RPF0715-How_to_Have_a_Low-Cost_Adventure_in_the_Midst_of_a_Financial

00:00:00.000 | The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

00:00:05.800 | Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos,

00:00:10.200 | your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto,

00:00:13.800 | Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

00:00:17.800 | Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.

00:00:20.000 | Choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction.

00:00:25.000 | Check our app for details.

00:00:26.600 | Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.

00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,

00:00:34.800 | and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:38.000 | while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.

00:00:41.000 | My name is Joshua, I am your host, and today we're going to talk about

00:00:44.000 | how to have a low-cost adventure in the midst of a financial depression.

00:00:49.000 | I was going to start with in the midst of a depression,

00:00:53.000 | but obviously I'm talking about a financial depression.

00:00:55.000 | And yes, it's a strong word, but I don't think it's in this case unwarranted,

00:00:59.000 | given the current economic crisis that we are all living through.

00:01:04.000 | But last week I was feeling a little bit depressed,

00:01:06.000 | and as I was just kind of going through this, I just had that sensation that you've probably had as well,

00:01:13.000 | like, "I am done. I'm done. I'm done with the whole thing."

00:01:17.000 | I'm sick and tired of not being able to plan for the future,

00:01:21.000 | because you simply do not know what the future holds.

00:01:24.000 | Now, thankfully, I have it easy. I have it easy, and I'm very well aware of that.

00:01:30.000 | My heart just hurts for so many people who have things much harder than I do.

00:01:35.000 | But even though I have it easy, it still is starting to get to me.

00:01:39.000 | I'm just tired of it. Tired of it.

00:01:41.000 | And it's not so much the daily circumstances.

00:01:43.000 | We're used to homeschooling. That was a common.

00:01:46.000 | We were already homeschooling before this.

00:01:48.000 | We're kind of homebodies. I work from home.

00:01:51.000 | The main difference right now is I don't have my nice quiet office,

00:01:54.000 | and so you'll usually hear that in the background.

00:01:57.000 | You hear my children a little bit more these days than you once did.

00:02:00.000 | But the biggest thing is I can't plan for the future, because you don't know what it is.

00:02:05.000 | And I find that really frustrating.

00:02:07.000 | I find it frustrating to not be able to know, "Okay, well, when are airlines going to start flying?

00:02:11.000 | When do these things open up again?

00:02:14.000 | When are we going to be able to hit the road?

00:02:17.000 | When am I going to be able to plan for something exciting in the future?"

00:02:22.000 | And so I figure if it's getting to me that badly, then it's probably getting to you.

00:02:26.000 | And I wanted to talk with you about some ideas to have an adventure in the midst of a financial depression.

00:02:32.000 | Because just because you're in a difficult situation, that doesn't mean you can't have fun.

00:02:37.000 | It doesn't mean you can't plan an adventure.

00:02:39.000 | I'm going to give you five low-cost adventures to help you plan

00:02:44.000 | and do something fun and interesting with your life.

00:02:46.000 | Now, in light of the spirit of the show that I shared with you a few weeks ago about don't fight the seas,

00:02:52.000 | but rather work with the seas, I want to give you some ideas here to help you go with the times.

00:03:00.000 | Recently, I was giving some financial advice to a friend of mine.

00:03:02.000 | She had gotten laid off from her job.

00:03:04.000 | And after that job layoff, she's trying to figure out what's next, what's new, where do I go from here?

00:03:11.000 | And I gave her a couple pieces of advice.

00:03:12.000 | Advice number one was try to get another job as quickly as you can.

00:03:15.000 | That was clearly the goal, is try to get yourself a job as quickly as you can.

00:03:19.000 | But I follow that up with saying, if you can't get a job, don't fight it.

00:03:24.000 | Don't worry too much about trying to figure out how you're going to, you know, just make everything work.

00:03:30.000 | Just don't fight it.

00:03:31.000 | Go with the flow a little bit.

00:03:32.000 | I talked to her about the idea of getting some certifications, taking some classes,

00:03:37.000 | if there was something that would be helpful to her.

00:03:39.000 | I think that's a good way to use this time.

00:03:41.000 | I also talked to her about the idea of taking a trip, taking a little adventure.

00:03:46.000 | Because what happens is in the modern life, in the modern world, we're so focused on the next step,

00:03:56.000 | the next step in our career that we often find it difficult to slow down.

00:04:00.000 | What is it that I'm frustrated about right now with regard to not being able to plan for the future?

00:04:05.000 | Well, it's basically the reality that I want to set goals and I want to achieve my goals

00:04:11.000 | and I want to make things happen and I can't because there's stuff outside of my control.

00:04:16.000 | That's what's frustrating to me, which it's all in your head.

00:04:19.000 | It's all just a made-up mental game that I could walk away from if I would embrace something different.

00:04:24.000 | And I'm working to do that.

00:04:26.000 | But what happens is we get in this groove in life and most of us have a list of things we'd like to do.

00:04:31.000 | We have a list of adventures we'd like to participate in.

00:04:33.000 | And it's always someday, someday I'll do that.

00:04:36.000 | But there's generally something in the way.

00:04:39.000 | Usually it's our jobs because after all, most adventures take more than two weeks unless you're in Germany,

00:04:44.000 | in which case most adventures take more than eight weeks or at least a lot of the fun ones that we want.

00:04:50.000 | And so what we often lack is time, not necessarily money, but time because it's just not the right time

00:04:56.000 | or right now I'm building my career or I've got to get another job.

00:05:00.000 | I don't want to have a gap in my resume.

00:05:02.000 | So we're often looking forward to the next thing, the next thing.

00:05:05.000 | But sometimes a break is forced on you.

00:05:09.000 | Sometimes you get laid off.

00:05:11.000 | Sometimes everything shuts down and the adventures are closer to home.

00:05:16.000 | And so I want to give you some ideas to help you really focus on recognizing that you can have an adventure right now

00:05:26.000 | in the midst of everything.

00:05:29.000 | If you will embrace the spirit of adventure.

00:05:33.000 | You can have an adventure in your own house.

00:05:36.000 | You can have an adventure in your backyard.

00:05:38.000 | I think sometimes we really appreciate this with children because they appreciate the simplest of things.

00:05:44.000 | They love to set the tent up in the backyard and sleep in the tent.

00:05:47.000 | We as adults, we think, "Why would I want to sleep in the tent in the backyard?

00:05:50.000 | I don't want to go sleep in the tent in the backyard."

00:05:52.000 | But children, they love it.

00:05:53.000 | And I think that we can embrace and do really well if we would embrace a little bit more of that spirit of adventure.

00:05:59.000 | To kick off today's show, I want to read you a short story about a man named Jim.

00:06:05.000 | And to my knowledge, this is a true story, but I read this a number of years ago in a book called Locusts on the Horizon,

00:06:11.000 | which was a fascinating book, really good book.

00:06:14.000 | But in this book, Locusts on the Horizon, I found this story.

00:06:18.000 | It's called Three Burros, with the Spanish pronunciation, Three Burros.

00:06:23.000 | Jim was a traveling man and he was free like few are.

00:06:27.000 | Half white and half native Shoshone, Jim grew up in rural Idaho and he knew what freedom was.

00:06:34.000 | He also knew there was more to life than the rat race.

00:06:38.000 | When he turned 18, he was a natural for the U.S. Army to recruit.

00:06:41.000 | So he volunteered and eventually wound up in the Republic of Vietnam with the Special Forces.

00:06:47.000 | After a particularly fierce fight with regulars from the North Vietnamese Army,

00:06:53.000 | Jim wound up back in the USA with a permanent limp and missing an eye.

00:06:59.000 | 25 years later, in the early 1990s, Jim decided that he had enough of the daily grind

00:07:06.000 | and he wanted to spend more time seeing America.

00:07:09.000 | He had been teaching survival courses and his students volunteered to help him make his traveling rig.

00:07:15.000 | Almost everything in the project was scavenged or bought second hand.

00:07:20.000 | His gypsy wagon was an old Nissan pickup that had been rolled

00:07:25.000 | and the engine and transmission had already been salvaged from it.

00:07:28.000 | They took the crushed body off the frame and kept the hydraulic brake system and the parking brake intact.

00:07:35.000 | They made a wooden wagoner's seat on the front with a wooden pedal for the brakes.

00:07:40.000 | They then used scavenged lumber and corrugated roofing metal to build a covered gypsy wagon on the old pickup frame.

00:07:48.000 | Into the gypsy wagon, they put an old wood stove, built a bed and constructed storage areas,

00:07:54.000 | including a hidden lockable compartment to store his guns.

00:07:58.000 | A deep cycle RV battery was put into its own wooden box and hooked through a small regulator to a small solar panel.

00:08:06.000 | This powered an automotive cabin light inside the gypsy wagon,

00:08:10.000 | an old donated 40 channel CB radio and a scavenged AM/FM car stereo.

00:08:16.000 | Mounted on the back of the gypsy wagon was a steel whip style CB antenna

00:08:21.000 | and near the front was mounted a scavenged car radio antenna.

00:08:25.000 | His "motor" was a team of three burrows harnessed side by side.

