May 24th, 2010
I’ve never been a fan of “traditional lifestyles” and especially not the “American dream” lifestyle. Owning lots of crap, having credit cards, kids, spouse never appealed to me. This has always been hard for my mother to understand since I’m her best chance at grandkids but she’s learning to accept my pets as my kids.
Ever since we took to the road last October to live a very non traditional lifestyle in the Brougham (our 19 foot 1973 Dodge RV), Ross and I have been enjoying a complete lack of connection with the American Dream aside from Ross’s lingering car payments (for a car we don’t have with us), insurance and phone bills.
Lately this lovely lifestyle has been tapering off, especially for Ross. We upgraded our RV to a 31 foot trailer about a month and a half ago and today he is buying a truck to tow the trailer with. Both were used and very cheap for their condition, at least the trailer with maintain its value and the truck should, though depreciate a little depending on how many miles we put on it. Getting them used was non American dream thing to do which is great but not owning them, having them be partially financed through his bank, is. I always hate the feeling of having something I don’t really own, especially when its something I want to and should care about. It’s like caring about someone else’s pet just to have them move away later, you don’t want to get attached until its rightfully yours and in the case of the trailer and truck, they may never be ours at all. By the time we decide to move on to the next lifestyle, they might not be paid off yet and we’ll sell them in order to pay off the loans and have a few bucks left over. We will be taking good care of them because we hope to resell them but love them like my ’73 Datsun 710? Probably not.
I may never be able to get financed for things the way Ross can, but it is a definite benefit. I always think about one day owning a house in Argentina but I imagine I’ll be paying for it in money I’ve saved up, or I’ll be rich and be able to pay cash in a briefcase. Working for myself and not being much of a business person, or money minded at all, I don’t really include myself in financed America. I like owning everything I have and not having a credit limit larger than $150, for use only when I’m just that broke. I hate money and although necessary I don’t mind living without it for the most part, that being said, I would love to be able to travel without worry about money – anywhere I want and for any amount of time. This is part of why I got into web design in the first place. It was the only job I thought I could do and be able to do from anywhere (initially Argentina). Now I get to test the limits of it by traveling around the US but would like to one day be updating websites in Cairo or Australia. These things take money but I don’t think they have to take money that isn’t mine. Although life is too short to wait around saving up money when you could be borrowing it, I’m aware that I wont be retiring and will still be doing this whenever I can when I’m old, so, what’s the rush right?
Back to work! As always, I’m way behind!
I totally agree with money. I absolutely despise it. It’s like that scene in the Dark Knight, when Joker burned the pile of money. My heart smiled a little. I use to dream of traveling to a place where no one knew me and I could go under an alias name. Still working on it, but school calls me back to focus.