Patience is a Virtue

Jill's Journal: Patience is not one of my stronger suits. Oh sure, I have an abundance of patience with my girls and my husband, but not so much in just about every other area of my life. I’m very much an “immediate satisfaction” kind of girl. And that is why waiting until 2010 to fulfill this dream is a great challenge for me! I want to do it now. Right now.

So why is 2010 the magic year? Well, we’re not jumping into this lightly. Luckily, even if I didn’t get the patience gene, I did get the logical and responsible gene. The primary reasons we’re waiting another year and a half to “fulltime” it in an RV include:

*A major life change like this with small children attached takes some planning! And plans have begun in earnest. We want to be fully prepared in every way possible. Much research goes into everything from finding the most compatible RV home for our family to little things like dealing with the girls’ well-child doctor appointments from the road.

*A four-letter word called debt. This, to me, is one of the ugliest words in the English language. I despise debt. We’ve been working hard for quite some time to eliminate ours. Earlier this year, we could actually see daylight. We were so close to being debt-free (including student loans!) that we could taste it. And then an evil three-letter word intervened: the IRS. A mistake we made on our taxes some years ago came back to haunt us and we were quickly blindsided with enough penalties and interest to make our knees buckle. The amount rivaled that of a new car. A rather nice new car. So, we had little choice but to push all our financial goals – like buying a new house or now, an RV – back two years so we can focus on our tax debt. We call it the two-year plan! If all goes like we hope it does, by 2010, we’ll have zero debt with the grand exception of our mortgage. That’s what I call an exciting prospect!

*Schooling. Our girls are young and right now only our oldest is in preschool, but we still don’t want to uproot them in the middle of the school year. In the fall of 2010, Erika will be ready for 1st grade, Madelyn will be starting second-year preschool, and Victoria will still be a year away from preschool. Although home schooling has never been something I’ve wanted to do, we can all handle it for a year. We think it’s better to do it for one continuous school year than interrupt a school year already in progress, so summer is our launching goal. I’m already checking into requirements and paperwork and how home schooling works in the state of Kentucky, which will remain our home base.

*Kristi and Adam. My sister and her new husband committed to Kentucky through May, 2010. Kristi arrived here from California nearly a year ago, got married this summer, and will finish nursing school at University of Kentucky in May, 2010. It is such a wonderful treat to have them here and we enjoy their company immensely. Who knows if we’ll ever get to live this close again? We don’t want to leave during their too-short tenure in our town!