00:08:31.000 | The harnesses were made from old discarded fire hoses.

00:08:35.000 | The rig rolled on old cast-off car tires that wouldn't have lasted 20 minutes at road speeds on an automobile,

00:08:42.000 | but at burrow speeds, they were good pretty much indefinitely.

00:08:47.000 | The three burrows were strong enough together that if they didn't feel like stopping,

00:08:51.000 | and sometimes they didn't, they could tow the entire rig with the brakes locked and the tires skidding.

00:08:58.000 | A small trailer using bicycle rims and tires was made and was towed behind the gypsy wagon.

00:09:04.000 | The entire small trailer was a chicken coop for small bantam chickens.

00:09:09.000 | On top of the chicken coop, Jim kept a container of chicken feed

00:09:13.000 | and a couple of bales of hay for the burrows for when grazing was sparse,

00:09:17.000 | such as when they took a break alongside a desert road.

00:09:20.000 | So, at the breathtaking speed of 3 miles per hour,

00:09:25.000 | Jim saw America, lived the life, met people wherever he went,

00:09:31.000 | and had more than one argument with the highway patrol,

00:09:34.000 | mostly about traveling alongside the shoulder of the road on the interstate.

00:09:39.000 | The last we saw Jim, it was 4th of July, 1994,

00:09:43.000 | and he was camped out near the base of Kachina Peaks, just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona.

00:09:49.000 | His goal was to head back to where he grew up on the Salmon River in Idaho.

00:09:53.000 | His guess was it was going to take three months, more or less.

00:09:57.000 | He wasn't in a hurry, because the journey is what mattered,

00:10:01.000 | and the destination was just part of that.

00:10:05.000 | Now, that's Jim.

00:10:07.000 | But I think that if you're going to have an adventure,

00:10:09.000 | one of the things that you can do is you can embrace the spirit of an adventure.

00:10:13.000 | You can embrace the spirit that says,

00:10:15.000 | "It's more about the journey and getting out there and getting gone than about the stuff."

00:10:20.000 | And if you will do that, if you will make that embrace,

00:10:25.000 | what you will find is you're no longer bound captive to needing more money.

00:10:32.000 | As I go through these adventures, I'm going to give you ideas of how you can minimize the cost,

00:10:36.000 | and I think you need a little bit of money, but not much.

00:10:40.000 | If you follow in Jim's spirit, recognize that he needed almost no money for his particular adventure.

00:10:50.000 | I mean, a couple bales of hay here and there.

00:10:53.000 | It's nice that gas is pretty low cost right now, but still, Jim didn't need gas at all.

00:10:59.000 | He needed a little bit of grass from the side of the highway and some bales of hay.

00:11:02.000 | And you can have a similar adventure if you embrace it.

00:11:06.000 | The cool thing is, though, with a little bit of modern technology,

00:11:09.000 | you can live more comfortably on an adventure, cheaply, than at any time in human history.

00:11:17.000 | You can have all the comforts of home with you on an adventure,

00:11:20.000 | a traveling adventure, more cheaply than ever before.

00:11:24.000 | It's really, really incredible how much is available to you.

00:11:29.000 | There's really not much difference between a million-dollar RV and a $10,000 RV,

00:11:38.000 | except the niceness of the walls, the plushness of the fabrics,

00:11:42.000 | and the shininess of the mirrors and the countertops, et cetera.

00:11:47.000 | The end of the day, you're still living in a car.

00:11:49.000 | Just one happens to be a million-dollar car, and the other happens to be a $10,000 car.

00:11:53.000 | And so embrace the spirit of adventure, and if you do that,

00:11:55.000 | you won't have to be stuck at home in the middle of a global depression.

00:12:00.000 | Now, I want to also, last caveat, and then we'll get to the adventure.

00:12:04.000 | I want to also hasten to add that you don't have to leave home to have an adventure.

00:12:09.000 | There's pretty incredible things that you can do right at home.

00:12:12.000 | I'm going to give you some of those in just a moment.

00:12:14.000 | But if you, like me, enjoy traveling, this might be a great time to do it.

00:12:20.000 | If you wind up laid off from a job, can't figure out what's next, economies and shambles all around,

00:12:25.000 | this might be a time for you to go ahead and schedule a mini-retirement.

00:12:29.000 | And if you do it on the cheap, you might spend the next few years building a fun story, a good story,

00:12:34.000 | and then when you come back to civilization and get yourself a job in a few years,

00:12:37.000 | then you'll be in a much better situation, where at that point in time,

00:12:41.000 | you can make money more easily and go ahead and get started back on that career lifestyle.

00:12:48.000 | Let's start with adventure number one, a walking adventure.

00:12:53.000 | One of the simplest things you can do is just simply walk out your front door, turn right, and go exploring.

00:13:00.000 | If you want to go somewhere, you want to see something, walk out your front door,

00:13:03.000 | turn right or turn left or go straight ahead, and start exploring.

00:13:07.000 | Now, you can do this literally.

00:13:09.000 | One of the things that I have found over the years is that there's a lot of interesting stuff right around my house,

00:13:13.000 | but usually I'm so busy just driving fast, fast, fast, fast in a car,

00:13:17.000 | that I don't take the time to get to know it a little bit.

00:13:20.000 | And so you can walk around your town or use this one metaphorically.

00:13:24.000 | Start exploring your city. Start exploring your state.

00:13:27.000 | I'm a list maker and a list checker-offer.

00:13:30.000 | And one of the things that I find really interesting to do is just complete lists of stuff in my area.

00:13:37.000 | The best source for these lists would be Wikipedia.

00:13:39.000 | Look up your state, look up your city, and start looking up lists of attractions that are in your state or in your city.

00:13:44.000 | For example, you can find all national parks or all points of interest in Florida, in the United States,

00:13:52.000 | or in Palm Beach County, a list of all Palm Beach County parks, or a list of all wherever you're located.

00:13:58.000 | And then start visiting them.

00:14:00.000 | A number of years ago, we started to do this as a family.

00:14:02.000 | We'd just go to all the parks and just one by one start checking off all the little parks.

00:14:06.000 | And you find all these interesting little things that you never knew were there.

00:14:09.000 | You find a little park down the road or a little wildlife refuge and you go poke around there.

00:14:13.000 | And it's kind of fun. It helps you to get to know your hometown a little bit.

00:14:16.000 | If you haven't done it, one of the recommendations I would make is get yourself a tourist book for your local area.

00:14:22.000 | We're often so keen to explore the things that are happening on the other side of the world

00:14:27.000 | that we forget about the opportunities that are right in our town.

00:14:30.000 | And yet, there are people who will come from the other side of the world to explore your town.

00:14:34.000 | And they'll be thrilled with it.

00:14:36.000 | So one way that you can get the mindset of one of those people is pick up a tourist guide for your town.

00:14:43.000 | Grab a Lonely Planet USA or a Lonely Planet South Carolina.

00:14:48.000 | And then start going through there with a highlighter.

00:14:50.000 | And just like you would if it were Lonely Planet Europe, start going through it with a highlighter

00:14:55.000 | and mark the things that are interesting to you.

00:14:59.000 | The things that you would like to check out.

00:15:01.000 | And if you do that, you'll probably find some things that you never thought of doing before.

00:15:04.000 | You start exploring some new beaches, exploring some new parks, exploring some new restaurants.

00:15:09.000 | Find a little favorite cafe that you wouldn't have known was there if you didn't go and find it online.

00:15:15.000 | Or sorry, in a guidebook.

00:15:17.000 | And so check out things that are right near you.

00:15:19.000 | Now if you'd like to take your walking adventure a little bit further afield,

00:15:22.000 | I would recommend that you just simply do it.

00:15:26.000 | There are people throughout human history who have traveled the world by walking.

00:15:31.000 | I've read a number of stories of people who walked all around the world as part of their adventure.

00:15:36.000 | There are people right now walking across your country, walking from Argentina to Alaska,

00:15:42.000 | walking across Europe, walking across Africa, exploring the things that are right around them.

00:15:48.000 | And you can do this too.

00:15:50.000 | You don't need much.

00:15:51.000 | You don't need any special gear.

00:15:53.000 | You probably want to have a little bit of camping gear, a little stove to cook on,

00:15:56.000 | maybe a tent to sleep in is going to be comfortable.

00:15:59.000 | You might want to carry it all on your back or you might want to go ahead and make a little cart.

00:16:03.000 | A little cart would probably be the way that I would do it so I could be a little bit more comfortable.

00:16:07.000 | But you don't need any form of locomotion.

00:16:10.000 | All you need is to walk.

00:16:12.000 | And if you do that, if you have the basics of a place to sleep at night, again, a simple tent would be great.

00:16:19.000 | If you have shoes to walk in, if you have a bag to carry some stuff in,

00:16:23.000 | if you have the ability to get and maybe purify some water, which is simple enough,

00:16:27.000 | you have the ability to cut your living expenses to just about as close to zero as you can imagine.

00:16:35.000 | Tents, once they're purchased, don't charge rent.

00:16:38.000 | About the only thing you have to do is buy some new shoes from time to time and feed yourself.

