SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Sitting around waiting for the grandkids is a sad, sad scene. There's nothing good there. And all your friends have all the pictures of the grandkids and all they talk about is the grandkids? Yeah, I I would like to see some of this world while I am really free to do whatever I want.

SPEAKER_02: 0:17

So good. I'm free to do whatever I want, any old time.

SPEAKER_01: 0:21

Welcome to this empty nest life. Join Jay Ramsden as he leads you on a transformative journey through the uncharted seas of midlife and empty nesting. If you're ready to embark on this new adventure and redefine your future, you're in the right place. Here's your host, the emptiness coach, Jay Ramsden.

SPEAKER_02: 0:40

Hey there, my emptiness friends. Have you ever thought about downsizing and escaping and hitting the road in your emptiness life? Well, my guest today does just that. Carol Tice, an entrepreneur who specializes in building online communities, has taken her work on the road, and she and her husband travel the U.S. in their RV. Today we're going to dive into all things RV life and how becoming an entrepreneur has provided Carol the freedom to live out her dream. Carol, welcome to this emptiness life.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10

Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, we are currently here driveway camping in my cousin's driveway at our home base of Seattle, which is where we sold had our last house that we sold. We've been up here 30 years. We love it. But we don't love the winter of it so much, like many Seattleites.

SPEAKER_02: 1:28

And driveway camping. That's just what caught me. I love that driveway camping.

unknown: 1:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:34

So you escape the winters then.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36

Yeah. So we go down south. We did three months on the first run of it, did four and a half months last year, and now we're celebrating our first full year of being full-time in the RV. We sold our house last August, and uh we're we'll probably go for more like five months this time, five and a half.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55

Now, do you go someplace specifically or do you pick different places? Tell me how the like I'm so intrigued about this lifestyle. Uh everybody needs to be. Yeah, exactly. Cool. How do you make that work? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00: 2:08

Well, let me start with how we grew into this lifestyle. So I built and sold a paid community that I sold in 2021. And at that point, my my plan was kids were graduating. I'm selling the business, and then we're gonna sell the house and be free. And then we looked at each other and we were like, we will downsize to where exactly? My husband, fishing cabin in the middle of nowhere, me, somewhere where there's a synagogue, college-educated people, bike trails. And we were like, hmm, there's not a lot of overlap here. Where is this place? And so getting the RV, I started a little bit as a way to go search for that place. And so while we still had the house back in like 21, during the depths of COVID winter, we bought the RV and went on a three-month tryout trip, and it was awesome. We were our best weights ever. We were so fit and healthy because no restaurant eating. We would just put on our masks, dive bomb through a grocery store once every 10 days, get our healthy vegan food. We were eating super, super clean, super healthy, and biking, hiking, doing all the things. We just part of the go down south is that like your exercise options get less in Seattle in the winter. And we're both very kind of prefer the outdoor exercise. And we did not find the place. We went to a lot of places. We're based in Seattle and we like the West. We're both from California. We went and visited family and friends there. We went to Arizona where there is cheap land you can stay on. And I don't know, nothing we could afford jumped out at us. I mean, we would love to go back to Santa Barbara where we met, but we can't buy a closet there for what we sold a five-bedroom house in Seattle for. And so then we came back, and with the money from the sale, I had also fixed we had also fixed up the house. And, you know, we had a nice new kitchen, and we were like, we love it here. So there was a few more years during which kids bounced back. First one, then the other, then the other again. And um we started to see that if we stayed in the house, that this might continue to happen. And the other thing in our life is that uh we have two of our three kids are adopted and had a range of special needs, and they weren't good travelers. So we didn't get to camp and hike and pedal and bike and fish the way we imagined we would as a family. So we had a lot of pent-up travel energy going on, and we finally decided to sell the house and, you know, go hardcore and do it. We liked the first trip, we enjoyed it, and thought we could do it and make it happen. And besides building paid communities, the other thing I do is ghostwrite books. And I ghost wrote a book for a kind of contrarian financial manager who was launching a consulting business and learned his contrarian investing system, tried it out, liked it. So we sold the house, took all the money, and I invest our money and one of my three jobs that I do from the road.

