Dreamstreamr FAQ

Airstream Full-timing Frequently Asked Questions

What's the biggest challenge you've found?
What do you miss most about your house?
How did you first become interested in Airstream?
Who is writing the website?
How long have you been full-timing?
How do you get your laundry done?
What are you doing about health insurance?
How long will you be full-timing?
Aren't you too young to be quitting work?
Did you really sell your house to go fulltiming?
What did you do with all your household possessions?
Where will you stay?
Have you made a list of the places you want to visit?
When will you come back home?
Why did you ever think you could go full-timing in a travel trailer?
Do they still make Airstreams?
Is yours a new Airstream trailer?
Is a 25 foot trailer large enough to live in full-time?
How did you come up with this idea of full-timing?

What's the biggest challenge you've found, so far, in full-timing?
Determining in which storage cabinet is stored a less-often-used item. The toaster oven is easy to find because we use it every few days and both readily remember where we keep it. Jim's tools all live in the toolchest in their respective drawers or bins. Our clothes are in the closet or certain storage bins. Some things we use infrequently and could be in any of numerous locations. The adult beverages are spread, a few bottles in each, throughout four lower cabinets. The bottles are in brown paper bags, to protect against breakage, so one must open each bag to determine contents. We just seized on the solution last week -- magic marker each bag with content name.

What do you miss most about your house?
Not the lawn cutting or shrubbery trimming, nor maintenance on the house, nor taking care of three cars, nor the city noise, nor the mortgage and taxes and insurance and utilities. We loved the beauty, the size and space of the interior, the neighborhood, and the proximity to all things Charlotte.

How did you first become interested in Airstream?
We addressed this question on "About Us" already.

Who is writing the website?
Jim writes eighty-five percent and Deb does the other half.

How long have you been full-timing?
We have heard this question 2/1 over any other question recently, and the reaction when we tell them, "Oh, two months", has been very consistent. The reactions have seemed to be, "We hoped you would have been more experienced at this." Wait and see, we will be!

How do you get your laundry done?
We carry enough clothes for up to two weeks without washing, so within this time we find a washomat in a campground or town. We can wash, dry, and fold our clothes in a couple hours once every two weeks. We have a Rubbermaid storage tote with extra clothing but mostly consider it for colder weather or replacement, rather than routine use. This worked very well during our nine week Odyssey across America last Fall and is working very well so far this year too.

What are you doing about health insurance?
Since we are not 65 years old, we had to consider our options for health insurance until Medicare would be available to us. We first looked into traditional full-coverage plans. While not as expensive as we had expected, approximately $700-800 per month to cover us both, it was still more than we wanted to spend by the time we added the deductibles and co-pays.

From the Escapees web site, we found a link to www.ehealthinsurance.com. This was a great web site for getting quotes for health insurance and allowing us to compare the different plans. Some of the plans were High Deductible Health Plans (HDHP) which qualified for Health Savings Accounts (HSA). These plans were considerably less expensive (around $300-400/month) than the other plans we had been considering so we were interested in learning more. Deb began doing intensive research on HDHPs and HSAs to see what the benefits were, how the tax code worked, how to set up the HSA, etc. After much investigating, we liked what she found and decided to go with this option.

The plan we selected is with Golden Rule Insurance through United Healthcare. One of the reasons we selected this particular plan is all our doctors were on their list of preferred physicians and all our Charlotte hospitals were on their list of preferred hospitals. Also, reviewing their list of physicians it appeared they had preferred doctors available in all states.

In addition to selecting the insurance plan we had to select a HSA plan and determine the amount of money to contribute each month. Part of our analysis included a tabulation of our expected normal medical expenses that we would be paying for under the $10,000 deductible. We included our routine bi-annual physicals plus labs, Deb's annual Gyn visit, two office visits per year each, one urgent care visit, one ER visit, routine prescriptions, two dental cleanings each, bi-annual eye check-ups, new glasses every two years for each of us, etc. All of this averaged out to about $375 per month. Since we are both in good health and have no chronic health problems, we decided that anything beyond the routine or minor medical problems would be major medical so we felt that we could live with a $10,000 deductible. With this high deductible, the premium for both of us is $295 per month.