00:16:43.000 | But the great thing is if you go on an adventure like that,

00:16:46.000 | I bet you could find enough ways to feed yourself on the road.

00:16:50.000 | A little bit of part-time work here and there, some interesting friends who will take you in,

00:16:55.000 | people who will want to house a traveler for the night or feed a traveler for the day.

00:16:59.000 | It's a time-honored way of earning a living.

00:17:02.000 | Be a source of entertainment.

00:17:03.000 | Throughout history, travelers have cut out across the countryside with really not much

00:17:08.000 | except a few dollars in their pocket or a few gold sovereigns or whatever the money of the day is,

00:17:13.000 | and they've just figured it out as they went along.

00:17:16.000 | Often they earn their keep by entertaining people,

00:17:19.000 | and people would enjoy hosting a traveler and would pay that traveler with a good night's sleep

00:17:25.000 | and a belly full of food in compensation for the stories that the traveler would have.

00:17:29.000 | And this is more doable today than it ever was.

00:17:32.000 | If you also want to be connected, your cell phone is going to work just as well in South Carolina

00:17:36.000 | as it is in North Carolina.

00:17:38.000 | So go exploring, go adventuring.

00:17:40.000 | Walking across the continent is probably not a bad way to do it.

00:17:43.000 | If it worked for Forrest Gump, it works for you.

00:17:45.000 | I just watched a fascinating story of a guy on YouTube who's some 60-ish year old man from Argentina,

00:17:53.000 | and he was walking from Argentina up to Alaska.

00:17:55.000 | He had a little cart that he had made, and he was pulling his little cart,

00:17:58.000 | just walking alongside the road and having an adventure.

00:18:00.000 | The great thing about that kind of walking adventure, that way of traveling,

00:18:04.000 | is you can't just whiz past and ignore all the sights.

00:18:08.000 | If you really want to slow down, you really want to get the sense of a place,

00:18:11.000 | just start walking its streets.

00:18:13.000 | Get a sense of what's happening in that particular place.

00:18:16.000 | And it can start as simply as that.

00:18:20.000 | Now there are other things that you might want to engage in.

00:18:24.000 | For example, if you're going to walk, maybe you're not all that interested in walking Route 1

00:18:28.000 | up the East Coast from Florida to Maine.

00:18:30.000 | Maybe you are more interested in seeing a certain type of scenery.

00:18:36.000 | So there are lots of things you could do.

00:18:38.000 | There are lots of famous trails that you could go and hike.

00:18:43.000 | Famously the Appalachian Trail.

00:18:45.000 | Every year there are thousands and thousands of people who set out to hike the Appalachian Trail.

00:18:49.000 | And some people do all the way through.

00:18:52.000 | Some people, a little over 2,000 miles from Georgia up to Maine,

00:18:56.000 | some people do it all the way through.

00:18:57.000 | Some people just do parts of it.

00:18:59.000 | But if you want to get off the beaten trail, you want to put a backpack on,

00:19:02.000 | you want to explore mountains, go ahead and hike the Appalachian Trail.

00:19:06.000 | Certainly the people that do it, most of the time they have a decent amount of gear.

00:19:10.000 | They buy some gear.

00:19:11.000 | They buy some fancy stuff.

00:19:12.000 | That can cost you money.

00:19:13.000 | But it's a little bit cheaper for you to buy a backpack and a good pair of hiking boots

00:19:17.000 | and a decent tent than it is for you to buy a sailboat or to buy an RV.

00:19:22.000 | And so if you are interested in slowing down and in seeing the wilderness,

00:19:26.000 | this might not be a bad time to do it.

00:19:28.000 | It's spring right now as I record this, April 21, 2020.

00:19:32.000 | It's spring.

00:19:33.000 | It might be a great time.

00:19:34.000 | And if you're going to be laid off and collecting unemployment,

00:19:36.000 | you might as well be off hiking instead of just sitting at home staring at Netflix all the time.

00:19:41.000 | Or maybe this is the time that you set off to make a checklist.

00:19:45.000 | Maybe you do the triple crown of hiking.

00:19:47.000 | There's a triple crown of hiking in the United States where people hike the Appalachian Trail,

00:19:52.000 | the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail.

00:19:55.000 | And so maybe you start working on that.

00:19:57.000 | You might have to manage the weather properly,

00:19:59.000 | but it might be an interesting thing for you to check off.

00:20:04.000 | You're in a very small group of people if you go and set off an adventure like that.

00:20:08.000 | But it doesn't have to be the laid out trails.

00:20:12.000 | You might enjoy that, but if not, you can simply have an adventure with walking.

00:20:17.000 | And you can do this anywhere in the world.

00:20:19.000 | You can fly into London and start walking to Morocco.

00:20:22.000 | There are opportunities for you to do it anywhere in the world.

00:20:25.000 | Don't forget about the value of a walking adventure.

00:20:28.000 | Go out the front door, turn right, get started.

00:20:30.000 | Adventure lies just beyond the horizon.

00:20:33.000 | Now, the next thing I would lay in would be what about getting yourself a bicycle?

00:20:39.000 | If you'd like to go a little bit farther, for example, for me, I'm not so interested.

00:20:42.000 | I've never really loved the concept of just going and walking.

00:20:47.000 | But bicycling has always appealed to me.

00:20:49.000 | You can cover dozens and dozens of miles in a day.

00:20:52.000 | You can make very meaningful progress across large swathes of terrain while traveling on a bicycle.

00:20:58.000 | You can do this on road.

00:21:00.000 | You can do this off road.

00:21:01.000 | You can do trails.

00:21:02.000 | You can do back roads.

00:21:03.000 | You can do all over the world.

00:21:05.000 | And if you, especially if you have children, this might be the kind of adventure that is a little bit more accessible to them.

00:21:11.000 | Some of these adventures are really well suited to a single person or to a couple, an adult couple.

00:21:17.000 | Some of them do open up the path with children.

00:21:19.000 | But there was years ago I read a story of a family that rode their bicycles from I think it was Alaska to Argentina.

00:21:25.000 | I have always had a fascination with that trip through the Americas.

00:21:28.000 | I think they got as far as Argentina, but my memory may be messing me up and they may have stopped at Panama.

00:21:35.000 | But they rode bicycles and they had mom and dad on a bicycle and they had the kids attached with one of those kind of tag along bicycles when they were younger.

00:21:43.000 | And then when the kids got older, the kids got their own bicycle.

00:21:46.000 | But a bicycle adventure is very feasible for many people.

00:21:49.000 | You can cover entire states over a course of days.

00:21:52.000 | You can cover entire countries over a course of weeks.

00:21:55.000 | And yet you still have that sense of adventure, that sense of being in the middle of things.

00:21:59.000 | Again, one of the real benefits of a walking adventure, a bicycle adventure, some sort of motorcycle based adventure as compared to a car or RV based adventure is you can't hide from what's happening locally.

00:22:13.000 | You can get an RV and you can say this year we're going to cover all the national parks and that's great.

00:22:18.000 | But you're going to go whizzing past at 70 miles an hour, little towns all over the country just to get from one national park to the next national park.

00:22:26.000 | Whereas if you go off on a bicycle adventure, you can't ever do that.

00:22:30.000 | You're always exposed.

00:22:31.000 | You're always visible.

00:22:32.000 | You're always in the local environment.

00:22:35.000 | And so consider setting up a little bicycle adventure.

00:22:37.000 | You can do this on the cheap if you are willing or if you need to.

00:22:41.000 | If you're willing to embrace, again, that spirit of adventure, go online, start looking around and figure out what other people have done.

00:22:47.000 | And maybe you buy yourself a nice expensive bicycle.

00:22:51.000 | But even there, it doesn't have to be thousands and thousands of dollars.

00:22:54.000 | That's one solution.

00:22:55.000 | Maybe you just simply use bicycles that are disposable.

00:22:58.000 | You've got a Walmart special.

00:23:00.000 | So you start on your Walmart special.

00:23:01.000 | You know the frame is going to crack, you know, a couple hundred miles down the road.

00:23:05.000 | But then you'll find somebody who can weld it for you and fix it.

00:23:08.000 | Or you'll get yourself another bicycle somewhere along the way.

00:23:11.000 | You don't need much for an adventure like that.

00:23:15.000 | All you need is a bicycle, something to wear while you ride the bicycle.

00:23:21.000 | It doesn't have to be perfect.

00:23:22.000 | It doesn't have to be high end.

00:23:24.000 | You're probably going to want to take some camping gear.

00:23:26.000 | So a tent, stove, a little pad to sleep on, you know, some extra clothes, some extra gear, a little bit of extra food.

00:23:33.000 | You can think it through.

00:23:34.000 | You can put some panniers on your bicycle.

00:23:36.000 | You can hook up a little trailer depending on what you want to do.

00:23:39.000 | But grab a bicycle and head off across the country.

00:23:42.000 | See what you find.

00:23:44.000 | One of the reasons why I'm focusing on these kinds of adventures and talking about a place like even the United States is a huge country or Canada, a huge country,

00:23:51.000 | is that with the travel restrictions you may have a tough time crossing borders.

00:23:56.000 | This is not the easiest time in the world for you to buy a round-the-world airplane ticket and start crossing a new international border every few days.

