That question made us start asking more questions:

• When are we at our happiest?

• What do we think about where we live?

• Why do we need money?

• Where do feel like home is?

• What does our son need/ what is best for him?

• Are we contributing meaningfully to the world?

The answers to those questions made us realize that we needed money to support our lifestyle, which was pretty much “The American Dream” and not really in line with what we said our values were.

We realized we didn’t really feel like home was anywhere for us. We were home when we were together. Traveling, exploring, learning, spending time together as a family. That is our bliss.

The natural next question was, “What are we waiting for?”

Exploring Options

So, we started looking at our options and that idea of Van Life popped back into our heads, but this time we didn’t think it was all that crazy. We took a hard look at it, thinking about how it lined up with what we wanted out of life. It pretty much checked every box!

We decided pretty quickly that we could do it. We could live in a van as nomads! We were incredibly excited and couldn’t wait to get started on converting a van. The only problem was the sticker shock of what a good van and then it’s conversion would actually cost.

We found out that one of the most common platforms to convert, the Mercedes Sprinter, is around $50,000! And then another $20,000 or so for the conversion!?!? That seemed insane and pretty out of reach. Sure, we could do it if we saved up for five years, but we didn’t want to wait that long.

Pandemic Pandemonium

Skipping ahead to March, 2020, this thing called the “Novel Coronavirus” started spreading and the world shut down. My job didn’t fully shut down, but it was announced that I’d be taking a pay cut. This obviously was not going to help us come up with $50k to buy a van.

The pay cut coming right after the layoffs made us realize how vulnerable we were. It made us double down on taking things into our own hands and turning this dream of nomad life into a reality.

A little while later we heard about this thing called a “skoolie.” It’s the name for an old school bus converted into a tiny house. At first we thought, “No way, that’s too big and we won’t be able to get into the places we’ll want to park at.”

But, after a while we started to see that it wasn’t as big of an obstacle as it seemed. Lots of people were doing it and loving it. Plus, the cost of a retired school bus is WAAYYYY cheaper than a new, or even used Sprinter van. There weren’t many arguments against it.

The decision was made. The path was clear. We had some learning to do. We had some questions to answer.

• How do you even buy a bus?

• Would we need a CDL?

• What do you look for in a bus?

• How much should we pay?

• When should we buy our bus?

• Where would we put it? We don’t have space for it at our house…

• etc, etc…

At first we thought we’d take our time. Maybe pay off all our debt, save up some money while I kept flying, let our house increase in value till we’re ready to move into the bus, that kind of stuff. But the more research we did into buying a school bus, and the more the COVID shutdown took hold, the more it seemed to us that we needed to jump on this thing, ASAP.

Going For It

The fire was lit. We had questions and we wanted answers. We wanted a bus!

We were super excited. We felt like we had a clear direction and that we were doing the right thing. We had no idea what we were doing but we dove head first into researching how to go about making this thing a reality.

The more research we did the more excited we got. We realized that there was a wealth of information out there for us and we could actually figure this out and make it happen. We were going for it!

We are absolutely stoked about this adventure. Keep checking back for updates if you are too.

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