With a premium of $295, we decided to put $400 into the HSA each month since our original budget for health insurance was $700. Now the real benefit of the HSA is this is tax deductible so it is not really costing $400 but $400 less whatever our tax rate turns out to be. For 2007, if the combined federal and state rate comes to 28%, it will cost us $288 to contribute $400 each month.

Another big benefit of the HSA is you can select any financial institution for the account. There were several options offered as part of the United Healthcare plan and Deb also researched independent plans offered by various financial institutions. There was a lot of variety in the interests rates offered, fees charged, set up fees, and other fees for checks, etc. As it happened, the best deal was one of the ones being offered by the insurance company. It was through Exante Bank which offered 5% on the balance from the first dollar as opposed to a tiered structured that most of the banks offered, i.e., 2% on $0-5,000, 3% on $5,001-10,000, etc., to get up to 5%. Also, their set up fee was only $5. We have a "credit card" that we use to pay for covered medical expenses that draws down on the balance deposited in the HSA.

If you are familiar with typical HSAs offered by employers, you know at the end of the year you use the remaining balance or lose it. Not so with this HSA - the money rolls over to the next year and continues earning interest. What a deal! And it gets even better. If you stay healthy and don't use the extra office, ER, and urgent care visits then you will likely have a balance in your HSA at age 65. This balance will then rollover to an IRA. Now that's some incentive to stay healthy and only spend what we need for the preventive care. Of course we have the insurance coverage if we do need it for some castrophic illness.

We don't know for sure how this will work our for us but will keep you posted on our experiences. If we have to fine-tune the plan as we go, we'll post those changes also.

How long will you be full-timing?
It depends. We'll continue as long as we enjoy what we're doing. It may be two years; it may be twenty. We've met couples on the road who have been full-timing for fifteen to twenty years and are giving it up only because of health problems. We only know we haven't made any permanent commitments so we can change our minds at any time. For now, we're loving this lifestyle.

Aren't you too young to be quitting work?
This is one of those s'posed to issues, isn't it? No, we're not too young. We're young enough to enjoy our health and resources in travel. We had planned to retire earlier than 65 but not this early. However, so many people kept telling us that they only wished they had retired earlier and that we need to start traveling while we're young enough to enjoy it. We did some long range forecasts using very conservative rates to decide whether we could make this work financially. We also worked out a conservative budget and began investigating health insurance options. Health insurance costs and coverages seems one of the biggest unknowns. The decision to sell the house helped also since this relieves us of a number a major expenses.

Did you really sell your house to go fulltiming?
The decision to sell the house was a long, multi-step process. The process occurred over a period of approximately two years. We proposed and considered numerous plans. We first began talking about downsizing to a smaller house in a neighborhood about two miles further from downtown. We wanted to go from our 2,900 square feet to around 1,500. Several of our church members live in a neighborhood we liked so we put the word out to watch for houses on the market. A fellow Airstreamer who lived in the same neighborhood owned a duplex that he was selling to move to a retirement community. This appealed to us since there would be someone living in the other unit who could keep an eye on things when we were traveling. We made an offer but he had a previous offer so we decided this wasn't meant for us. We also considered condos so we wouldn't have to worry about the yard work while we were away and exterior maintenance but didn't like the idea that we would have to find off-site storage for the Airstream.

During this time we also began learning about full-timing and seriously considering this as a lifestyle for post-retirement. As we learned more about full- timing and became more interested in the prospects of living anywhere anytime, we began thinking about the issues of maintaining a permanent residence while on the road. We heard horror stories from others of water pipes bursting and coming home to several inches of water in the house. If we rented the house, we'd be sure to get calls at the most inconvenient times about the water heater blowing up or the furnace dying in the middle of the night. We gradually warmed to the idea of not having a permanent residence at all once we retired. We decided it would be most economical to stay where we were for the remainder of our working career and then have just one sale and not have to move.

