July 25th, 2010

How can you afford to travel? — The rest of the story

Picture this:

There’s a sink-hole in front of you. It is bigger than you… in fact, it’s bigger than the house you live in.

This hole is roughly the size of:

• your house
• + your university
• + your car
• + anything unrelated those above items that  you walked by and thought “I have to have that… now”

You know that you need to fill this hole up as fast as you can.

And, you also know that it’s still sinking.

You may think it has stopped, but it hasn’t.  It may have stopped widening, but it’s still sinking.

To fill up this wide and gaping hole in front of you, you have a shovel. Now.

But, for years you’ve had only your hands and feet. You tried to kick and throw in as much dirt as you could to try and fill this hole, but it was widening and sinking faster than you could throw a handful of rocks in.

Now, though, since you’ve found that shovel, you can see that you’re making progress. There’s this bit at the bottom that appears to be filling. Finally.

What is that sink-hole? Debt.

Debt to the tune of: a mortgage, student loans, car loan, and unpaid credit card balances.

What causes it to continue sinking?
Interest on all of those loans.

What caused it to widen?
Your own spending…spending more on credit, or taking out another loan (car, school, etc.).

Nearly everyone has one of these sink-holes.

Jonathan and I do too.

And here’s the good news: We’re paying it off.

Two years ago, Jonathan and I canceled all our credit cards, choosing instead to live a cash-only lifestyle.

This means that if we don’t have the cash to buy something, we have to wait until we do.

We do this by asking ourselves “How can we afford this?”

Then we build businesses and income streams to afford whatever “this” is.

Two years ago, Jonathan and I had the following debt:

• $205,000 Home Mortgage
• $18,000 Car loan
• $40,000 Student loans (darn grad school)
• $22,000 Credit Card balances (from our Kilimanjaro 2006 trip, our wedding, and some from our honeymoon)

That gave us a total of $284,000 that we owed to other people…PLUS interest.

We were paying it, every month, but never felt like we were getting ahead.

So, our first order of business was to cancel our credit cards.

At least that way, we couldn’t spend anything more on them.

Then, we signed up for a program that would work with creditors on our credit card balances.

With their help, our interest rate dropped from an average of 22% to 6%. That’s a huge difference! (Contact us if you’d like to know more about this.)

Next, we took every spare penny we had, and put it towards paying off debt: credit cards first.

I’m proud to say, that after only 2 years, we have less than $6,000 left on our credit card balances.

And we sold the car that had the car payment.

That means that in 2 years, we’ve paid off over $47,000.

We have also had renters in our house for the last year, so for a year, our mortgage payment has been (mostly) paid for by someone else. (We still have some that we pay every month towards it (renters don’t cover the whole mortgage), but what we pay monthly is 1/14th (7% or so) of what we paid when we lived there.)

Still, today, we are putting every spare penny we have towards paying down debt.

In fact, all loans and everything else included we are currently putting 49% of our income towards debt repayment.  Hard to believe, right? (I couldn’t believe it myself until yesterday.)

When we started, about 25% of our income was going to debt repayment, and we weren’t getting ahead of it.

The good news is that in 10 months or less, we will be completely free of consumer debt / credit card balances, which will leave us with student loans and our mortgage.

Then, our sink-hole will start to fill up even faster, because for us, being debt-free (filling that sink-hole) is the most important way to spend our money right now.

So how can we afford to travel?

Hard work.  Really. Most people think we’re on vacation just because we’re traveling.  But the answer to how we afford to travel is that we work really hard.

We’re not working hard in the sense that “working hard” means to many people (being out digging ditches or doing manual labor), but figuring out all the moving pieces and the mental work required takes:

• Time
• Energy
• Willingness to be flexible
• Willingness to learn

Just to reiterate: we’re still working while we’re on our world travel.

That’s why being settled somewhere for a longer amount of time (here in New Zealand) has been so important to us. It allows us more time to work, and get set up to work a bit less for three months… then we’ll settle somewhere again and work really hard.

You may remember that we have about $1,830 / month to spend differently now that we’re traveling than we did when we lived in our home in Colorado. (We save that money on: transportation, phones, and housing.)

That amount is actually less now that we’re living in New Zealand and things here are more expensive than in Central / South America.

As much of that $1,830/month as possibly can is going to paying back our debts.

(Some times it feels like too much is going towards debt repayment. Because we do have to make choices and limit the tourist activities we do, because paying down our debt is more important to us right now.)

And now you know… the rest of the story.

Jonathan’s note: Looking at a mountain of debt is really hard.  What’s even harder is to gauge the size of a mountain when you have no idea how big it is.

If you are in debt on credit cards, a good place to start is by writing down everything you owe, and to whom.

I am also of the opinion that everyone should spend at least 1 month tracking everything they spend, and everything they earn.  Most people want to improve their money situation, but aren’t willing to do something as simple as tracking spending and earning. For whatever reason, it’s actually quite difficult to be disciplined enough to track it in-between 10-25 days.  After 30 days, it becomes easier.  But people freak out about money, without really knowing what their money picture is.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t track. (It’s not really possible to improve something if you don’t what it’s basic measurement is.  It’s not really possible to measure something if you’re not tracking it’s actual size.)

If you want to know who we went through to help get our interest rates down, or want to know more about this process (a 4-year process for us so far), please post a comment below.