SPEAKER_02: 5:32

I love it, I love it.

SPEAKER_00: 5:34

And yeah, so this time we really dug into the trip more. We were kind of celebrating the home sale this time, so it was glampy. We went to some expensive RV, more uh pricier side RV parks like in Avala Beach. We went to Flying Flags, which is just a fantastic little town out from San Luis Ibispo.

SPEAKER_02: 5:58

If you've never seen my brother and sister-in-law were just in Avala Beach, it's their favorite.

SPEAKER_00: 6:04

Love Avala, happy place, good paddling, and uh good biking, yeah. Fun little it uh you feel like you're in a Bond movie in the 60s on the French Riviera. It's like there's no power boats, it's very adorable.

SPEAKER_02: 6:18

Adorable, yeah. Um they love it. She's from San Luis Obispo, and so that's kind of like their go-to spot.

SPEAKER_00: 6:24

Yeah, it is a lovely place. So, yeah, we went to a lot of little happy places. We went and saw family and friends in Palm Desert and LA and San Diego, and we went to Santa Barbara because we love it. And then we went out and really started to explore more the boondocking, really cheap camping side in Arizona, and went to the epicenter of all RV life, quartzite, Arizona, which some people know from Nomad Land, the movie, and um got into that scene and kind of hold the the whole world of RV culture, which really is like its own community, which since I build communities was so much.

SPEAKER_02: 7:08

Brilliant love that connection, yes.

SPEAKER_00: 7:10

Yeah, it's it is what I was saying to a friend at the camp I was at this weekend is that the thing about RV community is that in most of our lives we are in very class segregated communities. You are in an upscale community or a very working class community, or and the thing is that you go out to Quartzide, Arizona, and you have all the economic strata right on right on top of each other. People camping in a tricked-out van that they bought for$2,000 to people rolling those three, four, five hundred thousand dollar land yachts in that have washing machines in them and an office and a living room and three TVs, and yeah, and you're all right together, and it's MAGA country and LGBTQ rainbow flags and all the things, it's all the things right together, and it's a very interesting social experiment to me.

SPEAKER_02: 8:13

Who knew that RV life was the true melting pot?

SPEAKER_00: 8:16

Was the great equalizer, yeah, yeah, and what I learned is that people are people, and that I can put a big smile on my face and go to anyone and say, hello, friend, hello neighbor, I have can I borrow a cup of sugar or your lights are on, or we're we are all living in a rudimentary sort of way, a lot of us on solar power, and things break, and we kind of all have to stick together and you know to make it all work. People have medical emergencies and you need assistance getting to town, and so it's it's kind of an interesting world to be in. And we also hear other couples fighting in their RV, and we're like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. We have a very strict no fighting in the RV rule. Like, hello, we're living in 50 square feet here. So we decided we did not want a giant RV. We are in a 24-foot coachman crosstreck and has a lot of storage, and it's just not very big. It's um can you can still park it anywhere. Those giant ones, you can only park them at an RV park or in a gas station in a truck stop to get gas, which you have to do every five miles because you get two miles.

SPEAKER_02: 9:41

They're so big.

SPEAKER_00: 9:42

Yeah, they they do not get good gas mileage. And um, so yeah, we ran after this trip, we ran a whole set of specs about whether we would change it. Where whether we might go bigger or different, go to a truck and trailer instead of an RV, which a lot of the more living full-time people tend to do, unless they're buying the giant diesel pushers. And we our conclusion was run this one into the ground. Because in the five years since we first bought this one, it RVs have gotten so much more expensive that it doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_02: 10:20

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 10:21

We're like, just keep it going, keep dealing. And the other thing I think people don't know about RV life is that you're not necessarily always in the RV. I just went on a cruise with my dad. We went on a trip to Europe for almost a month. Uh we house sit for friends, so we go stay in an Airbnb. The thing, the thing you don't anticipate is your house is also a car, and that's the car needs to go in the shop sometimes.

SPEAKER_02: 10:50

So of course, yeah. Yeah, so then we're in it.

SPEAKER_00: 10:53

So then we're in an Airbnb while they upgrade the heater or whatever's happening. So it's not like we're in this thing every second. But we love it. We're we're pretty darn happy with it.

