When the American Dream is a Nightmare Go Live in an RV!

What if I told you I have a brand new look? What would you imagine? What would you envision? And I'm really setting myself up here for a lot of interesting comments. Let's just put it that way. But what if I told you I had a brand new look and today I'm going to reveal it. Is that something that you might be interested in? Before I do though, let me clear a few things up. No, it's not me that got the makeover and again I'm really setting myself up here. But it's the channel. Our channel. My channel has a new look and I'm really excited to reveal that for you at the end. But before I do, I feel like I need to set the stage and also this kind of is in conjunction with my three-year anniversary of being a full-time RVer. I want to talk about why I live in an RV. And you're going to hear some things if you've been with me a while. You're going to hear some things that you've probably heard before. But I have a lot of new subscribers so I want to talk a little bit about that. But even if you have heard it before, I'm going to talk about some things here that I've never talked about before in my reasons for being a full-time RVer. And I've got a lot to cover here. Kind of personal story stuff and kind of bigger picture society and things like that. So I think that those of you who follow me for The Real Deal, I think you're really going to enjoy this video. And make sure you stay tuned to the end for the big reveal of our brand new look. Friendlies, I'm Carolyn and welcome back to my RV life. And I guess there is a little bit of a change here. Yeah, I hacked my bangs. Those of you who might have noticed, I cut my bangs and I kind of hacked them. But anyway, that's not what this is about. So why did I decide to move into an RV? And why do I decide to live the way I live? Traveling from public lands and BLM and National Forest to National Forest? Well, as as some of you know who've been with me since the beginning and I probably my very first video, I talked about how I think from like my early life, maybe even in my jeans, I don't know. But I went to 13 different elementary schools. We moved constantly. And I, so at a very young age, I got very used to being uprooted all the time. I got very used to change and having to adapt. And you know, also because of some of the other things about my childhood that many of you now know. All the abuse and the neglect and all the other things that I went through was like born with survival skills. So I thrive out here. And I really do think that a lot of the things that I have been through and a lot of the adversity and a lot of the challenges that I have overcome in my life really make me thrive out here. I really feel like I have thrived out here. I mean, those of you who've been with me a while know that I've, you know, it hasn't been easy. I've dealt with a lot of breakdowns, a lot of mechanical issues. And then most recently, of course, the passing of my my beloved Capone. It's not been easy out here. I mean, RV life isn't easy. It's just life on wheels. And in many ways, it's it can be a lot more challenging because all the things that can go wrong with an RV. So I really do think I was like predispositioned, you know, or predestined to live a nomadic life. You know, and I've said before that even when I was 17 years old, my fantasy was just to dump in my old Nova and wait tables as I worked my way across the country for gas money. And I think about it now, it probably would have ended up like some bad Lifetime movie, right? But that's really I dreamed about that. I fantasized about that. But instead, I felt that I had to prove something I felt that I needed to run away from my past, I needed to run away from who I was, I didn't realize that at the time. But really, what I felt is I needed to be a success I needed to be I needed to have the things my parents never had an education, a house, a career, and maybe stability. I think that a part of me thought I wanted stability. And so those are the things that I chased through my whole life. Instead of following my fantasy when I was 1718 years old, I did what I thought I was supposed to do. And I went to college and got the career and got the house and all of those things that we as Americans are told that we're supposed to want, right? I mean, that's success. And you think about like, I guess it's the Puritan work ethic, right? You're supposed to work, you're supposed to work really hard, you're supposed to climb the corporate ladder or whatever ladder and you're supposed to earn, earn, earn and achieve and you have to get the house and all of the other things that go along with the American dream. And so that's what I did for many years, because I thought that if I had all those things, if I made it, then I would be a success. I am somebody. And so I spent my adult life chasing those things. Interestingly enough, also, I was a very high functioning alcoholic and, and drug addict for a little while until I wasn't. I chased the American dream and all that I thought I wanted. As someone who was raised poor by a single mom who worked constantly in an effort to try to put a roof over our head and food on the table. I, I think I learned really young how hard life is if you're poor. And maybe that was also part of the reason I felt like I wanted to be different. I didn't want to ever have to be poor. I think like in middle school and high school, we went shopping. I didn't wear the cool clothes. I didn't wear the cool sneakers. We went shopping for some of my school clothes at Goodwill or the cheap stores. And it really wasn't until I started working when I was 14, that I started being able to buy the things that all the other kids were wearing, you know, and I thought, Oh, if I wear the Nikes, if I wear the Levi's, they won't tease me anymore. They won't bully me anymore. They did. Oh, look at, she's got Levi's. She's big now. And, you know, so