November 2019 Goals

November Goals

•  Work on Suburban
•  Save Money
•  Work on the House
•  Facebook Yard Sale

We recently bought a Suburban 2500 that we will be using to tow our travel trailer. We wanted an 8.1 L and they stopped making them in 2006. We managed to find a 2005 in good shape in Colorado. Michael flew out and drove it back. We will be doing a full post about the vehicle this month. It’s in great shape but it’s still 14 years old. We had to replace something as soon as it got here because it was wired up and came loose on the way home. It had something to do with emissions and cost us around $200 because Michael replaced it himself. He’s quite handy.

The windshield is cracked and has to be replaced. They came to look at it this morning and were unable to fix it because they heard rust at the top edge. Now, we have to take it to a body shop to have it fixed. It had a cracked tail light cover too. We are replacing all of the tail and headlight covers because they are showing their age.

We are choosing to upgrade the radio. The one in it works but it’s not what we wanted. I wanted to be able to listen to Spotify. Also, we wanted a back-up camera. We knew that we would need to replace it unless somebody had already upgraded it. We ended up getting a radio that would allow both of these and has a CD/DVD player. The screen shows the DVD that you play. It’s not something we needed but it could come in handy if we are stuck somewhere with the kids. You never know what’s going to happen on the road and it’s always nice to have options that don’t cost us any extra space.

We are watching our non-essential spending to save as much as we can. We are paying for everything with the suburban in cash so we have wiped out our savings. We will be buying our small travel items and our travel trailer over the next 10 months or so. For Christmas and birthdays, we are planning to buy our kids and to ask family for things that we can use on the road. This whole thing is so new to us that we aren’t sure how to go about some of it. We know that we are trying to get rid of everything so buying more seems like a bad idea. This realization is saving us tons of money because we are avoiding shopping. We have been flirting with the idea of a shopping ban or a no spend month but we honestly buy so little now that it doesn’t seem to really matter. Our biggest non-experience splurge of the month was Halloween decorations. We don’t need to buy any Christmas decorations because we already have way too many. We do go out to eat and take our kids to do things still. We could probably save a little money by eating at home more.

We were planning to get the painting completely finished before Thanksgiving but I haven’t been able to do any of it since the end of September when my hand was injured. I hope to be able to start painting again this month so we can finish on time. Michael plans to spend the month working on the garage.

We plan to start listing things for sale on the Facebook Yard Sale this month. We will be posting them a box at a time to help keep me a little saner. Isabella has volunteered to help/lead this project for the time being. She is helping to go through the boxes and take pictures of things on my phone. Everybody is helping with pricing and posting. I will be doing most of the meetings. It really is time to start getting this going as much as I’m dreading it.

Trip Countdown: 317 days to go!