SPEAKER_02: 11:05

What do you like when you travel, what do you do with it? That that would be my first question. Oh, we're gonna go to Europe for a month. What do we do with the RV? Do you is there places to park it? Do you park it in a friend's? Do you beg somebody? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00: 11:17

This time for Europe, we left it right here where you're seeing. Okay. Uh in my my cousin's driveway, which is our sort of crash pad home base here in Seattle. You need somewhere to put it. Some people do there's heated storage for RVs. A lot of people who are snowbirds drive their RV to like Yuma and put it in storage there, and then they fly home to Canada or wherever, and they fly back and get it. And so they don't do the long drive up down.

SPEAKER_02: 11:51

Okay. So they do the summer in Canada or someplace else, and then they're going to Arizona to right.

SPEAKER_00: 11:57

They're spending half the year in Minnesota or wherever, and then they fly back down to where they stored it, and you make friends with people who have nice flat driveways, and you're like, hello, friend, would you like to earn a little extra money using your driveway to store my RV? Yeah. Um yeah, I what I love about RV life is that you discover that you just really don't need so much stuff, America.

SPEAKER_02: 12:32

Uh yes. Yeah, that's minimalizing.

SPEAKER_00: 12:35

Drowning in stuff. We have way too much stuff. Our stuff owns us. We don't own stuff. It's bad. Oh, I love that too.

SPEAKER_02: 12:44

Yeah. The stuff owns us.

SPEAKER_00: 12:47

Yeah. You are you're a slave to the stuff. And that's really why another reason we made the decision to sell the house is we were like we bought a house and the value of it skyrocketed, the taxes of it skyrocketed. We refied the mortgage when the rates were low during COVID. It was still going up, up, up because of the taxes and insurance. And it was like, well, I can continue working this hard, and my husband husband can continue selling cars for Toyota, and we can work, work, work all the time. Or we could just cut this baby loose and not have to work so much. Now my husband's retired. I do work I love, so I'm still doing it, but I can do less of it. And as it happened, it all worked out great because all three of our grown kids ended up needing financial support for us in the past year or so. Sure, as they do. Some quite unexpectedly, and we had the money. Just didn't have to worry about it. They were like, okay, we can help keep you off the street here till you get the next job or whatever, get over your illness and yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 13:55

Yeah. So it I'm curious. I know you you had freelance writers. That was your first community. Yeah, freelance writers can. And then was that when you sold that, was that the impetus for the RV or did that come later?

SPEAKER_00: 14:08

Well, that generated the cash to buy the RV, which we did buy for cash from a private party.

unknown: 14:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 14:15

We probably should have financed it and kept more of my cash for investing. I've now learned. But it was COVID, no, no RVs were being made. It was very hard to even get your hands on a new one. Prices were skyrocketing as a result, and we we just didn't want to spend tons. I didn't want to spend more than a hundred grand on it. Didn't know if I'd love it. I I wanted to get in at sort of a really modest, not life-changing, not I've poured my life savings into this price. And uh that was buying from a private party.

SPEAKER_02: 14:50

So then now you you're splitting time between Seattle, which you love, and then other places you can hop around. What's been your favorite? Yeah, what's been your favorite so far?

SPEAKER_00: 15:01

Oh, my favorite, huh? We I I would have to go with a couple of places. There is a tiny like federal Bureau of Agriculture Campground or something called Matole Campground, and it's at the top of the lost coast in California. So you're you're and there's sea stacks and stuff. There are 10$10 a night spaces or something at this place, and so you're on a beach, a spectacular Northern California beach, and there's nobody.

SPEAKER_01: 15:38

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 15:39

And you're at the top of the trail you can hike to hike the lost coast. So you can go hiking, just fabulous. We tried to go back again on this the trip this year, and we got blown up by the bomb cyclone. It's really a bummer. So we were were hoping to do it this year. The other one that became our real happy place, so is an interesting campground that may or be in California or maybe in Arizona.

SPEAKER_02: 16:05

You're not giving it away.