the, the, the desire to have things started very early on for me because I didn't have a lot of things. I didn't have what everybody else had. And so the desire, and I think a lot of us have that, I mean, we're kind of indoctrinated from birth, right? To obsessed with stuff, right? Consumerism. I mean, that's what, that's what capitalism is all about, right? Buying and buying the latest and greatest new things, buying what everybody else is wearing and keeping up with the Joneses. And there's, there's no time in life that that is more acute and more important than in high school. And that was certainly my experience in high school. And so I think I learned very young how difficult life is if you're poor and yeah, you know, we had our moments of government cheese and peanut butter and handouts from social service organizations who, who saw that we were, that my mom was struggling. I remember the first time one of my high school, I think in high school, we got free lunch in high school and you know, my mom applied for that and they, I guess the school had a program. They recognized that we were low income. And so they gave us like, I don't know, a hundred dollar gift certificate for groceries to at Christmas time. And I remember just being so mad about that. And they called, I think on the phone and I took the call and I was like, we're not taking that. And my mom was like, like, hell we're not. And I'm like, we don't need their handouts. You know? I mean, I was proud teenager and you know, despite everything else. And she was like, no, we're taking it. We need it. And I remember going to the grocery store with a hundred dollar gift certificate and it felt like Christmas. We were able to go through the aisles and buy anything we wanted. And it really did feel like Christmas day. I mean, that was definitely a treat for us. And it was something that we, you know, we didn't have to look at prices. We could just buy whatever we wanted. So I did learn really early on that, that this, that it's hard if you're poor. And so fast forward, you know, I, I worked two jobs to put myself through college and still came out of college with a lot of student debt. And then I started a career and I wanted a house. I just wanted a house. I'd never lived in a house. My parents never owned a house. We lived in trailers and apartments and you know, we moved all the time. I thought I wanted that security. You know, I got married, we bought a house and I remember just feeling like stuck. I remember like this longing, walking past like apartment buildings and feeling like this longing for the transiency, I think of living in an apartment. Here I was stuck in a 30 year mortgage. And, but I thought, you know, but I pushed it aside and I was like, well, I have what I want. I have a house. I have the American dream. I have made it. And just kind of pushed that aside. And in the meantime though, then this is why I think it's so important to talk about things and to address things. I don't dwell on the past, but it's important to look at the past and to look at the things that have happened to us, the things that we've done in order to heal from it. And at the time I wasn't looking at all the things that I needed to look at. And I wasn't able to kind of look at myself and say, okay, well, what is this really about this fluttering and this whole 30 year mortgage thing? Why am I drinking myself to death if I'm so happy? Right. And I was, I was drinking myself to death. And, but the, the real change for me came with the great recession. I had a career. I'd been at a company five or six years. I'd, I'd been promoted a couple times. I was moving up. It was a company I liked. I liked my job. I liked where the company was going. I liked where I was going. We had the house and it was really, technically we bought it. It was, it was just going to be the starter house. We were going to remodel it and then flip it in a few years. And, but then the recession hits and the first year. So we bought the house for three 20. After the first year, it was worth about four 30. And I did the math before I bought the house. I did the math. I knew we were in a bubble. You know, I'm not, I'm not stupid. I knew we were in a bubble. And I did the math when I bought the house and I looked at the growth rates of real estate in the area. And I said, okay, if, if the real estate market continues to grow the way it has been my little house at 320, which was very much a starter house, it needed to be gutted and remodeled, uh, very much a starter house outside the San Francisco Bay area. I did the math and I said, okay, if, if the bubble continues the way it's going, this house in three years is going to be worth a mil, over a million. And I knew that was ridiculous. I was like, there is no way that's going to happen. It's going to level out. Eventually I expected a leveling out. I did not expect it to crash. I mean, who loses money in real estate, right? And my ex-husband, it was the second time losing money in real estate. Great recession, just for a lot of us really changed everything. And this is where I'm going to tell you a story I've never told you before. And all of a sudden our 320,000 after, after 320 going up to 430 or whatever it was. And then within two, two and a half years, the great recession hit and it was down below 200,000. And eventually the bank sold it after we moved out. I think it was empty for six months or a year. The bank eventually ended up selling it for $140,000. And I lost my job. I made it through three rounds of layoffs. They did the best they could, but the company, of course, like a lot of companies were really struggling. You know, I, I'm kind of a little bit, I'm interested in finance and how it works and was really like wanting to be a responsible American. And so I had a lot of, I had credit. I had a lot of credit. I used it the way I'm supposed to use it. And we, you know, we were overextended except for the money we were