Monday, April 28, 2008

Eat the Dessert First

When I was young, I had two uncles on my mothers side who had planned to take their big trip to Europe with their wives as soon as they retired. One of each couple died by the time they were 50. I vowed then that I wouldn't make the same mistake - I would eat the dessert first, and if I never got to the lima beans - well, so be it!

Jack and I had gone straight from school to parenthood, and we promised each other at that time that when the time came we would go and do something special, just the two of us. This was the time.

But how to finance our adventure? The only real asset we had was our house. We figured we had enough equity to allow us at least a year of freedom. We considered renting it out while we were gone, but we didn't really want to get into the landlord business. Besides, a rental agreement could also limit our ability to allow for serendipity - to stay, move, or come back earlier or later than we'd planned. So the first thing to do was to put the house up for sale.

1 comment:

Eileen said...

Great start!

Really, you weren't thinking very creatively at the time. You should have put your kids up for sale. Maybe for medical research. I hear dogs pull as much as $20 - I'm sure we could have managed at least half of that...
:)