Books that helped us in this process:

Continue reading "How can you afford to travel? — The rest of the story" »

February 28th, 2010

February Changes: Movable Type to WordPress

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we recently moved our whole site over to Wordpress from Movable Type.

Why this might be important to you?

The non-geeky explanation is that this will allow us to do more stuff with our web site more easily.

However, there may be some pages or links on our site in the next week or so which might not work as effectively as they should.  If you find things that aren’t working, please drop us a line and let us know.

Also, please be patient as we get things working 100% again.

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February 3rd, 2010

Panama Viejo and Casco Viejo in Panama City, Panama are not the same thing

Panama Viejo and Casco Viejo in Panama City, Panama are not the same thing…

I don’t know why, but for some reason, I thought that Panama Viejo (old town Panama City) was Casco Viejo. I was wrong.
This morning, Jonathan and I decided to go see Panama Viejo and then have lunch at one of the many new and fun places in Casco Viejo.
Casco Viejo is also called Antiguo Viejo, as you’ll see in the video below.
We grabbed a taxi right out front of our hotel (Hotel Santana), and were taken to Panama Viejo. Our driver also told us where it was safe and where it wasn’t if we wanted to walk around the old city.

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February 2nd, 2010

The Panama Canal at Miraflores

The Panama Canal at Miraflores

For some reason, whenever I hear of the Panama Canal I think of “Arsenic and Old Lace”.
Teddy says “I’m going to the basement to dig the Panama Canal!”
I love that show…
No trip to Panama, especially Panama City, would be complete without a trip to the canal.
We didn’t really make it work last time we were here (as we just passed through Panama City), but this time we knew we’d go.
Our overnight bus arrived into Panama City from David at 6:00am – exactly on time!
There are some crazy buses in Panama (all over Central America)!

From there we went to our hotel, and they let us check in super early, which was great!
So, we were able to grab a nap.
I read that there is a restaurant in the visitor’s center of the canal, so we decided to go there, have lunch, and watch a few ships pass through.
It was awesome! The food was ok, not the best (and pretty pricey), but good enough.

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December 25th, 2009

Merry Christmas!

For those of you who don’t celebrate Christmas, we hope you will take some extra time today to spend with family members and/or loved ones.

We are enjoying our time back in Colorado… though with the traveling we’re doing around the state to visit family, we’ve been running around like crazy since getting back!
We hope you enjoy this special day!

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December 21st, 2009

Top 5 Things I’m Looking Forward To In Colorado

I don’t really experience homesickness, because I always feel pretty excited about what’s coming up, about the future, about where I’m going next.
So this is the 5 things I’m looking forward to at this moment, knowing I’m returning to Colorado tomorrow.
This is being written from a hotel outside of San Jose, Costa Rica called the Adventure Inn.
#1. Water
-Hot Water (lots of nice, hot water in the shower)
-Tap water. At least in Colorado, drinking filtered tap water is safe, cool, and nice. Although we’ve drank tap water in Costa Rica and Panama, it’s nice to know that the water in the states is safe, whereas in Central America, I’m never 100% certain.

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February 21st, 2009

The Island Reef Job: How Many Videos Did You Submit?

“How Many Videos Did You Submit?”

This was a question I was recently asked.
In total, 5 videos.
Two videos were submitted using Carrie’s two email addresses, two using my email addresses, and one using our support email address for GreenJoyment.
I know this may have increased their workload a bit at Queensland Tourism’s offices (reviewing 5 minutes of video instead of 1 minute), but I read/heard in an interview on the Indie Travel Podcast, that they would accept all applications, even multiples from the same person, as long as they came from different email addresses.
I took that as an open invitation… hopefully that was a good opinion to arrive at.
We’ll find out soon enough!
So over the course of the past few weeks, we’ve made 5 videos, each approaching us, the island reef job, and the reef from a different perspective.
Here are the videos, in the order we submitted them…

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February 16th, 2009

Contact form is back

For anyone who may have attempted to contact us via the contact page in the last couple of days, please accept our apologies.
The contact form was down because someone (me) uploaded the wrong template.
It’s relatively technical and geeky so I won’t bore you with the details, but just FYI, the contact form is back.
Thanks for understanding my operator error!

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May 1st, 2007

Kevin’s climbing Everest – right now!

Kevin Cherilla, our leader when we climbed Kilimanjaro, is on Everest now. He put together a blog so that we could read about his experiences while trying to summit the tallest mountain in the world. It really is a fun (and funny) read. If you’d like to check it out, here’s the link: www.kcsummits.com/Everest_2007_Blog.html
Definitely go check it out if you’ve ever had even a little curiosity about what it’s like to climb the highest mountain.

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August 15th, 2006

Britten and Chris return from the mountain

Jonathan and Carrie,
We are home safe and sound (even with all the London Terror that held us up). Thanks for your info on the hiking poles. We found some that we rented and were very thankful for them (especially on the way down, my knees were killing me and we were sliding everywhere in the mud in the rainforest). We were sooo sore for a few days afterwards too! We did make it to the summit just at sunrise and it was absolutely breathtaking. We took about 600 photos and video too. Actually we took more photos but somehow managed to lose one of our digital cameras on the mountain We had pretty good weather although we did see rain, snow and hail. We both loved to see the clouds roll into camp! It all just seemed like a whole different world (besides the coca cola that was everywhere!) We took the Rongai route (known as the Coca Cola route) up and came down the Marangu route. Thanks again for all your help! We were very prepared and thankful for your packing tips!
Britten and Chris =)

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