The Decision

"If we don't do it now, we never will."

How many times have you heard that? Moreover, how many times have you said it yourself?

If you are anything like us, the answer will be, plenty!  The time to stop 'saying' and start 'doing' arrived for us during, yet another, cold, damp, dark winter.

We were fed up with our jobs and, like many others, I'm sure, just felt as though we were trapped on a cycle of going to work to pay the bills, replacing things as they wore out and , settling for our two weeks in the sun, at a cost, or, if we were lucky, maybe another week in the winter.

"There has to be more to life than this?"

Looking back, it was a simple question, wrapped in a few facts, that led to us making, what we hoped would be, our life changing decision. The facts read like this:

• You've got a nice new car, which you love.
• You live in a nice detached house with views of the countryside
• Your wardrobe spilleth over (not me, obviously) 
• We get to take one or two foreign holidays, every year.
• For the most part, you enjoy your job, even though it makes you more tired than it used to.
• Are you happy?

The answer, obviously, was an emphatic 'No' So what do we do about it? There are no guarantees for happiness, of course, but if you don't try to change something, one thing is for sure, nothing is going to change.

We'd always talked in the past about how lovely it would be to sell up and travel. That idea never goes away but, it nearly always gets put on the back burner as other things in your life have to be dealt with, work etc, and once the wine wears off, it never seems as glamorous an idea, as it did the night before.

And then there was social conditioning: You, get married, buy a house, have kids, have two weeks a year in the sun, and you go to work and pay your taxes, the same as everybody else. Travelling around in a motor-home? No sir, that's not what normal people do.

Even so, it still, never completely, goes away.

This time though, we explored the idea a little further. A voluntary redundancy scheme was operating at work and, if we could sell the house, now would be as good a time as ever to take advantage of it.

The house was valued and put on the market and redundancy figures were obtained from work. Both figures added up to, not as much as we would have liked but, do-able. We could afford to do it if....and it was a big if, we stuck to a tight budget and had a very large slice of luck.

Nervous? You don't know the half of it! It's a huge step to take and all of your instincts are screaming, 'don't do it!'