00:24:04.000 | But if you're walking or if you're bicycling, there's plenty to see within the bounds of whatever country you're currently located in.

00:24:10.000 | So consider a bicycling adventure.

00:24:12.000 | Now a step up from a bicycling adventure.

00:24:14.000 | Some people could go to a horse, right, or a burro team.

00:24:18.000 | I've never been into that.

00:24:19.000 | But you know what?

00:24:20.000 | It could be a fun story to say.

00:24:22.000 | There are people out there, I've read a few of their stories, who ride a horse from border to border, take a mule team, something really wacky like that.

00:24:30.000 | Get yourself a little buggy and hook your horse to it and go see the country with a horse.

00:24:35.000 | If you've got horses, maybe this might be a great time to do that.

00:24:38.000 | Or just spend the summer out in the wilderness riding your horse from mountaintop to mountaintop.

00:24:43.000 | Who knows?

00:24:44.000 | For me, I've always gone to a steel horse as the next solution.

00:24:48.000 | And I think that for me, personally, motorcycle-based adventures are usually, I think, a great compromise.

00:24:55.000 | Motorcycling is tough for all the reasons that walking and bicycling are tough.

00:25:00.000 | That you're out, exposed to the elements.

00:25:03.000 | But you can make a little bit faster progress than on a bicycle.

00:25:08.000 | And the costs, I think, are really quite modest.

00:25:11.000 | If you don't have any money, you're probably going to not want to try to buy yourself a motorcycle and keep it on the road.

00:25:16.000 | But if you've got a little bit of money, a motorcycle can be done really, really well.

00:25:19.000 | Now let's start with the lower end cost.

00:25:22.000 | If you've got a $30,000 Harley Davidson, that'll work.

00:25:25.000 | But if you don't, consider just picking yourself up a cheap little scooter.

00:25:29.000 | One of the adventures that I thought about going on when I was in college didn't pull the trigger on it.

00:25:33.000 | I probably wish I had, but that's all right.

00:25:35.000 | There's plenty of time.

00:25:36.000 | I've had plenty of other adventures in the meantime.

00:25:38.000 | Was to just simply take a scooter across the United States.

00:25:42.000 | My plan was to get an inexpensive, just basic little scooter.

00:25:45.000 | You can buy yourself a Chinese, you know, cheap scooter or a nice little Honda or a Vespa.

00:25:50.000 | It was just that kind of little scooter.

00:25:52.000 | Put a few bags on the back and then take the slow path.

00:25:55.000 | Go up US 1 from Key West all the way up to the Northeast or go across the country.

00:26:01.000 | Do Route 66, whatever it is that you want to do.

00:26:04.000 | I wouldn't do the desert on a scooter.

00:26:06.000 | I would stick to the East Coast where it's more populated just because the slow pace fits it.

00:26:10.000 | But at a scooter, let's say you're traveling at 40, 50, 50 miles an hour.

00:26:15.000 | You can make a lot of progress but yet still see a lot.

00:26:19.000 | It's extraordinarily inexpensive.

00:26:22.000 | You can get routinely 60, 70, 80, 100 miles per gallon on a scooter right now with gas, a buck, buck 50 a gallon.

00:26:29.000 | That'll get you a long way.

00:26:31.000 | But you're still kind of out in it.

00:26:35.000 | And yet a scooter is small.

00:26:36.000 | You can go just about anywhere.

00:26:38.000 | You can pull it off the road.

00:26:39.000 | You can camp in the woods at night.

00:26:40.000 | But yet you can make a lot of progress.

00:26:42.000 | You could easily do the four corners of the United States on a scooter.

00:26:46.000 | You could easily do border to border on a scooter and enjoy thousands and thousands of miles in between.

00:26:53.000 | If the scooter breaks, you leave it on the side of the road or call someone to trash it and get yourself another one.

00:26:58.000 | You can find them all over the place for a few hundred bucks.

00:27:01.000 | And so consider the basic approach of a simple scooter.

00:27:07.000 | Really great way to move a lot faster than a bicycle but a lot cheaper than almost anything else.

00:27:15.000 | Now, of course, you can upgrade to nicer motorcycles pretty well if you have a motorcycle.

00:27:19.000 | That's a good one to take.

00:27:20.000 | If you got a street bike, go for it.

00:27:22.000 | If you got a dual sport, go for it.

00:27:24.000 | If you got a nice high-end touring bike, go for it.

00:27:27.000 | But get out the door with a motorcycle and you can really see a lot of country.

00:27:31.000 | What about moving from a motorcycle to an enclosed vehicle?

00:27:37.000 | Well, there's tons of ways to have a car-based adventure.

00:27:39.000 | If you want to travel, there are so many interesting ways to make a car-based adventure work.

00:27:44.000 | I think car-based adventures, the big downside is usually the cost of fuel.

00:27:49.000 | But right now is a great time to do a road trip because the cost of fuel is low.

00:27:54.000 | If you have the money and you can easily pay for fuel, your fuel budget will go a lot farther today than it would have a year or two ago.

00:28:01.000 | And so this is a great time for a car-based adventure.

00:28:04.000 | Car-based adventures offer a number of big advantages.

00:28:08.000 | Number one, the travel is certainly easier.

00:28:10.000 | You can drive for a few hours in a car and not be worn out like you are with a few hours on a motorcycle, out in the sun and the wind and the exposure.

00:28:18.000 | You can go for a few hours in a car and get just about anywhere.

00:28:22.000 | And then the car gives you a little bit more privacy and it opens up some options to you that are going to be more comfortable than all the options previously stated.

00:28:32.000 | Basically, everything discussed so far involves some form of staying in a hotel, which will bust your budget if you're trying to do this on the cheap, or some form of camping, which is exciting to some people and not exciting to other people.

00:28:45.000 | When you go to a car, however, the options open up.

00:28:48.000 | At the really low end, you just say, "I've got to do this thing on the really cheap."

00:28:52.000 | Just simply sleep in your car and make that your primary plan.

00:28:56.000 | Almost any car can be modified to be slept in, almost any car, especially if you're willing, if you have one person and/or if you are willing to adjust the seats a little bit.

00:29:07.000 | Years ago when I graduated from college, I had a Honda Accord, an old Honda Accord, and I wanted to go off and visit my, I wanted to go and travel around the United States.

00:29:17.000 | I didn't have much money though, so I had to do it without hotels.

00:29:20.000 | And here were the strategies that I used.

00:29:22.000 | Number one, I had my own car, and so the basic expense there was fuel.

00:29:26.000 | The car was paid for, it was cheap, it was old.

00:29:28.000 | I was worried about it breaking down though, because when I left on the trip, it had 193,000 miles on it.

00:29:33.000 | And so I was concerned, what do I do if this thing breaks down?

00:29:36.000 | So I bought a AAA membership.

00:29:38.000 | And I said, "All right, at least I got the ability to get this thing towed, and I know the cost of it is whatever an annual AAA membership costs, $70, $80, I don't remember."

00:29:46.000 | Number two is I made a plan to sleep in the car.

00:29:49.000 | So I figured out how, if I could pop the back seat down and stick my feet in the trunk, if I needed to sleep in the car, I could sleep in the car, but that wasn't my primary plan.

00:29:57.000 | My primary plan just involved staying with friends.

00:30:00.000 | And so what I did at the time was I sent an email to basically everybody that I knew, and/or I guess maybe a Facebook message, just about everybody I knew.

00:30:08.000 | I collected all their addresses, and I said, "Hey, would you like to host Joshua for a night?"

00:30:12.000 | I collected all their addresses, I plotted them on a map, and that was how I figured out my itinerary.

00:30:17.000 | I just went from friend's house to friend's house to friend's house to friend's house all across the country.

00:30:22.000 | That was easy. I was a single man. I could sleep on the couch, on the floor. It was no big deal.

00:30:26.000 | It would be a little bit more challenging for people to host my family at this point than it was back then.

00:30:30.000 | But that eliminated all of my hospitality expenses.

00:30:34.000 | I didn't stay in a hotel the entire trip. I only stayed with people that I knew.

00:30:38.000 | It also made kind of a built-in itinerary where I usually had a local tour guide.

00:30:42.000 | Many of my friends were kind and gracious enough to treat me to food, to treat me to activities, and I had a great time.

00:30:49.000 | I traveled for, I don't remember, but a long time, and got as far west as Colorado, wound up in Ottawa, up in Canada, and had a great time all the way back.

00:31:01.000 | You can use a car and yet never have to touch camping gear, never have to see a hotel room, if you'll embrace staying with your friends and visiting your friends all across the country.

00:31:11.000 | If you need to modify a car to stay in, there are a number of things you can do depending on the specific car.

00:31:17.000 | You've got just a little bit of itty-bitty car. First, you could always trade out your car.

00:31:21.000 | I think one of the best compromises would be a minivan if you're a couple of people, one or up to two people, although you could do three if you build a hammock, but I think that would be a little extreme.

00:31:31.000 | You can go up to a full-size van. If you go to a full-size van, you could probably go up to about six people.

00:31:37.000 | I've seen solutions where you take a 15-passenger van, take out the last back two seats and put in two beds, bunk beds in the back.