What did you do with all your household possessions?
We thought we had read in someone's book on their fulltiming experience they spent one week emptying their house. What are we doing wrong? We've spent over two months so far and visitors cannot tell we have made any progress. First, we tried to get our children to take whatever they wanted which was precious little. We had a few family antiques or heirlooms we placed with family members for safekeeping. Most every full-timer we talked with agreed that paying to store lots of furniture was an expensive undertaking that they regretted. For the amount spent on storage, they said they could have replaced the items they needed. Also, the furniture that we have in our large house may not be at all appropriate to whatever smaller house or condo we move into when we come off the road. Hence, we decided to get rid of all our furniture and household items through consignment shops, Craig's list, yard sales and Goodwill donations. For the pictures, records, china, etc. that we wanted to keep, we rented a small conditioned storage unit.

Where will you stay?
We joke about chasing 70 degrees. This was a miscalculation. We learned 70 is cooler than we really want. We like 75-80 with medium to low humidity, so far. We don't know about staying anywhere. We've stayed and worked places for so many years we are excited about being able to not stay, for now. We'll just have to see . . .

Have you made a list of the places you want to visit?
We are daily updating this list as we learn from others, or read in the magazine or news, or see somewhere and want to delve into it more.

When will you come back home?
Where's home? Charlotte will always be like home to us. Our house will be on wheels behind our truck, so we think home is where we park it. Of course, we plan to return to Charlotte frequently since we both have family and friends there.

Why did you ever think you could go full-timing in a travel trailer?
We still don't know we can. This full-timing thing is a big experiment for us but how will we know if we don't try? We haven't talked to anyone who tried it and didn't like it. The only reason people have given for quitting seems to be health reasons and age (maybe these are the same problem).

Do they still make Airstreams?
Yes. The Airstream Factory in Jackson Center, Ohio was producing approximately thirty-seven (37) per week when we visited in September. Airstream celebrated their 75th anniversary in 2006 and is the oldest RV manufacturer in the U.S.

Is yours a new Airstream trailer?
It's a 2005 model. We bought it in May 2006 from an Airstream dealer in Milwaukee where it had been sitting on their lot for two years. Consequently the dealer gave us a great deal to allow room for arrival of their 2007 models.

Is a 25 foot trailer large enough to live in full-time?
We think so, but Not according to most people we meet. Everyone says we'll be trading up to a 34 foot before long. We believe we'll use the amount of space we have available. We were pleasantly surprised to find that when we loaded the trailer with all the things we needed for our first big trip, we had space left over. We are keeping a list of things we want to add when we return home and so far it's a very short list. We'll also go through what we packed and see what we didn't use that we can take out of the trailer and truck. We're very flexible -- we'll try this and see how it works out and let you know later.

In addition to the issue of having enough space for all your stuff, there's the issue of having enough space for the two of us. People ask how we can possibly get along full-time in 200 square feet of space. Of course, we don't stay in the trailer all the time. We are out sightseeing, touring, shopping, and hiking during the day and enjoy spending time outside during the evening if the weather is nice. We spend the most time together in our truck when we're driving between locations. It's fortunate that we really enjoy being together and so far the closeness has not been a problem for us.

How did you come up with this idea of full- timing?
Not by ourselves! We met a lot of wonderful camping people, some also in Airstream trailers or motorhomes. Summer 2005 we visited Virginia Highland Haven Airstream Park in Copper Hill, VA. We invited our good friends, Jerry and Ann Hall along with their camper. They fell in love with the park and asked questions of the members about how to join. We listened as the Tom and Mary Deeney of Highland Haven Airstream Park explained the rules and rights of membership in the Highland Haven group. Tom and Mary happened to mention they were full-timers, having sold their house 20 some-odd years earlier to their daughter. They had started on a two month trip to explore America and just never came back home. Their daughter, after two years housesitting, bought Tom's and Mary's house. We were awestruck. Who knew you could do that in an Airstream? The idea came along at just the right time for us.

Those are really great questions, aren't they? Please give us more questions, we promise to try to answer them. This is supposed to be frequently asked, and answered as we have time. You can email us at dreamstreamr@gmail.com