As I mentioned in this post, we’re a couple years out from our goal of being full time RVers, but that doesn’t mean we’re sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. Obviously we’re working hard on the financial end of things (I talked about our reasons for waiting here), but we’re preparing in other ways as well.

8 Things We’re Doing Now to Prepare to Hit the Road Full-time

1. Long road trips

We’ve taken enough long trips that we know we can handle living in a small space, but that’s not all there is to it. So many things are done differently on the road: laundry, grocery shopping, and food prep, to name a few. Spending time in our RV also helps us discover what we do and don’t like about our RV, and the same was true of our travel trailer. We now have a very good idea of what we want when we hit the road full-time.

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Not sure if you could handle spending a lot of time in an RV or travel trailer? Renting different sizes of RVs and trailers can help you determine if tiny house living and traveling is for you. Skip the big corporate rental companies and rent from someone local. Look on RVShare or Outdoorsy to find a rig that will work for you.

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2. Short road trips

We don’t always have time to take a month off work for an epic 7000 mile road trip, but we can still make the effort to get on the road as often as possible. Doing so keeps us excited about travel and helps us fine-tune how we do things on the road.

3. Downsizing our belongings

We’re slowly going through our clothing, toys, books, furniture, kitchen paraphernalia, and all the miscellaneous stuff that always finds its way into the house. As we get rid of stuff we don’t currently use or need (selling, donating, or discarding), we’re also earmarking what items we’ll store and what items we’ll sell when we hit the road. We’ll get rid of the majority of our stuff, but we’ll store our books and most of our wood furniture. Since we’re only planning on traveling for a few years, we feel that it’s worthwhile to store some things that would be a pain to replace.

4. Strategic purchasing

Even though we’re a bit more than two years out, we’re already being much more careful about what we buy and why. We’re asking ourselves: Is it something we really need? Will we just sell it or give it away when we move, or will it be worth storing? There’s definitely some things we’ve decided not to purchase because we’d just have to get rid of it, so it’s not worthwhile to spend money on it now.

5. Frugal living

We’ve always budgeted, but now we’re being even more mindful. What do we need, what can we do without? When we bought our house 7 years ago we cut the cord and we now only stream online. Now we’re contemplating dropping Netflix and just using Amazon Prime streaming, since we have a Prime membership that we use for purchases. We were down to three magazine subscriptions, but I didn’t renew two of them, so we’ll soon be down to just one. We’re so busy right now that we don’t have time to read them anyway.  We’re also thinking about switching cell phone carriers (we don’t have a land line), but we’ve been with the same company for 17 years and Jeremy is finding it hard to let go (he worked for them while we were dating). I’ll bring him around eventually…

6. We’re not taking on more debt

Both our cars are paid for, and while a larger SUV or minivan would be more convenient for carting the kiddos around, we don’t want to take on a car payment right now. So we’re dealing with the tight quarters until we purchase a truck or van to pull the Airstream trailer we’ll also be purchasing. When we reach that point, we’ll sell both our cars and our RV, as well as the house.

7. Trip planning

Sunshine and I are researching where we want to go on our big road trip (homeschool math and geography project for the win!). We plan to visit each state, all the national parks, as many of the national monuments as we can, interesting state parks, and so on. That’s 50 states, 60 national parks, roughly 357 national monuments, historic sites, and so on, and countless state and local parks. Definitely too much to leave to the last minute, so planning ahead of time allows us to consider what’s worth visiting and what can be skipped. There won’t be time to do it all.

8. Talking about our plans

With the kids, on my blogs, with family and friends. No one will be surprised when we do this. There may be those who try to discourage us, but so far everyone’s been surprisingly supportive. I think deep down, a lot of people want the freedom to be able to travel or pursue hobbies full time.

Do you dream of traveling full time? What are you doing while you work towards that goal?

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Interested in getting your own RV or travel trailer, but not sure where to start? Head on over to this post, where I talked about the flowchart I made to help you narrow down your choices, and how you can get that flowchart for free.