00:31:46.000 | You could put about six people sleeping there and turn that van into a camper.

00:31:50.000 | That would work really well if you've got some children and you need to create an inexpensive adventure van, or you can go ahead and upgrade to a larger RV depending on the size of your family, depending on what you actually need.

00:32:01.000 | You can do this stuff on the cheap if, again, you'll embrace that spirit of adventure.

00:32:05.000 | What do you do if you've just got a simple car?

00:32:07.000 | The first thing you look at is what would happen if you took the back seat out.

00:32:12.000 | A hatchback here is going to be a different design than a sedan, but sometimes you can take the back seat out.

00:32:16.000 | You can use the trunk. You can put your feet in the trunk and you can build a platform.

00:32:19.000 | Also, then consider popping out the passenger seat.

00:32:22.000 | You can take out the passenger seat and you can often build a flat platform.

00:32:25.000 | Even in the smallest of vehicles, you could often build a flat platform that would give you a sleeping area.

00:32:31.000 | Then you get a little screen, put some magnets on it so you can keep the windows rolled down and have some ventilation at night.

00:32:36.000 | Then look at what you've got left over.

00:32:38.000 | You might just need a bag, a duffel bag with some clothes, a little stove that you can pop open on a picnic table, maybe a little portable table or something flat that you can cook on.

00:32:47.000 | Sometimes you have a tailgate if you have a pickup truck, but you can turn just about any car into a workable camper for one person.

00:32:55.000 | Two people becomes tough, but it can be doable. But you need a car that's going to work a little bit better and still give you seating.

00:33:02.000 | Great solution here is a Toyota Prius. If you have a Prius or you can get one cheap, right now because of the decrease in fuel prices, you should be able to get a Toyota Prius at a pretty cheap price.

00:33:12.000 | When fuel prices are high, they command a bit of a premium, but right now with fuel prices low, they probably don't get much of a premium.

00:33:19.000 | So you can get yourself a used Prius for a few thousand bucks.

00:33:22.000 | The great thing about the Prius is the front seats will fold backwards and the back seat will fold forward.

00:33:29.000 | And so you can sleep stretched out full length in one of those things.

00:33:33.000 | If you're going to be traveling hot areas or cold areas, the Prius is also a good solution because you can use the air conditioning very economically.

00:33:41.000 | Because it's a hybrid, you can flip the AC on and you can run it on the high end and the engine will just turn itself on and off over time.

00:33:50.000 | I've camped for probably about two and a half to three weeks in a Prius over time, slept in parking garages in the middle of cities out in the country, all over the place, and I loved it.

00:33:59.000 | It was great for one person, possibly two people, although you probably need some kind of roof rack to put your stuff in.

00:34:05.000 | Could work great.

00:34:07.000 | What other options are available to you?

00:34:09.000 | Well, a pickup truck is a big upgrade in comfort from a car.

00:34:13.000 | So grab yourself a pickup truck, put a topper on the back and build yourself a little camper in the back.

00:34:17.000 | You can even build your own topper.

00:34:20.000 | Go to YouTube and start getting some inspiration from what other people have done.

00:34:23.000 | But you can build your own topper or you can grab yourself a $500 topper off Facebook Marketplace, build a little bed, and you have a major increase in comfort without a major increase in cost.

00:34:34.000 | So tons of options there with a pickup truck.

00:34:37.000 | If you want to upgrade still further and you have a pickup truck, consider looking at something like a pickup truck camper.

00:34:44.000 | That's the kind of upgrade that I would definitely make if I wanted to be on the road for a longer period of time and I wanted to be able to work on the road.

00:34:52.000 | One of the things that I have found is it's simply too difficult for me to work on the road unless I feel like an ordinary human being.

00:35:03.000 | It's really tough psychologically to be sleeping in a car and yet still, for me anyway, to be able to work and feel like a human being.

00:35:12.000 | So if I'm just traveling, I don't mind roughing it.

00:35:15.000 | If I'm just traveling, I can stay in a tent.

00:35:18.000 | If I'm just traveling, I can sleep in a backseat, I guess.

00:35:24.000 | But if I'm trying to work and travel, doing some online gig or doing some gig on the road, then for me, there's a big upgrade by going ahead and having a decent bed so that I don't feel like a total bum sleeping on the ground in a tent.

00:35:39.000 | You think about that if that's important to you.

00:35:41.000 | It could also be just that I'm getting old and at this point in time, I'm getting soft in my old age.

00:35:45.000 | Who knows?

00:35:46.000 | Pickup truck though, big improvement in comfort.

00:35:48.000 | If you got an SUV, most SUVs can be adjusted to be able to be slept in.

00:35:56.000 | There's people that can sleep in a Wrangler.

00:35:59.000 | There's a Jeep Wrangler.

00:36:00.000 | My wife and I camped one time in a Ford Escape that we had.

00:36:04.000 | We had a Ford Expedition.

00:36:05.000 | We put a bed in the back of that, camped in that.

00:36:07.000 | Josh has been fascinated with sleeping in cars for years.

00:36:10.000 | So this is nothing new.

00:36:11.000 | And so any SUV can be adjusted and modified to work out really well for you.

00:36:17.000 | But you don't have to stay inside the vehicle.

00:36:20.000 | Remember, you can always just toss a tent in there.

00:36:22.000 | And depending on what your travel style is, you can either have a basic minimal tent, go down to Walmart, get a Walmart special.

00:36:29.000 | It may last you a month or two before it falls apart.

00:36:31.000 | But with that, plus your little Toyota Corolla, tent in the back, it works great.

00:36:35.000 | You can go ahead and buy a little fancier tent that will set up a little bit faster, take down a little slower and keep you for longer.

00:36:41.000 | And that could be your living quarters.

00:36:42.000 | Or you can go ahead and upgrade to something like a large wall tent.

00:36:46.000 | And you can go and stay places comfortably for weeks or months at a time in a nice wall tent if that's what you would like to do.

00:36:54.000 | Tons of options if you've got a van or are interested in upgrading to a van.

00:36:59.000 | If I were doing it, as long as I didn't have too many people, I would do it in a minivan.

00:37:03.000 | Because then I got a good compromise between fuel mileage.

00:37:08.000 | A minivan is going to get a lot better fuel mileage than a bigger van.

00:37:12.000 | But it's going to be livable.

00:37:13.000 | I can put a full-size twin -- meaning a twin mattress, not a full-size, but a standard residential mattress in a minivan.

00:37:21.000 | I can have easy access from the front to the back.

00:37:24.000 | I can have air conditioning overnight.

00:37:26.000 | I've slept many nights in a minivan.

00:37:28.000 | And when it's hot, you just keep the van on and run the AC all night.

00:37:31.000 | Make sure you've got a carbon monoxide detector for safety.

00:37:33.000 | But it works great.

00:37:35.000 | I've also run a heater.

00:37:36.000 | Heat is not so difficult because you can easily insulate with thick blankets.

00:37:41.000 | But it's nice to the minivan.

00:37:42.000 | You wake up in the morning.

00:37:43.000 | It's a little bit cold.

00:37:44.000 | You reach up, turn the thing on, crank the heater up, and in 10 minutes your car is nice and warm.

00:37:49.000 | And you can go ahead and squirm out of bed.

00:37:51.000 | So a minivan is a really good solution.

00:37:53.000 | Or if you're interested and you're going to be on the road for longer, go ahead and build yourself a proper camper in a full-size van.

00:38:00.000 | A few weeks of work by somebody with some basic competence with hand tools,

00:38:04.000 | and you can create for yourself a very livable house on wheels in a full-size van.

00:38:11.000 | You can do this very comfortably with two people.

00:38:14.000 | You can do this with semi-comfort with more, depending on exactly what you're trying to do.

00:38:20.000 | If you're trying to strike that balance, let's say you've got children and you want to go and travel with children,

00:38:25.000 | then what I think you want to do is you want to strike some balance between in the vehicle versus out of the vehicle.

00:38:31.000 | You don't want to try to live in the vehicle with multiple children, you know, four people, five people, et cetera.

00:38:36.000 | But what you can do is you can set up sleeping quarters in the vehicle or on the vehicle,

00:38:41.000 | and then you can live and work around the vehicle.

00:38:44.000 | My plan has always been, let's say that I wanted to go and travel with children.

00:38:48.000 | I wanted to strike a balance between comfort and practicality.

00:38:54.000 | My balance would be to have a 15-passenger van or a large van, put two rooftop tents on the top for sleeping,

00:39:02.000 | so that I've got kind of the comfort of the rooftop tents.

00:39:06.000 | They're up off the ground, easy and fast to set up, all the reasons why the Jeeps love them.

00:39:11.000 | But then just build a nice awning around it and then have a kitchen that folds out of the back of it.

00:39:19.000 | With that design, I've got plenty of space for people to be in the vehicle,

00:39:25.000 | and I've got adequate protection from the weather with some awnings, et cetera,

00:39:29.000 | and I've got kind of a reasonable balance where it's not so big as an RV.

00:39:35.000 | I can get off-road, I can get down little trails, a lot of things I can do,

00:39:39.000 | but we're not trying to live in the van the whole time, so that might be a thing for you.