SPEAKER_00: 16:06

Depend no, it depends on what your which GPS you look at. It's right on the border. And it is it was known as Squaw Lake and was said to be changed to a native name, but now we're not doing that. So I guess it is still Squaw Lake. And it has it is as close to a free campground heaven as we've ever found. Amazing lake that feeds out onto the Colorado River, so you can paddle either the lake or out onto the Colorado, and all kind of little nooks and crannies and side trails you can paddle in, just spectacular paddling. I'm a stand-up paddleboarder, set up. And uh, my husband has a kayak he fishes from, and you can catch bass in this lake, and there are showers, and for seniors, it is 7.50 at night.

SPEAKER_02: 16:59

Wow. Wow, it's just the economical piece of of I mean, other when you have to go to repair your RV for some reason, right? It's like having a car, but the economics of it sound intriguing.

SPEAKER_00: 17:11

They yeah, you can you can do this lifestyle cheap or you can do it fancy. And or both.

SPEAKER_02: 17:20

You could do both if you really wanted to.

SPEAKER_00: 17:22

Yeah, the first trip we kind of really did some of each. And yeah, we went we went fancy places like Campland on the bay by the bay in San Diego, which is right on Mission Bay, not a cheap campground, and we kept extending our stay because it's so awesome. Um it is a it is a planet of RVs. There's a stage and shows and a laundry and you know, a store and a merch store, and uh it's a whole scene. And there the trail to bike around Mission Bay is like right at the campground. You can throw your paddle board in in the bay every morning. Incredible, but not beautiful.

SPEAKER_02: 18:03

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 18:04

How much many amenities?

SPEAKER_02: 18:05

Many amenities. Time do you spend at each campsite? I'm assuming you have to reserve them in advance and give like a hotel kind of like we're gonna be here from X to Y.

SPEAKER_00: 18:15

It depends. It depends. Some places don't take reservations. Matole doesn't take reservations.

SPEAKER_02: 18:22

First come, first serve.

SPEAKER_00: 18:23

Actually, Squaw Lake doesn't take reservations. Camp Land, all the big ones take reservations. State campgrounds, fest, you know, federal campgrounds, national parks take reservations usually. Um, but some of them will have first come, first serve. They'll have a block they keep for first come, first serve. Um, so that really depends. I tend to be a planner person. I come from a very planner family. My family would like to know in like it's summertime now, so they would like to know if I'm coming to the family Hanukkah party in LA in December and can't and are b baffled that I don't know the answer yet. So I come from a very big blunder family. So I I tend to map it out. It's kind of like the Normandy landing. I'm like, we're gonna stay here for this long, and but we leave some wiggle room because of the world of boondocking, of just being able to just park somewhere. And now there are websites that tell you where.

SPEAKER_02: 19:20

Yeah, what for the people who are uninitiated in RV life, what is boondocking?

SPEAKER_00: 19:24

Boondocking is like you just park somewhere, you're not plugged, you're not hooked up to electricity, you're just faking it in a neighborhood or a parking lot, or there are many places you can stay.

SPEAKER_02: 19:36

Truck stop or for free.

SPEAKER_00: 19:38

You can stay at truck stops, you can stay at casinos because they want you to come in and gamble. You can stay at most of the Walmarts. So there are places in town, and there are just random places, I'll say. And there's a site called freecampsites.net. Um, some people like Campendium, there's iOverlanders. So there's a Whisper network essentially of crowdsourced information on websites about I oh, you know, I stayed at just like mile 37 of this thing, or this rest stop on the major highway is actually really awesome and has an R V dump and it's really quiet and it's far off the road. So there's all kinds of intel you can tap into about where to stay in between point A and point B. Because sometimes you have two great camp campgrounds you want to go to, but it's like a long drive between them, and you want you're not going to go there in one day. We don't believe in driving for like 18 hours. Yeah. We we try and keep it to like three, four hours of driving in a day, partly because I'm working. I need the I need this to stop so I can like get go do some uh a little write a book chapter or answer community questions or something.

SPEAKER_02: 20:55

When you when you're it sounds like you you've you're stayed mostly on the west coast.

SPEAKER_00: 21:01

We have the southwest and Pacific Northwest and down in the west. I once thought I would when we got the RV, we'd go all around all those states and currently not on my agenda.

