Up and Out: Packing, Budgeting and Leaving (aka Leaping Part 3)

Departure day! The last 24 hours are what we've been preparing for - jet lag, no sleep and exhaustion. Just kidding. Kinda. But we've packed and budgeted and now travel. It’s been a long time coming and we've safely arrived in Brugge, Belgium, our first leg of this trip. I’m extremely excited to spend a week in Belgium, and have been thinking fondly of my future 4 food groups: Chocolate, waffles, beer and fries. YES. 3 days in Brugge, 2 in Gent and 3 in Brussels, I cannot wait. I’m sure the resident food editor, Jon, will have much to say on the topic of fries and mayo – especially since he does not like mayonnaise. More pictures coming soon, we're only just recovering from the long flight.

FYI, this post will mostly be a catch-up on the how-to of long-term travel - or at least, what we know so far.

For those with whom we haven’t connected lately, here’s what’s up:

We left Portland on December 22, after selling the majority of our belongings, including the car, and packed the rest into a moving van to head up to Olympia, Washington.

We arrived at Jon’s moms’ house (thanks Sheryl & Dayna!) where we spent the week of Christmas. The moms are truly making our trip possible, by storing the rest of our stuff in a little shed in their backyard, and letting us forward our mail to their address. It’s things like this that really make leaving possible. A storage unit would have cost us over $1000/year, which is money we didn’t have.

There was quite a lot of business to take care of before leaving Olympia. But my favorite part (other than relaxing with family of course) was that our moving truck had a giant picture of a firefly on it (exhibit A in the giant picture at the top) – a serendipitous sign I think of good things to come.

Packing

Many of you have also asked how one packs for a year abroad. The answer? You don’t. Bring a few changes of clothes, buy what you need while traveling, leave things behind when you’re done with them. Jon and I both have 1 bag each plus a small carry-on size day bag. One of the books we read (thank you Garrett Downen for the recommendation) Vagabonding, also suggests this. The idea is to pack light. The biggest challenge for us was packing for 2 climates – a week in Belgium (same weather as Portland right now) and 2-3 months in West Africa, with highs of 95 and lows of 65. In the past I’ve found the packing list on OneBag.com extremely useful, and highly recommend it. I usually trade out a few things here and there. We also brought a bit of technology – the laptop and charger, our Kindles, an external hard drive, the necessary cords and outlet adapters (thanks BCA!), plus of course the camera.

Budget

I also have some budget updates, since we offer transparency in an effort to express that this kind of travel isn’t just for the wealthy. Both Jon and I can say with confidence that had we looked at these numbers 2 years ago on somebody else’s blog, we’d think, “well, no way can we do that.” The point is that we didn’t realize how much money we had, nor what we could buy with it. We also didn’t realize that by selling a few things, I could get rid of my debt and have the freedom to make financial choices differently. Don’t get me wrong, it took a lot of work to get here, and these numbers are a combination of our cash, savings, sales and lots of other ways we worked to make the most of our money. These numbers also assume that we’re coming back with no additional savings. Highly irresponsible in “today’s economy” but hey, you have to live sometime.

After it was all said and done, we left with the following assets:

• A grand total of about $13,500, which includes our pooled resources and sale of stuff and car.
• We also have some money set aside, which we will save to come home and set up shop.
• Additional income will come through my client work and any jobs we can come by on the road.

And of course we have expenses. Here’s where things are at:

• With the cost of leaving the country, final bills, the last car and rent payments and moving expenses, we totaled about $3585 of expenses before we even started.

All told, we’re trotting off with around $10,000. Europe is way expensive so after some crafty budgeting by Jon, we’re expecting to be just over $9,100 by the time we land in Mali.

$9,000 may or may not sound like a lot, but I can tell you that I feel rich with the prospect of knowing that I’m buying experiences from here on out, and that the choices I make won’t be whether or not to eat a Belgian waffle, but rather, what kind of amazingness I want on that Belgian waffle. It won’t be about paying too much for cable, or even if we should pay for cable, but which incredible art museum we should visit, or which bus we should take that will lead us to somewhere unexpected. These are all good things.

