How long to get ready?

We have already started downsizing and we won't be full-timing for 3 1/2 more years. This is our second time to do this though, we full timed in 1998-2002 and had to settle down due to a family situation. Can hardly wait to hit the road again!

Yup. Start NOW! Start selling, donating and purging all your stuff. Just have the bare necessities in the house while it is up for sale.

I didn't.
I decided to 'wait' until the house sold before I started eliminating all my stuff. What a big, big mistake. :(

Short on time and pushed to my wits end when the house did sell, I ended up with 3 storage units when I hit the road. Paying 10's of thousands of dollars in storage fees because I kept coming up with all kinds of excuses why I didn't/couldn't go back up north to sort thru them.

6 years later I still have one storage unit.

So my advice is:
"when you go full time, leave NO storage unit behind"! :B

ctpres wrote:
Once you decided to FT - how long did it take to: decide what to take, store, give away, sell house, get insurance and all that stuff?

We put the house on the market in the early spring and didn't do anything until we had a contract signed by the buyers.

Then in about 2 months we sold a ton of furniture, moved the rest of our personal stuff and my business equipment to storage facilities, finished going completely paperless, changed our address, driver's license, vehicle/trailer's registrations, and all the other required stuff.

I still had a small contracting business for a few months of the first year we were full time. If we had both been fully retired I think we could have switched over to full time RV in about a month or less.

We had one huge garage sale and gave the rest to charity. We kept 5 plastic bins of photos and mementos that we didn't want to part with. They are stored in our daughter's garage. Start now. Sort: sell, trash, donate, keep. Limit to one garage sale. The part that is the most difficult is deciding what not to keep. You won't need much in the RV. Select clothes that can be layered and limit the number of shoes you keep. We started moving stuff into the RV right away. Staged and tagged what we were going to sell in the garage sale as we sorted. You can do it in one month but you have to be focused and stick with it every day. Very tiring. Just keep you eye on the prize! Full time lifestyle... priceless!!

Two months.....seriously, TWO months! We put my mother in a nursing home (alzheimers). All she could say or talk about was all the trips she NEVER took. It got us thinking. We called in a realtor to find out what they thought we could sell the house for. WOW! The prices were up in the "yeah I'll sell" area. Signed to sell that night, 1 month later it was SOLD, and we were out in the next month!!!!!!! We have 2 storage units (2 10 x 10) full. We'll go back next summer to sort thru and determine what else we can get rid of. :) :) It was exhausting but I'm happy as a bug in a rug to be in our rig. However, we still north......promised daughter we'd stay for Thanksgiving. :)

What ever time is allotted.

We sold our house for full price, cash, in eight days. BUT the buyer had to take possession in 20 days!!

We cleaned the house, quit our jobs AND bought the rig all in the 20 days. It was a whirlwind but we got it done.

I wouldn't recommend it. I would have liked about six months.

We started downsizing and sorting about a year before we left. Our departure date changed by a year by the sudden death of my boss and loss of my job. That happened in early April 2011. By June we were living in the motorhome and at our first workamp position. We had to really hustle to finish getting ready. House didn't sell (too many foreclosures on the market) so we rented it to someone we knew. Now 4 years later(spring 2015) we will go back, tenants moving out and we will be listing the house for sale for a 2nd try at selling it.

The physical prep could be done in a week, except maybe selling the house (we actually took longer)

Getting debt free, so we could relax and enjoy it took about 1.5 yrs but that will depend on your financial situaiton.

About 4 months, but there was Thanksgiving and Christmas in there to complicate things. And the last month of that was actually living in the motorhome in a park down the road while we got the house fixed up to sell - new carpet, paint, etc. Set a target date but don't get all stressed if you have to slip it a week or two. Actually sold our second car just two days before our target date, which cleared the slate and left us free.

al

It took us over two months. And that was both of us working steady at it. We also had a house and a cabin to clear out.