SPEAKER_02: 21:15

Not on your agenda. Yeah, my yeah, my aunt and uncle had an RV. That was like the first person that I knew to have an RV, and they did that when they both retired and they were traveling around the U.S. But it was just like this foreign concept to me. So I appreciate you enlightening us a little bit in terms of how it works. What would be your top three things to know for people who were like, oh, this is intriguing. I may want to check it out.

SPEAKER_00: 21:40

There are so many different models and ways to set this up, and the decision of what you're gonna get is a complex one. And my husband has sold cars and is a car guy, and this was totally him. I was like, you go, you figure it out. I I trust him to do these kind of things to pick the cars. And he looked at so much stuff, and we went to RV shows and went to RV lots and looked through trailers and looked at a lot of things. You want to think about, yeah, how what am I going to be bringing with me? What will I be doing? We originally thought we would be more off-roading, going down forest service roads and parking in the middle of the nowhere, just like me and the woods. But we ended up getting an RV that's actually not that suited to that. You did one with a lot of clearance, the heavy duty chairs, high clearance for that, which tends to be more truck and trailer.

SPEAKER_02: 22:37

Truck and trailer.

SPEAKER_00: 22:39

Yeah, you want to think about where do I imagine myself going in this RV? What kind of activities do I want to do? How much gear do I need to bring with me? We want to bring a paddleboard and two a bike, a pair of bikes, and a kayak, blow-up, blow-up kayak. I need a lot of clothing choices in my life. So I have more clothing than my husband with me. And we have a whole pantry area. We have a lot of food with us. We we like to cook and eat healthy food on the the idea that you have to like live on hamburgers and hot dogs and take up pizza or something. No. We eat great food and we met other people who were eating good food. Good health on the road. Yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_02: 23:21

Yeah. I I would imagine too, you could even kit out like a van. Like I have a friend who's a coach and her husband that do part-time between a house and that lifestyle, and they have a kitted-out van that they use. Absolutely. Powderboards and climbing gear and all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 23:38

People are taking those like gear trailers, like the the uh toy haulers, and just fitting them out and living in them. Yes. The other big culture, whole subculture of its own is schoolies.

SPEAKER_02: 23:51

I was gonna ask you about that. I see those videos on Instagram all the time.

SPEAKER_00: 23:55

You can get them cheap. Yeah, the schoolies, and they have conventions of all schoolies. They all get together and trade best practices about getting out their schoolies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 24:05

I love that I didn't even know they were called schoolies. I love them. Yep, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I am fascinated by that component. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00: 24:13

I'd say if I had a to-do over, if I had a to-do over, I would get an oven.

SPEAKER_02: 24:18

In your because I missed making my own bread.

SPEAKER_00: 24:22

Yeah, yeah. I toured me a Winnebago at a home exchange, I stayed at, and they had an oven, and I was like super jealous. I was like, ooh, yeah. I just have we have a sort of not a dorm-sized fridge, but sort of halfway between that and a full-on fridge.

SPEAKER_02: 24:40

And a full fridge.

SPEAKER_00: 24:42

Tiny freezer. And uh we have two burners and a microwave. So that's what we're and we have a foodie grill with us. We haul that along so we can have our roasted vegetables and everything.

SPEAKER_02: 24:53

There you go.

SPEAKER_00: 24:54

And uh we have a rice cooker now. My husband got into that, decided we needed that.

SPEAKER_02: 24:59

You needed a rice cooker.

SPEAKER_00: 25:00

And yeah, everybody's rolling their own way, doing their own thing.

SPEAKER_02: 25:06

You you said choosing is complex. Is that because there's so many options? Is that what makes it complex?

SPEAKER_00: 25:13

So many options. It's a big expenditure. And yeah, are do you want an RV? Do you want a truck and trailer? Do you want a giant diesel pusher? What's the shape and size? Is it a fifth wheel where you bolted onto the bed of the truck? There's that kind of a deal. It there's a lot of different formations of it. There's different layouts of how these work. We felt I felt like two things. One, I wanted to be able to drive away if anything weird was going on without having to get out of my trailer and walk around and get into my truck that weight in favor and of the RV, and just maneuvering it. We would just look at people backing the truck and trailer, you know, and RT's like a track.