So the question for you: what experiences would you buy with $9,000?

12 hours until go time...

As my first post regarding food and culture, I am happy to report I have spent the last few days overindulging in food and drink as is common in US culture. Next: Belgium!

Happy Christmas

Merry christmas to one and all! We wish you the warmest holiday season with family and loved ones. May your holidays be filled with love, light and your own personal inspiration. We're spending the holiday with our family in Olympia, WA and will begin our international travels December 28. Best,

Jess & Jon

Road Music

Cue the audience participation! We're making a travel soundtrack and we want your suggestions.  Add them in the comments below and let us know why your song is perfect for travelers.

Here's our starting point, in no particular order:

• Senegal Fast Food - Amadou & Miriam
• London Calling - The Clash
• I Feel Like Going Home - Yo La Tengo (because we will at some point)
• Road Bone - Willy Porter
• Where Are You Going? - Dave Matthews

Let us know what you music you think we should tune into as we're on the road, in a plane or walking overland.

Endings & Beginnings

I’ve been thinking a lot this last week about beginnings and endings; about chapters in our lives and transitions from one to the next. Jon and I on the fast-track now, with one week until we leave Portland, two until international departure. Whether it’s jobs, where we live, and the people we see every day, there are endings, and new beginnings happening at rapid pace. We ended our jobs yesterday. I wrote in an earlier post that my job and my personal life had become a little too intertwined for comfort. And although the anticipation of the job ending was a long time coming (I gave notice almost 3 months in advance), the day came and went, the access to email and contact lists was gone, the work that was in progress is handed off, and the chapter was closed as swiftly as ever. Trust me, this is all a good thing. Having instant access to your work email all the time is a choice I made when allowing the smartphone to come into the house, and with its arrival the boundary between personal and professional time was even more blurred than before. More than just email, my job became my community, my lifestyle. And so been a long time and I got so accustomed to that line being blurred. My journey of searching for the me without the job has already begun. Now of course, the ending of a job doesn’t mean the ending of the relationships with the people - that for sure is one thing I’ll hold on to, regardless of wherever my new beginnings take me.

There are other chapters that are ending for me too – all with equally balanced beginnings on the other side. But I continue to believe that while things end, they don’t disappear or become less significant. I may leave the arts community for a short time, but the people I met, and the work we did certainly made a lasting impression on me – and I hope I contributed to it in return.

When I think back on my relatively short life, I think about the chapters, about the times that began and ended, only to begin again. As Jon put it while I was writing this, thinking about the past is a natural way of informing our present; and processing where we think we’re going in the future. Well said. What a change we have coming.

And so to stop boring you with my ramblings, since I’m apparently so deep in this mushy ending/beginning time I don’t actually have a point (other than to muse), I leave you with a reading from camp. It’s a reading that I jotted down many years ago in a quote/poetry journal that I kept for years. I realized the other day that the journal ended up in a recycle bin pile when I was cleaning out the basement. Bummer, talk about an ending. Anyway, thanks to Ruth Igoe from Clearwater for sending me the text. These are a few excerpts from “Beginnings & Endings” by Darcy Gruber, 1980 Counselor at Clearwater Camp.

“...If we stop to think about it, life is an endless stream of beginnings followed by endings, followed again, by beginnings. It is the beginnings and endings that make life really worth experiencing.

Here today, each and everyone of us faces an ending and a beginning…Some of us are ending one phase of our lives here and are approaching a new and different phase....This is the way of life and although it is difficult at times, perhaps, some endings are too hard to make - I would prefer life no other way.

Each one of us was touched by someone here and it is up to us to spread these new "touches," these feelings with others. Each one of us has also touched someone. We must continue on, gather more experiences and knowledge - so that, if we meet again, we will have that much more to share and learn. Everyone of us should realize the best thing we have to offer in this world is ourselves.