00:39:44.000 | A couple other kind of off-the-wall ideas that I think really have merit.

00:39:48.000 | One of the things that I would consider before we go all the way to the full-size RV would be to convert a cargo trailer.

00:39:55.000 | You might already have a cargo trailer or you might want to convert one,

00:39:59.000 | but you can take a cargo trailer and you can make it very, very livable very, very quickly.

00:40:04.000 | Now, many people go quickly to building everything in,

00:40:07.000 | and if you want to have your house on the cover of Tiny Homes Magazine,

00:40:11.000 | you're going to need to build everything in.

00:40:13.000 | You're going to need to be a carpenter, it's all going to be finished,

00:40:15.000 | it's all going to be built in and look great because basically you're copying an RV.

00:40:19.000 | But I don't think that's the ideal solution.

00:40:21.000 | I think the ideal solution is to find a bit of a balance between having everything built in versus using portable equipment.

00:40:29.000 | For example, I use all the time those folding portable plastic tables,

00:40:35.000 | and they're great because you can set it up, have a great big table,

00:40:38.000 | they can wipe them down easily with a cloth, and yet when you're done, fold them down, toss them in your vehicle.

00:40:44.000 | Those can be set up inside a trailer and outside of a trailer.

00:40:48.000 | And so if you have a cargo trailer, you don't have to devote the whole thing to heavy built-in furniture.

00:40:55.000 | You can have a small built-in table, but you can also use one of those plastic tables.

00:40:59.000 | And if the weather is beautiful, you don't want to be inside the trailer.

00:41:03.000 | It's one of the great downsides of an RV is if you have an RV, everything is so built in,

00:41:08.000 | you've kind of always got to do everything inside the RV.

00:41:11.000 | And some of them, of course, have an outdoor kitchen, but the downside of an outdoor kitchen is that's not where your stuff is.

00:41:16.000 | And so you're always going back and forth.

00:41:19.000 | I almost never see somebody build or actually use their outdoor kitchen in an RV park for anything other than storing beer

00:41:25.000 | for the reason that your stuff's inside.

00:41:28.000 | Well, you can do something really nice with a cargo trailer where you have a big upgrade in space.

00:41:33.000 | If the weather is bad, you can be inside, but you can move your equipment inside and outside really easily.

00:41:38.000 | So why not keep everything simple?

00:41:41.000 | Have a portable table, and if the weather is bad, you set it up inside the cargo trailer and cook on that.

00:41:46.000 | If the weather is good, you set it up outside and you cook out there.

00:41:50.000 | Why do you need a built-in stove?

00:41:52.000 | There aren't really that many advantages to having a built-in stove that you can't move.

00:41:56.000 | I love to cook on a little portable stove.

00:41:58.000 | You can grab yourself a single burner butane stove from Walmart or a restaurant supply store for $15, $20, any outdoor store.

00:42:05.000 | Those things work awesome, and they work awesome whether you set them on the countertop inside the stove or outside.

00:42:11.000 | I'm sorry, inside the trailer or outside on the table.

00:42:14.000 | I carried one of those for years in my pickup truck, and then that way I carried some food and some water.

00:42:19.000 | And if I wanted to make a hot meal, I just pop the tailgate down, put that little stove there, and make myself a quick lunch

00:42:24.000 | with some dried food or whatever was shelf-stable and mix it up on the back of the tailgate.

00:42:31.000 | And that works awesome.

00:42:32.000 | It's perfectly comfortable as a plan to cook, and yet it gives you far more options than trying to build everything in,

00:42:38.000 | and it's far cheaper.

00:42:40.000 | Similar things with water, with a sink.

00:42:42.000 | It's not that hard to set up a water station with a water jug and a dish pan.

00:42:47.000 | And so doing something like that gives you -- you still have water.

00:42:51.000 | At the end of the day, it's not going to be quite as nice as your big farmhouse sink in your house, but it's perfectly adequate.

00:42:58.000 | And so you don't have to go through all the time and the expense of building everything in.

00:43:03.000 | Similar things with beds.

00:43:05.000 | Cots can be created.

00:43:06.000 | They're fold-down cots, or you can go ahead and build beds in, whatever you want to do.

00:43:10.000 | But there's so much, so many things you can do now with portable equipment that you can get yourself 80% of the way with 20% of the money

00:43:18.000 | and 20% of the hassle and get out on the road and have your adventure.

00:43:22.000 | But consider building a cargo trailer, converting a cargo trailer.

00:43:26.000 | It could be a really great project, tons of inspiration online if you go looking for it.

00:43:31.000 | Now, I've talked a lot about vehicles, and I've used so far kind of off-the-wall ideas, low-budget ideas.

00:43:37.000 | I haven't talked about getting an RV.

00:43:39.000 | But yet you can do all of this with an RV as well.

00:43:42.000 | And where I think you cross the barrier was what I found when we went RVing full-time was children.

00:43:49.000 | I wanted to -- I wasn't going to leave my kids behind, and yet they add an extra element,

00:43:54.000 | extra element of pressure that doesn't exist if you're just a couple of people.

00:43:58.000 | And so if I've got children and if I've got money, then I definitely appreciated the upgrade and comfort to go ahead and get some kind of RV.

00:44:08.000 | I won't turn this show into an RV show.

00:44:11.000 | I will simply say that there are low-budget options available if you're willing to go and look for them.

00:44:19.000 | The cheapest way for you to get on the road with an RV that will be serviceable is going to be a travel trailer.

00:44:25.000 | And right now it's my understanding that basically the RV business is essentially collapsing.

00:44:31.000 | There are people on all sides trying to sell RVs, and I think there are going to be a lot of RVs available in the used market.

00:44:37.000 | Your cheapest option is going to be a towable travel trailer.

00:44:41.000 | They're widely available partly because they're cheap and a lot of people buy them.

00:44:46.000 | They're also widely available because they work for a lot of people who can tow them with almost any kind of tow vehicle, an SUV, a van, a pickup truck.

00:44:54.000 | And so they're going to be your best bang for the buck.

00:44:57.000 | Everything in RVing is a compromise.

00:45:00.000 | You're always going to be compromising somewhere, but that's a very doable, low-cost compromise where you get some comfort, you get real built-in furniture,

00:45:09.000 | you get RV systems that will function effectively for you, and they're nice.

00:45:15.000 | We lived very comfortably as a family of five in an RV for about six months and enjoyed it very much.

00:45:21.000 | I will do it again.

00:45:23.000 | We'll get another RV at some point, and we'll go do it again because we really enjoyed it.

00:45:27.000 | So my strategies when I started was, number one, is I focused on a travel trailer because I didn't want to have a lot of money into a rig.

00:45:34.000 | Looking back, I wish that I had spent a little bit more money when I bought the rig, but I'm glad I did it cheap.

00:45:41.000 | The first travel trailer that I bought, I think I paid $6,000 for it, maybe it was $8,000, something like $6,000 or $8,000 for it.

00:45:50.000 | I did wind up having to put a few thousand bucks in it on the trip.

00:45:53.000 | I had to replace the axles on the trip because one of the axles was bent and was wearing out the tires.

00:45:57.000 | That was a couple thousand bucks.

00:45:59.000 | I had to fix some stuff.

00:46:00.000 | I had to fix a hot water heater along the way, and I was driving down the road.

00:46:05.000 | The siding started to pull off.

00:46:06.000 | I had to fix that.

00:46:07.000 | That didn't cost a lot of money.

00:46:08.000 | It just was a hassle for me to fix.

00:46:10.000 | Other than that, though, stuff mostly worked, and I was able to sell it for, I think it took about a $1,000 hit on the depreciation.

00:46:18.000 | All in, I probably lost about three grand on the deal with that travel trailer.

00:46:23.000 | I also tried to go cheap when I originally bought it with a tow rig.

00:46:27.000 | My genius plan to start with was to pull my trailer with a full-size van, and so I picked up a full-size van for a few thousand bucks.

00:46:36.000 | Unfortunately, mine had some engine troubles, and it wasn't strong enough to pull it, so that was when I switched over and I moved to a diesel pickup truck.

00:46:43.000 | I was able to get a diesel pickup truck for, I think, six or seven thousand bucks, so all in, I was into the whole thing for something like 13 grand.

00:46:51.000 | Along the way, I was able to do a couple of trades, and by the time I sold everything out, I broke even on the whole thing, even including repairs,

00:46:58.000 | and so you don't have to take a beating on the depreciation.

00:47:02.000 | If I were doing it over again, I would never let money stand in the way of my going, because I wasn't willing to commit by buying fancier stuff.

00:47:11.000 | I wasn't willing to commit to buying a new rig. I hate losing money more than many things in life.

00:47:17.000 | I just hate losing money, and so I was so scared that it was going to be a short-term thing, I wouldn't go out and just buy a new RV.

00:47:24.000 | That said, I probably would next time, I probably would go ahead and upgrade to a nicer RV to get some of the comforts and some of the nice things of a newer, bigger, more modern RV.

00:47:38.000 | There's plenty of deals out there. You can always find something.

