Hey everyone, it's Sachiko here. I know we’ve taken a bit of a finance detour on this blog, but HOLD TIGHT, some real van-related things are a’coming. I promise you, less bean-counting days are nigh.

This brings us to our third and final part of our finance trilogy:

How are we going to fund all of this?

Now, we’re getting into our personal budgets and spending habits. This is a bit of a vulnerable subject for us seeing as money is a taboo topic in our society. We’re going to try our best to be transparent to show people that adventure years are possible despite all your adult responsibilities.

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In Part 1, we discussed how much money we needed to build the camper. In Part 2, we will be talking about how much money we'll need to spend one year on the road.

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The biggest question has always been, "Can we afford it?"

As with any good budget, we needed to know two things:

1. Income
2. Expenses

Which translates into:

1. How much money do we have?
2. How much money do we need?

We hopped back and forth between the two until we were able to triangulate towards a “Yes!”. Once it was more likely than not that we could succeed, we dove into figuring out the costs.

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Hello and hallo! We are Sachiko and Moritz. Welcome to our blog where we’ll be sharing our journey of building a camper van/truck (TBD) and our one-year climbing adventure on the road. We are located in Toronto (Sachiko, born and raised, and Moritz hails from Munich), so you will see references to the metric system and the Canadian loonie in our posts.

This dream of ours was borne out of our passion for climbing and getting outside. We've happily traded in urban comforts for primitive pursuits, recently wrapping up our SUV rooftop-tent build and road trips.

 

 

What originally began as a three-year plan (creatively dubbed our “Grand Plan” to friends and family) with several milestones got fast-forwarded to:

“Why can’t we do this next year?” 

When we realized that:

a) Not only were we emotionally and logistically ready; but, 

b) We didn’t HAVE to accomplish those milestones before embarking on this adventure.

To clarify, these self-imposed prerequisites were: move out west to Vancouver or Calgary, climb and explore the Rockies and west coast, further our careers, continue saving for the sabbatical, AND THEN build the camper and travel.

 

 

When we distilled it down, what we really wanted to do was just BUILD CAMPER, TRAVEL, and CLIMB! Everything else was merely buying us time.

So we decided to cut out the middle chapters, which begs the following question:

“Can we actually do it?”

Emotionally speaking, hell yeah!

We think.

You’re never really ready for decisions like this, but our relationships, jobs, and life things are pretty stable at the moment. There are no big weddings or babies in the horizon. Our families are healthy, we’re healthy, and our climbing fitness, well, that’s as good as it can get for now.

Logistically? Likely.

We have access to tools and a little bit of space for the vehicle. Together, we have a pretty broad range of experience with electronics, plumbing, carpentry, sewing, designing, writing, project management, and financial planning. For everything else, there’s Google.

Financially? Maybe.

This is a moving target and we will continue to save towards this trip during the build-out of the van. We will be tracking all expenditures closely to give you all an insight into our planning and the outcomes. We plan on writing a detailed post about our preliminary financial goals, costs for the build-out, and budget for the year of travel.

 

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