…I may never see you again, but we have found a place where we will always be together no matter how many miles separate us physically…And know that after every ending, there is always a new beginning.”

A Simpler Time...

I had a good week this week. It was busy, and I’m still waking up with headaches from working 8 hour days at the office and then going home and doing client work for my new freelance business (Stern Creative Solutions, Inc). But all in all, there are some realizations that I’m coming to in anticipation of cutting the cord of a highly-networked and visible profession and lifestyle in order to wander the world. Jon and I have been using up all our Chinook Book coupons that expire this month and decided on Wednesday to go have dinner at the Tao of Tea on Belmont – an old favorite. It has a special place in my heart, I used to go there at least twice a month for a stint and it’s synonymous with relaxing, reflecting, studying for school, or just being with great people in a calm and healthy environment. But, like so many things I used to take part in, I hadn’t been there in years.

So we went for dinner and got one of their comfy little booths. I was exhausted beyond repair, but just being there with my hubby, a warm pot of tea and delicious daal (and Dahl!), made me fulfilled in a way I hadn’t felt for a while. I kept expressing to Jon how nice it was, and how I missed going there. He said to me, “it was a simpler time.”

A simpler time, yes indeed, everything seemed simpler. But what happened that made now complicated, and how has it taken me so long to realize the dramatic shift?

The closer I get to leaving for our travels, the closer I come to some semblance of an answer. My job is pretty great, but when it comes down to it, there’s a direct correlation with when I started my job and when things stopped being simple. It’s easier to see because none of my other previous jobs, or even being in grad school caused me to simply not have the time or energy to do the things I love. During that ‘simpler time’ (which was not THAT long ago), I spent my non-work hours playing music, taking yoga classes, sometimes up to 4 days a week, reading, listening to and buying new music, camping and spending time with friends. My job was a good distance away, so I commuted by bike, which gave me another 1.5 hours per day of high intensity work outs. I was single, living simply and super healthy.

And looking back, there was a clear demarcation in 2008 when I started by current job. In 6 months, I was in grad school, in a committed relationship, no bike commute, out of the band in order to have time to study, and unable to make my yoga classes because of school and work events. In other words, it all stopped. And with the grad school came the student loans, and with the partner (who is now my husband, whom I love dearly) came moving in together, buying a car, and taking on more expenses. Without even knowing it, I was building the web of obligations that make so many of us feel like we’re stuck, without even realizing it or reflecting on what was happening.

But now that we’ve decided to deconstruct the web, the realization of all the sacrifices has been overwhelming. It’s no longer acceptable to me that when people ask, “what do you do for fun?” I freeze up and get all nervous because those fulfilling activities in which I used to partake are tucked away on some backburner that I can’t even find. I have to answer, “well, I serve on a lot of boards…? And… I like to go to arts things when I can…?” Ridiculous, Jessica Stern.

So as I drove to Tualatin today to meet my new CPA for my business, I was struck that my iPod, with the choice of over 5000 songs on shuffle, chose to play 3 songs in a row from R.E.M’s Automatic for the People. Ok, not only is that statistically unlikely, it must be a sign! I used to listen to that album ALL the time, when I listened to music, ALL the time. When things were simpler.

I think that if our entire trip fails and we get nowhere or have to come home, the very experiment of closing up shop and changing course has been a complete success. It’s allowed me to reflect, deeply, about the choices I’ve made over the last few years, and how those choices have guided my life without me really truly paying attention. I sort of let life take its course and now have realized, wait, I’m not doing the things that make me happy, that allow me to express who I am, this isn’t right!

While I never envisioned this travel adventure as a soul-searching mission, I can’t help but think that there will be a huge amount of self-discovery along the way. I do want to get back to the roots of who I am and who I want to be, and what better way to do that then to remove yourself from a static lifestyle and change it up? I’m so looking forward to the surprises, the unexpected, the new and the challenges. We really are seeking our fireflies, those things that give us light and inspiration, and hopefully as a result, I’ll understand how to live my life in a simple and tremendously fulfilling way.

