It’s July 1 which means it’s exactly six months until we leave on our 5 year, 50 state road trip!
To say we’re excited is an understatement, but we’re also a little nervous, stressed, anxious and pretty much every other emotion you can think of.
I think we’re both still a little incredulous that we’ll be traveling full-time. Quitting our jobs in a few months and being completely self-reliant makes the whole thing a little nerve-wracking.
Less Than Six Months To Do Everything
There’s also soooo much stuff we have to take care of before we leave, which isn’t helped by the fact that we’re spending December in New Zealand and Australia. That means most of this planning needs to be sorted out by mid-to-late November, so less than five months away.
I’m making a list
And checking it twice
Hoping it turns out
To be precise…
I’ve created a checklist to help me keep track of everything that ideally needs to be put in place before we leave. I’ve shared it below as I’m sure there are many of you who dream of traveling full-time, but are (understandably!) overwhelmed by the whole process.
I’m hoping this list inspires you; that even though there’s a lot of things you have to organize before heading off for a life on the road, having a route map like this can help get that journey started.
Some of these won’t be applicable to you, but they’ll give you a good guide of what to consider before you start roaming.
There’s a good chance that there’ll be many other items I’ll have to add to the list in the coming months, so bookmark this page to check for future updates.
n.b. There are some links below to products on Amazon which are affiliate links. Clicking through from those links doesn’t cost you anything, but it means we get paid a small commission by Amazon if you buy something as a result.
Traveling Full-Time: Our Preparation Checklist
- Extreme minimalism. We need to let go of most of our items as there’s no point sticking everything we own in a storage unit for 5+ years. Check out this post for more on our minimalism journey.
- Packing. This kind of goes without saying. Part of this process will be ensuring everything we want to bring with us fits in our car.
- Get Prepaid / No Contract Cellphone Service. We’ll be using T-Mobile (I’ll write more about why in the future), but their coverage still isn’t as good as Verizon’s. We’ll no doubt end up in some pretty remote places, so it’d be good to have an emergency phone that’d still have service. That means either getting some kind of very cheap Verizon service (does that even exist?!), or using one of the MVNOs that use Verizon’s towers (e.g. Straight Talk).
- Get car up to scratch. Inflate tires, oil change, etc.
- Apply for credit cards. Just to clarify, I’m not talking about getting into debt – we’re actually completely debt-free nowadays. Credit cards signup bonuses are a great way to travel for free, so we want to take advantage of as many bonuses now as we can. That’s because it’ll be harder to apply for cards and meet minimum spend requirements once we’re traveling full-time.
- Auto insurance. We obviously have auto insurance, but I need to look into whether there are any restrictions because of how many miles we’ll be driving, moving around from state to state, etc.
- Redirect mail. Traveling full-time means we don’t have a permanent home address. We’re therefore planning on using a mail-forwarding service like St Brendan’s Isle, which leads us on to…
- Relocate to Florida. St Brendan’s Isle gives you an address in Florida and they help you arrange for it to be your state of domicile. This has a number of benefits, one of which is that Florida doesn’t have a personal income tax.
- Change addresses. Tied in with redirecting mail, there’s the long and tedious task of changing our address with every company we have a relationship with.
- Get a couple of LifeStraw bottles. There’ll likely be many occasions where we’ll want extra water while hiking. LifeStraws filter all the junk out of the water, making it safe to drink from rivers, streams, waterfalls, etc.
- Road trip planning. Decide what we want to do in the first few states we visit, where to stay, etc.
- Book hotels. In a similar vein, we need to start booking our accommodation for the first month or two of the road trip. That way we can take advantage of advance purchase rates that are lower than when booking last minute.
- Move out of apartment. This’ll hopefully be relatively straightforward as we’ll hardly own anything by that stage. However, we’ll still need to clear out the last remaining things, clean it, etc.
- Learn some new recipes. Eating cheaply and healthily while traveling permanently will be a huge challenge. Our Instant Pot will help hugely with that, but I need to learn some new recipes so we don’t get bored eating the same thing all the time.
- Keep learning. One of the ways we can afford to travel full-time is by maximizing hotel loyalty schemes and credit card reward programs. These change all the time, so it’s important to stay up-to-date with what’s going on. Check out our recommended sites page for a list of many sites I read.
- Get healthy. One of my goals this year was to exercise more and lose weight before the road trip. It’ll be easy to eat junk and not exercise while traveling, so I’m trying to get into good habits now in the hope that I’ll continue them on the road. I’m down 11 lbs so far but would love to lose even more before we go.
- Save money. Although our income from all my websites should cover our expenses each month, we’re trying to build a $30,000 savings buffer just in case. That’s close to our budget for an entire year, so we’d be able to keep traveling even if our regular income dried up for some reason.
- Get AAA cover. We have roadside assistance cover through our auto insurance which is cheaper than AAA. However, we’re planning on cancelling that before the road trip and taking out AAA cover instead. That’s because AAA offers all kinds of travel and hotel discounts that should more than offset its higher cost.
- Use social media more. I know, this is a weird one and the opposite of what most people think they should do. However, I’m more of a lurker than someone who posts a lot on social media – my Facebook profile picture is from years ago. Now that people are following our journey, I need to get better about posting updates as I want to inspire people to travel more.
- Learn about tolls. We have an EZ-Pass which is used for road tolls in many states. Different states have different toll setups though, such as Florida’s SunPass. We therefore need to do more research into what we need in each state so that we don’t get screwed with high pay-by-plate fees.
- Wean myself off caffeine. Neither Shae nor I drink coffee (I know, we’re weirdos!), so that’s not an issue. However, I start each day with a can of Coke Zero and have two mugs of English breakfast tea everyday. Seeing as we’ll be on a tight budget, I want to cut out those daily drinks.
- Spend time with local family & friends. One of the great things about visiting all 50 states will be seeing all our friends and family spread around the country. That comes at a cost of not seeing local family and friends as often though, so we’ll spend as much time with them as possible before we leave.
- Research vets and groomers. Truffles needs her fur cut every couple of months or so, plus she’ll need to stay current on vaccinations for rabies, bordetella, etc. That means we’ll need to research vets and groomers before she needs to see them to ensure we can get her booked in.
- Prepare for New Zealand and Australia. As I mentioned above, we’re spending the month before our road trip Down Under. Although we have our flights booked there and back, there’s a lot of preparation we still need to do. Internal flights, accommodation and activities all still need to be booked.
- Train Truffles. We haven’t ever made much of a concerted effort training Truffles with voice commands. That’s something we want to make more of an effort with before we travel full-time.
- Car Supplies. We’ll need an emergency kit for our car containing a first aid kit, tool kit, Mylar blankets, etc. We already have all these things scattered around our apartment, but need to collect them together. Thanks to reader Chile for the suggestion on Facebook 🙂
Question
If you were going traveling full-time, what preparation would you be doing beforehand? I’d love to hear your ideas below in case there’s anything I haven’t thought of!
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