Ive been back in Vancouver for about seven weeks now and Ive posted almost nothing....
Whats been going on in my world??
Well, a bunch of stuff.
The plan in my mind as I rode back from Guatemala was to retain ownership of my house but to "dispose of" as much of my accumulated stuff as possible. I had more or less decided that the life I had been leading before my trip was not what I wanted and that if I didn't take definitive action and "Do something"; I was just going to fall back into the same old rut I had built for myself.... and before I knew it, another decade would have passed and Id have missed my chance to change...
So, I was intending to make some big changes, but I didn't want to "raise" my entire past... I wanted to step away from the old life and into a new life in a more or less orderly fashion :).... Another factor involved here is that I was not entirely sure what that "new life" would look like... but I knew I had to make some big changes so I may as well get started on them!
So, I put together something of a plan with a couple of options and milestones along the way:
1) I did not want to be burdened by my oppressive mortgage any more!
2) I wanted to do more motorbike "Adventure Touring" though not necessarily immediately.
3) I wanted to keep ownership of my house in Vancouver (Its a good investment, I like living in it and I may want to resume "the life that I had" in a year or three if "the new life" does not lead onward to somewhere different.
4) I wanted to go try living in a very simple way for a while... The loose plan here was to go live in San Pedro Guatemala with the friends I had made (Marie and Indy and others...)
So that was the rough plan, but how to get all the pieces into place was not straight forward.
For a start, I have accumulated quite a pile of "stuff" over the last decade or more in Vancouver. That stuff cost me thousands of dollars to store for a year, and I also left quite a bit of it in my house/garage which made it significantly harder to rent out!
So, the answer to that was to "get rid of the stuff!" - Should be possible but it was going to take me a few months to achieve it - if I am not going to just throw it out that is... (three or four at minimum).
Then there was the mortgage problem... I had been paying it off at a rapid rate while I was working, but that meant that the payments while traveling were painfully high... That had to change! Once I got back to Vancouver I looked into this challenge... The mortgage is at the end of a five year term this December and then I can easily renegotiate all the details. After some mathematical gymnastics, I have determined that I can rearrange this so that at current interest rates the rental income from the house will cover the mortgage and all other maintenance expenses - Just!
Its not actually that pretty - Long term low rate mortgage means I end up paying about one and a half times the principal of the loan in interest... But if it lets me be free of the burden of paying myself then thats good enough (at least for a couple of years or so).
Another twist here is that I'm sure interest rates will go up in the next few years, but how much??
So what I really needed to do was to pay down another lump sum of some tens of thousands of dollars off the mortgage..... This means work!
On the work front, I did not want to do what I had been doing and as I said, I wanted a change of life. However, being the sensible conservative intelligent engineer (substitute "afraid") that I am, I felt very uncomfortable about throwing away a perfectly good career with very large earning potential for a subsistence living. - I am over 40 years old and hi-tech engineering is a young persons world, and I was not solidly in the management stream so chances of me getting another job after a few years "in the wilderness" would probably be slim!!!
So; my plan to accommodate these issues was basically to accept that I was going to have to work for a year in order to get my freedom in the manner that I wanted it.
I decided Id try to get a job that was more in the "Project Manager" role than the technical engineering role since I figure that project management does not really change like the technical stuff, its always in use, its portable, and I like the job better than the technical one - Only down side is that it pays less, but these days, Im OK with that.
This plan allowed me the time to dispose of all my accumulated stuff without just throwing it out. It allowed me to transition to a new professional role that I could take up again at a later date, and it brought in a chunk of money to secure my mortgage and give me enough cash in hand to go play in the world for a year or two..... :))))
Sounds great but ironing out the wrinkles in that plan was going to take quite a bit of effort, and now that I'm here in Vancouver, that is what I have been doing...
Ive got my stuff out of storage and Ive gone through all the boxes and Ive been getting rid of it.
I have put dozens of advertisements on gear swap and Buy-N-Sell web sites and have sold thousands of dollars of my accumulated past life... I've been selling things off at really low prices just so that I get rid of them... In most cases I have no issues with doing it since the gear had not been used for years, but there were still a few things that were tough to let go (and so I grow)
As expected though, Ive found that there are some things that don't make sense to get rid of immediately (better to hold in storage for a couple of years and see if I want to come back) so for these things I decided that I would build a storage container in my back yard.
So I also got a pile of wood delivered and have started that construction job while it is still sunny (rather than doing it in the winter rainy season).
I'm definitely "on the program" and every day I'm figuring out how to get where I want to go as effectively as possible.
Trouble is though that I'm not much clearer on any details of where it is that I'm trying to get to...
I guess I'll figure it out later :))