Do you feel stuck? Do you feel like there was a simpler time? Did you have drastic changes in your life that led you away from your essence?

Leaping: Part 2

In my first post, I wrote about how Jon and I have decided to make our own rules; to change the playing field, and come up with a different lifestyle. We’ve been talking with our families and it’s starting to sink in how this philosophy is truly a departure from everything around us. Since we pledged that this would be for all of you who feel like you can’t leave your obligations, or your responsibilities, we want to be honest with how we’re going about this.

Jon and I haven’t been planning this trip for a long time. Indeed, we've known we wanted to go to West Africa for over 18 months, but the question of whether or not we could ‘make it work’ lingered for a long time, and so we never really committed to saving and doing it. Bad move on our part: If you don’t take the first step and make the decision, time just flies by and before you know it, it’s 10 months before you want to leave and you haven’t saved really much at all.

So we sat down and figured out the budget. It included the following for 1 week in Europe over New Year’s Eve, 4 weeks in Mali, 3 weeks in Senegal, 2 weeks in Morocco and 1 week in Spain, with all the travel in between countries:

• $2,300 savings from gifts received from our wedding, joint savings and some other random cash we pulled together
• an expected $1,100 from the ‘car fund’: money Jon gets from mileage and gas reimbursement from his work that involves driving nearly 300 miles per week, minus expected car repairs and maintenance
• $3,000 Jon’s personal savings money, after keeping some for reserve for when we get back
• $3,000 Jess’ personal savings, with no reserve for the return (yikes! I had credit card debt that zeroed out my savings awhile back…)
• $2616 Jess’ last month of earnings from work plus about $500 in unused vacation hours
• $2700 Jon’s last month of earnings from work

This is a total of $15,200 to start with, not including the sale of any of our stuff, our furniture or our car (which we expect to net about $3000 from).  Also, because we bought a one-way ticket, we were going to need to save some cash to get us back home if one of us got really sick, or we just ran out of money. So we calculated a months worth of really cheap living, plus putting down first/last month’s rent on a new place, which came to reserving $4,000 for airfare and the aforementioned expenses. I will make a note here that at this point we have no plans to purchase medical insurance while traveling, which does make us both nervous, but we can’t afford it… Stay tuned on that one. We're going to try and find some money to do this - maybe from the sale of our car.

Of course, that is for a short 2-3 month trip and we've decided to not come back. So now the key is not spending all that money and finding work for short stints in order to continue our travel. It's all about being resourceful, and we're looking forward to it.

So there you have it. What about expenses you say? Well sure, we have them. Here's what we're looking at:

• Student loans - we have 'em, but without income, they go down to about $10/mo, so that's $20/mo for both of us
• Credit cards - I have 'em, and wasn't able to pay them off before leaving, but we transferred everything to a no-interest card - it's about $100/mo, which is more than the minimum payment, but not by much.
• Phone - not sure what this is going to cost overseas. We'll take my smart phone and buy SIM cards locally, minutes and data will depend on usage. We'll mostly stick with skype.

Hopefully other than feeding, housing and clothing ourselves, there won’t be a lot of required costs. For someone like me who’s always had a lot of stuff, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to getting rid of it, going minimalistic and hitting the road.

Some people ask us if we're selling everything, or if we're storing stuff. Definitely storing stuff. Part of the reason we shied away from doing this in the first place was honestly because we were afraid to come back to nothing. But we've realized it doesn't have to be that way. We also just got a beautiful set of Heath dish and serverware, plus other gifts from our wedding. We also have a few pieces of furniture that we'll keep - things that will fit in a small apartment and we'll need when we get back. We also have some bigger things that we don't want to sell, but that others can enjoy on loan - like our tv, grill and the super nice washing machine that my folks bought us as a housewarming gift.

Looking at everything we have has really made us realize our assets. By doing an inventory of our things, and what’s really of value to us and what we don’t mind selling or giving away has truly opened out eyes to the small riches we’re living with, and how we really do have the freedom to let it go and use the resources from our stuff to start living our lives the way we want to. Hells yeah, that’s super exciting and so so freeing!