SPEAKER_02: 26:07

Yeah, if you're not used to having a boat or something in the back. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 26:10

Yeah. And we were my husband was like, I don't want to park that. So just we ended that's kind of how we came to the R V math of it. But yeah, we have the lack of clearance. So we do think about truck. Our dream is a Rivian electric truck that can tow the trailer. So far, none of the all-electrics can really do that.

SPEAKER_02: 26:35

Actually, tow, yeah, do a heavy load.

SPEAKER_00: 26:37

You'd have to stop to reach our and and there isn't enough infrastructure built for charging yet, really, to go the kind of middle and nowhere places you want to go. So, yeah, it's it's still coming down the line, but that would like be our fantasy.

SPEAKER_02: 26:52

That would be the fantasy. Riving and charging.

SPEAKER_00: 26:54

We do not have a generator. So the thing to know about RVs in me is that I never imagined myself getting an RV. We were backpack campers and tent campers. And one time I was interviewing an RV salesperson, and they said, You got to understand this is the way life works. When you're young, you backpack camp, and then when you're a little older, you tent camp, and then you car camp with the kids, and then you get an RV. And I was like, That's the path. That is never going to happen to me because RVs are horrible. I have camped next to RVs and they have those loud, nasty diesel generators going all day long. No, that's never gonna happen to me. But now solar has come onto the world of RVs and it's awesome. You can be in an RV park and there's an it's quiet. And it's great.

SPEAKER_02: 27:43

Makes perfect sense. It's wonderful. Yeah. As you're driving, you're collecting energy and yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 27:49

Driving the car chargers, but we have solar panels too. We have three on top and and a uh move mobile one, and we could go up, I gather, in quality on that. We when we started, it just had one on top, and that's what we learned on the first trip was we didn't have enough. And we came back and got two more and uh got the move movable one. Okay, so that's in the winter, you know, the sun is low, it's hard to get it to hit the roof. So you get that mobile one and you point it right at it. Right at the sun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 28:21

So what did you learn? That we you just mentioned one of the things you learned on that inaugural trip. What else did you learn?

SPEAKER_00: 28:27

Hmm. Just that my husband and I like detours. So if we we are willing to detour, and our kids would be like, No, what what are we doing now? Uh they were even more planner than me. Uh we were like, oh, it says there's a lighthouse here. Oh, I didn't have that on the map. Let's go take a look at that. So we go on so many little side trips, and we get lost and end up places. We actually got lost on this most recent trip. We were trying to go from Palm Desert from visiting my parents to Vegas, and we didn't want to go back to Quartzide and Up, which turned out to be the way we should have gone. Uh, we were trying to go some backwards women and it was getting really weird, and it was sending us into the Mojave Desert or something, and we were like, no, this is wrong. We're gonna backtrack. And we ended up in Area 51, which was super fun.

SPEAKER_02: 29:25

Yeah, yeah. So it it paid off that it was out of the way.

SPEAKER_00: 29:28

Yeah, so we're into kind of that we're both down for that. The let's see what's over here. What if we go this way? Oh, this sign says the world's largest something. Is this a way? What we're we're up for that. Which I think makes sense, right?

SPEAKER_02: 29:43

If you're gonna live that RV life traveling around, why wouldn't you? It's not such a linear approach to travel.

SPEAKER_00: 29:50

And often, even though we're going all around the West, um, you have that we may never pass this way again feeling anytime you're going. In on these trips, and so it's well, let's go check it out.

SPEAKER_02: 30:04

I love it, I love it. What's one thing you've learned about yourself through RVing?

SPEAKER_00: 30:09

That I just I don't have to have a big place. I really did that for my family. You know, I built them that American dream, big house by the lake, lifestyle, and it was really never for me, it was for them. I was always like my original vision was that like I would never meet anyone I who would marry weird me, and I would live in a garret above a store and write song lyrics and be a rock star. Like I always imagined myself in a kind of a small space, I think. And I'm not a I need the big flashy car, I need the big showyest house in my neighborhood. I'm I'm not that person. I was never into that sort of conspicuous consumption. And so I love it. I just feel very light and free and happy. We look at our bank balance, and two weeks later we look at it, and it's basically the same as it was. Just the amount no-paying uh gardener, a termite exterminator, a roof cleaner, snow removal guy, all the things, yeah. All the things, yeah, just all of the cost related to owning property.