00:47:41.000 | If you're willing to spend somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000, you can get on the road from nothing with a very reasonable, very livable situation.

00:47:52.000 | If you want to travel for the longer term, that's a good area to do it, a good way to do it, especially if you've got children.

00:48:01.000 | You're probably not going to be – if I went to my wife and I said, "Honey, I've got this great idea.

00:48:05.000 | We're going to buy a tent, and we're going to put it in the back of our compact car. It's going to be awesome, and we're going to go and sleep on the ground every night and give our children baths and buckets,"

00:48:16.000 | she would look at me and she would say, "All right, we can do it for a few weeks, but we're not going to do it for six months."

00:48:22.000 | I think she would – I'd probably be pushing her a little bit too far.

00:48:25.000 | An RV, I think, is a worthy investment.

00:48:28.000 | Once you get on the road with a rig like that, you can live very inexpensively on the road depending on what region you're traveling in, depending on how much your fuel expenses are.

00:48:36.000 | I came to the conclusion when I did it that if I had to and if I were trying to really cut expenses, that I could live with my children in that kind of setup for about a thousand bucks a month as if I were out in the western United States.

00:48:51.000 | The reason is in the western United States, costs are a lot lower, and there's plenty of government land that you can camp on for free.

00:48:57.000 | All in, costs of some fuel, some insurance, some food, et cetera, I figured that this would be kind of the hardcore.

00:49:04.000 | If Joshua's got to cut his budget to a thousand dollars a month, I could do this and it's livable, and I could make it really exciting.

00:49:10.000 | Now, I'm pretty good at not spending a lot of money.

00:49:13.000 | If you're used to just spending money like crazy, you won't be able to do that until you practice.

00:49:18.000 | But if I'm in the middle of depression and I'm trying to figure out how to start some business, figure out how do I make it as a writer online or start a podcast,

00:49:26.000 | figure out how to provide for my family, I would a whole lot rather be in that situation than out on the streets taking a job that is not a good fit for me just so I can make my $3,000 set of living expenses.

00:49:38.000 | And so that's one of the areas where these adventures can come in.

00:49:42.000 | Car-based adventures run the scope from locally.

00:49:46.000 | Right at your local Walmart, there's people living in their cars.

00:49:50.000 | I think that gets old pretty quickly, but I wouldn't want to do it as a matter of lifestyle unless I were traveling.

00:49:59.000 | But there's a lot you can do, and you can go and do some pretty cool stuff on a car-based adventure.

00:50:06.000 | Everything from a tent tossed in the back of a compact car up through a big giant pickup truck, a big old RV.

00:50:13.000 | There's tons of multimillionaires out there living in cars.

00:50:16.000 | Guarantee it.

00:50:17.000 | They just happen to be slightly bigger and slightly fancier, but at the end of the day, they're still living in cars.

00:50:22.000 | And so once you get past the psychological blockages of it, there's a lot of opportunities available to you.

00:50:28.000 | Let's pivot now.

00:50:29.000 | Let's talk about boats because there's some really interesting things.

00:50:33.000 | If you studied past depressions and you study things that people have done throughout history to live cheaply, boats sometimes come into their adventures.

00:50:44.000 | Right now, all throughout Europe, you can find people living inexpensively in river boats or on narrow boats.

00:50:50.000 | There are whole boating communities.

00:50:52.000 | All throughout Asia, there are entire communities based on living on boats where you can just raft people raft up and they live cheaply.

00:50:59.000 | In the United States, there's not much of a tradition of this now, but there has been in the past.

00:51:05.000 | You can go back to the classic shanty boats from the 19, probably 30s, but 1930s, 40s, and 50s where people didn't have a lot of money and so they just build a simple boat, put a little shanty, a little shack basically on that boat, and they tie it up on a river bank somewhere.

00:51:21.000 | I've been fascinated by the shanty boat culture in the South for many years.

00:51:25.000 | Years ago, I read a story, a novel, and one of the figures, characters in the novel just lived on this little shanty boat in the bayous of Louisiana.

00:51:34.000 | I loved that idea when I was a kid.

00:51:36.000 | I thought, "That is the coolest thing. I want to do that."

00:51:38.000 | You can do this on the cheap with a few thousand, a boat that you build for a few thousand bucks.

00:51:43.000 | Recently, I saw a video on YouTube.

00:51:45.000 | I think it was the Outdoor Boys channel, but the father of that and the leader of that YouTube channel, he built a little, basically a tiny shanty boat, a little barge, fishing barge using sterilized plastic tubs.

00:52:00.000 | Total size was about 8 feet wide and 16 feet long.

00:52:04.000 | What he did was he built some plywood frames.

00:52:08.000 | He framed up four sheets of plywood and then laid them together sideways for 8 feet wide and 16 feet long, braced them together with a board, and then underneath, he screwed a bunch of sterilized tubs, those basic tubs that you pack all your junk into.

00:52:24.000 | He used that for the floats.

00:52:26.000 | Then over top of that, he built a simple cabin on one backside of it.

00:52:30.000 | Then he had a little deck out on the other end of it.

00:52:33.000 | He set up his couple of folding, take down cots, some camping cots in the cabin, put a little propane heater, and took his boys out fishing overnight on a local lake.

00:52:43.000 | He put a little trolling motor to push the thing around on the lake.

00:52:46.000 | I thought the thing was awesome, super cool, and just a total adventure mobile for those boys.

00:52:52.000 | Got to fish all night with their dad and yet have a nice warm bed to sleep in on the lake.

00:52:57.000 | I thought that was super cool.

00:52:59.000 | You can go ahead and upgrade that, though.

00:53:01.000 | You can grab yourself if you're going to do this on the cheap and you're willing to do a little redneck engineering.

00:53:04.000 | Get yourself a pontoon boat and then build a little cabin on it or build your own plywood hole, barge hole, put a little outboard motor on the back, and build a little shack on top.

00:53:14.000 | Again, YouTube is your friend here to see some of the cool things that other people have done to build your own little shanty boat.

00:53:20.000 | A shanty boat could be a really interesting way for you to go on an adventure and live cheap in your local area.

00:53:27.000 | One of the benefits of something like a shanty boat is if water is abundant where you are and if you can find places to anchor out with no cost, you can be part of a workable society.

00:53:41.000 | You've got good cell phone signal, therefore you can work online, you can commute to a job, you can still be in local society even in a place and possibly do it at a cheaper cost than having to live in an RV park.

00:54:00.000 | It just depends on if you're in an area where the water lifestyle works for you.

00:54:05.000 | There are people living in marinas all around the world but all around the country.

00:54:11.000 | I have a friend of mine who has a couple of sailboats in a city in Florida, bought a sailboat for $6,000, anchors it up in the marina for a few hundred bucks a month and he lives on that sailboat while he's working in that town.

00:54:22.000 | He uses one sailboat for himself and another sailboat as housing for some guys that work for him.

00:54:28.000 | It works out really great as a low-cost way of living.

00:54:33.000 | If you need to have a little adventure and you're looking for a place to live inexpensively so that you deal with a financial depression, that might be something worth considering.

00:54:44.000 | The thing to be careful about with boats, of course, is the costs getting into them.

00:54:48.000 | To keep a boat going really well is usually not inexpensive.

00:54:52.000 | If you're going to be sailing offshore, you're going to need a lot of rigging and sails and all that stuff can add up quickly.

00:54:58.000 | I'm trying to give you really low-budget ideas here but you can still do that.

00:55:02.000 | You can get yourself a sailboat, $6,000, $10,000, $3,000 and/or build something for yourself as well.

00:55:08.000 | If you've got a river system, check out building a boat.

00:55:12.000 | Of course, there's tons of cabin cruises out there that you could live on as well.

00:55:15.000 | I've always been attracted to the image of the shanty boat, a little more comfortable, kind of a house that just happens to be on the water.

00:55:23.000 | This might be a time that you head off on an interesting little cruising adventure.

00:55:27.000 | For example, I've always been fascinated by the Great Loop in the United States.

00:55:31.000 | There's a neat little waterway system of a loop called the Great Loop.

00:55:36.000 | Basically, you go up the intercoastal from Florida up through Maine, cut across the Great Lakes, either north into Canada or just across the Great Lakes.

00:55:42.000 | Then you come down the Ohio, the Mississippi, etc., down to the Gulf of Mexico.

00:55:46.000 | Then you complete the loop back underneath the tip peninsula of Florida following the intercoastal from the Gulf all the way down through the Keys and up around Florida.

00:55:56.000 | You can do that on a very small boat.

00:55:59.000 | You can do that on a very modest budget, and you're in the middle of society the whole time.

00:56:05.000 | Yet, it's a genuine, legitimate adventure.

00:56:07.000 | Of course, the Caribbean is your friend.

00:56:09.000 | You can pick up online.

00:56:10.000 | You can pick up a trawler for I don't know how much they cost to maintain, but you can do it for a couple of 15,000, 20,000 bucks.

00:56:18.000 | $25,000, your budget is more.

00:56:20.000 | Go for more.

00:56:21.000 | But you can cruise all around the Caribbean, all down through Central America and all around the Caribbean on a trawler very comfortably and enjoy yourself a Caribbean adventure as well.