What things would you sell/keep in order to cut the cord and be mobile?

Taking the Leap

Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of planning a 2 month ‘sabbatical’ to travel in West Africa, my husband learned that his employer pulled a switcheroo and decided that they wouldn’t guarantee his job when we got back from our travels. It could have been an incredibly frustrating moment, because our original intent when we decided to take a trip over a year ago was to take a gap year; but we came to the conclusion we didn’t want to come back without the security of everything we currently have. So we settled on taking a much shorter trip in exchange for the comfort and stability of coming home to our stuff, our jobs, our normality. Sound familiar?

But instead of getting frustrated that we could have been planning something much different, it was a poignant moment for us, and one that I think we needed to push us to where we are now – taking a leap outside that normality; and banking on the prospect that insecurity could lead towards a stability we haven’t experienced.

Woah, let me explain and provide some context. I have a travel bug. That’s an understatement; I have an insatiable desire to see and experience the world and the wanderlust never goes away. As a nonprofit arts administrator, i.e. someone without a lot of financial means, I translate my lack of cash-flow and ability to pick up and wander, to the joy of experiencing and appreciating all things cultural in my own environment. Thus, you can imagine, working in the arts and culture community is a pretty good fit. The job is stressful, but over the course of my four years doing it, I’ve built an incredible professional network, a variety of experiences and skills, and a deep appreciation for the creativity of my community. Why should I want to leave? There’s just something about this life that’s been a little too rigid, too tightly controlled; honestly I feel trapped by my own creation of work-life arrangements.

Enter my wonderful husband, Jon. Jon’s a family crisis counselor working at a nonprofit. We work incredibly hard for our jobs, and like most people in our income brackets, just try to carve out the moments beyond the 9-5 that fulfill our personal selves. Like so many people, our student loans, car payments, bills and obligations make that carving somewhat of a challenge each month.

It seemed that in order to make it all work, to hold all the pieces together, to maintain our responsibilities, there was no way on earth we could afford to take a year trotting off.

And that’s where the blessing entered in ravishing disguise. See, we’d hit a point where we weren’t moving forward. We were just continuing to carve out those small moments, and not understand why we couldn’t save enough money to ever get close to buying a house, or paying off the student loans, or really enjoying the amazing place in which we live. We realized we were already going to be coming back from our trip to the same grind, but now with the stress of having to find work for Jon, so maybe it was time to envision something else. Maybe we didn’t have to subscribe to the live-to-work or work-to-work mentality that keeps us at offices, away from family and friends, with ultimately not a lot to show for it (not including my unsatiated need to see the world).  Why should we be bound to obligations we created for ourselves in the first place? If we created a life where we had higher bills, couldn’t we deconstruct that life and change the playing field?

While recently reading The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander, as recommended by a friend, Zander made a point that if you’re getting frustrated with the way the game is played, then make your own rules.

And that’s what we’re doing. Ultimately, Jon and I realized we haven’t been happy with our lives. We have a great set up, but there’s something that’s been missing. So instead of assuming that somewhere, somehow, with that better job or that key ingredient to “success” that we must be missing, we’re changing the rules, our rules.

We’re taking the leap; and I can’t remember the last time we felt so free, like the world really is our oyster (can we say clams? I don’t really like oysters to be honest). As of December, we’ll both be jobless (except for some bubblings of freelance work and other goodies, more on that soon), homeless, agenda-less and culture-bound. The best part is that if it doesn’t work, well, we just come home.

So this blog is for all of you who don’t have a stash of money somewhere; who don’t have a ton of savings or a trust fund, but who want something different from those that that say there are only a few ways to really ‘make it’ in this world. I can’t say that it’s for those that want something more, because really, this is about finding what’s enough; what’s enough to hit that sweet spot of fulfillment.

I look forward to sharing our travel experiences as we wander. I also look forward to your advice, feedback and thoughts.