SPEAKER_02: 31:24

I love it. I love it. What comes to mind for me, which I think might be even the point of this conversation, is that you're living the life you were meant to be living. You did the traditional way, and then as the kids left and grew up for talking about an emptiness life, you've actually pivoted into the life that you were meant to be living. Not to say you weren't supposed to be a parent and have kids, but like in this time of your life, you're not just sitting around waiting for things to happen.

SPEAKER_00: 31:51

There's well, there we are sitting around waiting for something to happen, and that something is grandkids.

SPEAKER_02: 31:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 31:58

And like many other empty nesters, we are confronting a generation that is not that interested in having children, certainly not interested in having them young, except for my sister who's an Orthodox Jew who has scored eight grandkids already. But in general, most of us are on a long wait to grandkids. One, our oldest is 32, not married yet. And so we've I feel like this was the other reason it was hard to pick a place to live, is because I'm gonna want to live wherever grandkid is. But no, there is no grandkid yet. So if I buy now, I'm just gonna have to sell that one and and buy again. So what if we did this kind of interim period where we just were mobile and yeah, we love to travel and be outdoors, and we'll just do that until such time as there is an or another organizing principle to my life. There you go. Where maybe I want to be wherever there's the grandkid. The grandkid. And we ended up with this gap in time here where we're retired and semi-retired, and but there's no grandkids to play with, so we're free to move about the cabin. Yeah. Which I think is we may not always be, but we may not always be.

SPEAKER_02: 33:17

But my what I talk about a lot in my in my work is don't wait for the grandkids. Do things like you're doing until they come. But just don't sit and do the old routine until they come because they don't always come right away. It could be a 15-year gap between when the kids finish school or 12-year gap, whatever it may be. But a lot of times people do just wait around for the engagement and the wedding and the grandkids rather than living life. And but you're living life the way you want to.

SPEAKER_00: 33:47

Sitting around waiting for the grandkids is a sad, sad scene. That you know, that there's nothing good there. And all your friends have all the pictures of the grandkids, and all they talk about is the grandkids. Yeah, I I would like to see some of this world uh while I am really free to do whatever I want.

SPEAKER_02: 34:06

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Girl, before I let you go, it's been a fascinating conversation. One of the questions I love to ask my guests is what is your emptiness life motto if you had one?

SPEAKER_00: 34:21

Free to do what I want.

SPEAKER_02: 34:23

I love it.

SPEAKER_00: 34:24

Any old time.

SPEAKER_02: 34:26

Love it. Perfect. Oh, so good. I'm free to do whatever I want, any old time. And that is a perfect ending to this episode, Carol. Thank you so much for coming on this emptiness life and sharing a little bit about the RV life and kind of how you you funded it and how you got there and some of the things people need to look at for. I know for me it was quite an education and something that I don't know, Colleen, my wife, if you're listening, I'm not thinking about the RV life, but it's just an interesting conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 34:55

Well, I think the thing that holds people back, if I can put a PS on it, is they're still working and they, you know, think that ties them to a place. And I've designed a work life from far back from like 2005 or so that with that would be mobile, that would be digital nomad enabling. And that's what I help people do is build that life.

SPEAKER_02: 35:19

That life, yeah. Through your coaching, right? You coach people on how to build communities together.

SPEAKER_00: 35:23

I have a community for people who want to get into that.

SPEAKER_02: 35:27

Who want to get into that? Plus, you do the freelance writing, and you said a third. What was the third? I think I missed the third. I manage our money. Oh, manage the money, that's right. Yeah, you're the investor. Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 35:37

I am my own financial advisor.

SPEAKER_02: 35:39

I love it. So good. What a great combination. Carol, thank you so much for being here today. I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00: 35:46

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_01: 35:47

Are you ready to start living and enjoying your empty nest years? If so, head over to jasonramsden.com and click work with me to get the conversation started. This empty nest life is a production of Impact One Media LLC, all rights reserved.