00:56:30.000 | So, with boating, the world is open to you.

00:56:34.000 | At the end of the day, if you're willing to invest the skills, willing to invest the time in developing the skills, you can do a lot inexpensively, and you can live a lot of places inexpensively on a sailboat.

00:56:46.000 | There's a great YouTube channel that I enjoy called Sailing Atticus, which is a young couple who bought a fixer-upper sailboat, fixed it up, and they set out from the United States.

00:56:56.000 | They had 2,000 bucks in their cruising fund, and they made it as far as Mexico, and then they totally ran out of money.

00:57:01.000 | So, they did freelance boat work down in Mexico to save up a little bit more money, and they headed off down to the Caribbean.

00:57:06.000 | They were planning to cross through the Panama Canal and head to the Pacific this year, but unfortunately, with coronavirus, they're pretty much locked down in Panama now.

00:57:14.000 | But they've shown how, with a lot of hard work, you can take an old fixer-upper sailboat and turn it into a pretty cool adventure platform.

00:57:22.000 | And so, if that works for you and your lifestyle, those are some options as well.

00:57:27.000 | To wrap up the basic theme of this show, I'm just trying to give you low-budget ideas to stimulate your thinking.

00:57:35.000 | Because when I look back at my younger years, one of the things that I wish I had done was gone on more adventures for cheap.

00:57:45.000 | I went on a lot of adventures for cheap, but I wish I had done more, because there was a neat phase of my life at which it was very doable.

00:57:55.000 | Now, I still go on adventures for cheap and for expensive, and I'm always going to do that.

00:58:01.000 | I live a pretty adventurous life and I like it. I've got that - I forget the name of it now - but I've got that kind of wandering feet syndrome.

00:58:07.000 | I'd be a Bedouin if I were going to go back. I kind of have a gypsy heart in me at my core.

00:58:14.000 | But what I didn't realize when I was younger is I thought I needed money. I thought I needed a great rig. I thought I needed to spend lots of money.

00:58:25.000 | And while money can make things nice, it can allow you to have a vehicle with four-wheel drive instead of two-wheel drive, and big fat tires instead of little skinny tires.

00:58:36.000 | My experience and observation has been that mostly it's completely unnecessary.

00:58:42.000 | Now, travel all around the world and you'll find somebody that comes from Europe with a big, giant, four-wheel drive Mercedes Unimog adventure vehicle.

00:58:51.000 | And meanwhile, there's a broke young couple there with a station wagon, a two-wheel drive station wagon, parked in exactly the same surf spot.

00:59:00.000 | And they're both out there doing the same thing.

00:59:02.000 | Now, if I've got millions of dollars, I'd just as soon drive the Unimog. It's fun. It's awesome. It's cool.

00:59:08.000 | But at the end of the day, does it matter to be there? Isn't that the key thing?

00:59:14.000 | And so many people let money and having the nicest, fanciest stuff hold them back when in reality, if they would adjust their thinking, they could go and do a lot more with less.

00:59:28.000 | My theory has always been I want a big budget for fuel.

00:59:32.000 | And in order to get there, I need to devote a little budget to the stuff that I've got.

00:59:37.000 | And with a little bit of creative thinking, you can take whatever you have now and you can allow it to get you out on the road.

00:59:46.000 | I haven't talked about backpacking the world in this show, although that's also an option, just simply because of the travel restrictions that are on us right now.

00:59:56.000 | But if you want to take an adventure, if you've got an adventurous heart, don't wait until you're old and gray just because you think that then you'll have money and time.

01:00:05.000 | If all of a sudden you find yourself with an unexpectedly large amount of time on your hands, you lost your job, you can't get another one, rent out your house and go.

01:00:15.000 | Go take an adventure. Hit the road.

01:00:18.000 | I don't think that the permanent travel lifestyle is a good fit for most of us. I know it's not a good fit for me.

01:00:25.000 | I don't want to be a vagabond just traveling constantly.

01:00:30.000 | I don't think that's a good fit for me.

01:00:32.000 | There are people who like it, but what I do like is I do like more extended trips because what I find is that really, I guess it invigorates me.

01:00:43.000 | It makes me kind of get ready to get back to work.

01:00:45.000 | My number is about three months.

01:00:47.000 | After about three months, you've had a good time, you're rejuvenated and you're ready to settle back into the beauty of the day-to-day.

01:00:53.000 | The day-to-day routine can be a really beautiful and rich life, but the travel routine can spice it up.

01:01:01.000 | If you find yourself with unexpected time off, you're furloughed, you get laid off, can't find a job, it might pay you not to just freak out about it and say,

01:01:12.000 | "I got to get out there. I got to go and make it more right now."

01:01:17.000 | If you're in a truly dire financial situation, yes, you probably do need that.

01:01:21.000 | But if you got a little bit of money, take a mini retirement.

01:01:24.000 | Take six months, go on the road, pack your children up.

01:01:27.000 | Hey, they even canceled school for you.

01:01:29.000 | Their school is canceled the rest of the year.

01:01:31.000 | People always say, "Well, I can't homeschool my kids."

01:01:33.000 | Well, now it's easy for you.

01:01:34.000 | So pack the family up, load up the RV, find a destination that is open.

01:01:39.000 | Things are going to open up pretty quickly here all around the world.

01:01:42.000 | We can't keep this lockdown going for much longer.

01:01:44.000 | Things are going to open up pretty quickly all around the world and get out there and embrace the adventure of today.

01:01:51.000 | That's my encouragement for you.

01:01:54.000 | Here I would just say one of the resources that we have today that we never had before is the Internet.

01:02:01.000 | The ability to go and dig into information and find people who are really doing it, sharing ideas and information with you is incredible.

01:02:10.000 | There were always resources for the interested.

01:02:13.000 | You could go back in Popular Mechanics Magazine and download a shanty boat set of plans and mail order a set of shanty boat plans in the 1950s.

01:02:22.000 | But today you can go on YouTube and you can find people all over the world who are sharing their ideas and their plans.

01:02:29.000 | You can see how doable these things really are.

01:02:32.000 | In order to do it, you're going to have to embrace an adventurous spirit.

01:02:36.000 | If you're committed that I'm just going to live in a soft bed and I'm never going to experience hardship, well, guess what?

01:02:41.000 | You can buy yourself a million-dollar RV.

01:02:43.000 | At the end of the day, you still got to hook up the poopy hose and drain your black tank.

01:02:48.000 | You don't get out of that just because you buy yourself a million-dollar rig.

01:02:51.000 | So embrace the adventure of the day and go with what you got.

01:02:55.000 | Go with what you're interested in.

01:02:57.000 | But you can do a lot of cool stuff on really cheap.

01:03:00.000 | Another important note, if you'll embrace that, it'll give you a lot of flexibility with your long-term retirement planning.

01:03:08.000 | Over the years, I've met a lot of people living really well on not much.

01:03:13.000 | And that skill set can allow you to save your portfolio if you're trying to live on a retirement budget when times are tough.

01:03:21.000 | I've given advice to many people.

01:03:23.000 | I said, "Listen, if you want to set out a retirement plan that says I've got to have $10,000 a month every single month and I'm never willing to go below that,

01:03:32.000 | well, if that's the case, you've got to save more money to fit that with all of the appropriate projections.

01:03:40.000 | You've got to have a lot of money and be very conservative in your projections.

01:03:44.000 | But if you can set out a $10,000 budget and a $5,000 budget that you're also okay with,

01:03:51.000 | now you can kick the job to the curb sooner because you have a lot more freedom."

01:03:57.000 | Well, some of these kinds of things really play into that.

01:04:01.000 | So a simple example would be I want to live in this town and I want to live in this house.

01:04:05.000 | But my backup plan would be I have this RV and if we needed to, we would just rent out our house and we'd move into the RV and we'd go on this great trip that we have planned.

01:04:15.000 | Or we'd do an inexpensive boating trip like the Great Loop and we'd enjoy that and we would do it on a lot less.

01:04:21.000 | And then we can wait and wait for the markets to come back before we start selling stocks or start selling other investments and it gives you a lot of options.

01:04:29.000 | That's it for today's show.

01:04:30.000 | I hope you've enjoyed Joshua chatting through some of these options.

01:04:34.000 | Just always remember, if you're interested in adventure, it's really simple.

01:04:40.000 | Go out the front door and turn right and adventure awaits just around the corner.

01:04:46.000 | If you'd like to support this show, find me on Patreon.com.

01:04:49.000 | Go to Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

01:04:51.000 | I'd love to have your support there on Patreon.

01:04:54.000 | I also do a little bit of individual consulting.

01:04:56.000 | If you are interested in that, email me for consulting work, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

01:05:01.000 | And I have a host of great courses available for you at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

01:05:06.000 | Thank you very much.

01:05:09.000 | The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

01:05:14.000 | You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos.

01:05:19.000 | Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use Simple Truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto.

01:05:25.000 | Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese.

01:05:31.000 | No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions.

01:05:36.000 | Ralph's, fresh for everyone.

RPF0715-How_to_Have_a_Low-Cost_Adventure_in_the_Midst_of_a_Financial_Depression