making. We weren't, we were able to make our payments, but we had nothing in savings, but we were, didn't have any problems making the credit card payments that I had making the mortgage, making the two car payments that we had. We were making enough money to do that until I lost my job. And what happened when the great recession hit is let's say I had five credit cards with a hundred thousand dollars in credit and my balance is debt to credit ratio was about 50% or lower. It was like 40 to 50%. I wasn't maxed out by any means on any of my credit cards. Well, what happened is after Freddie Mac or whatever, after Merrill Lynch, whatever they, after they all bombed, the banks freaked out and they pulled available credit. They pulled all of my avail overnight. My debt to, to credit ratio went from 50% to a hundred percent. So overnight I was maxed out on all my credit cards. And what do you think that did to my credit rating? Yeah. So all of a sudden I saw my good credit rating plummet through no fault of my own, nothing that I did. And I'm not playing the victim here. I know a lot of people think just because of some of the, some of my beliefs that I play victim, that's not playing a victim. That's the reality. Nothing. I was playing their game the way I was supposed to play it. Get credit, use credit because you want a high credit score because having a high FICO score means that you are a, a responsible American and it opens doors to you to get mortgages and to get cars and to get more credit cards. And that's what it really means to be a success in America, a high FICO score. Right. That really was another, and I've had little bits and pieces here all through my life. Cause I've struggled, you know, with working two jobs to go through college. I mean, I've been pretty poor most of my life, right. Up until recently when, when we were both doing well and we had the house and we really felt like we were doing well and we were earning really good money, but still living paycheck to paycheck because of the debt. And, you know, and it's different times in my life. I realized how rigged the system is against the average person. Think about it. Okay. You get a credit card, they give them to you. You know, if your credit is decent here, have a credit card here, have a credit card. I don't know what the percentages of Americans who actually then ended up using the credit cards, not for vacations and expensive spa days, but to pay their electric bill to buy groceries. And then when they can't make the minimum payment, they jack up the interest rate. They pile on late charges. And it just seems to me like I'm poor. I can't make the minimum payment. And so what are you going to do? You're going to put more, more penalties on me, make me owe more money. And it just becomes this snowball effect of just making the poor, even poorer and getting deeper and deeper, digging holes deeper and deeper into holes that you're just never going to get out of. And I started seeing it just, it feels like injustice. And I know people are probably going to argue with me and say that, you know, it's not that I'm not being responsible for my own actions and things like that. But you also can't deny the, the, the influences and the factors in our society that, that send us these messages and tell us you need a good FICO score. So get a credit card. But when you use that credit card and heaven forbid you lose your job and you can't make the payment, then all of a sudden you're, you're penalized to a point of getting in a hole that you're never going to get out of. When 80% of Americans are in debt and 70% of Americans say that that debt is a necessity to their daily life, you can't deny that there are powers bigger than each of our own individual choices and each of our own individual capabilities of managing that. The average household debt is $137,000. And that includes mortgage. Average household income in America is about $59,000. So there's a disparity there. There's something going on. And I don't think that it's fair to just say it's personal responsibility. How are you going to save money when you're earning $10 an hour? 43% of Americans are poor or below the poverty line and a quarter of Americans are earning less than $10 an hour. And that means they are below the federal poverty line. A quarter, 25% of Americans make less than $10 an hour. And the top 10% of our society makes nine times what the bottom 90% make. And even if you're making $10 an hour, if you've got a decent FICO score, they're going to give you a credit card and you're going to be tempted to use that credit card to buy food for the kids, to buy diapers, to pay the electric bill, to keep the right. I mean, if you're rich and you miss a credit card payment, the $35 is nothing. Or even if they raise the interest rate, that's nothing. But if you're making $10 an hour and you miss a credit card payment or you bounce a check, right? And you keep bouncing checks because you're trying to float between, you know, I don't want to be late here and I don't want to be late here. So I'll float a check and, you know, keep my fingers crossed. Been there, done that. Keep my fingers crossed that it won't clear before I get paid. It's this big game that we have to play. And it is a much higher priced game if you're poor, if you're making $10 an hour than if you're making millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And that is why I think the system is rigged. You know, I mean, a lot of people still want to believe that the American dream is alive and well. And if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it's not that easy for everybody. So the great recession really made me realize how little control I have. I had no, at that point, I really felt like I had no control over my life. I played their game. I did what they told me to do. And overnight, because of the greed of big business and banks, it was ripped out from underneath. The whole rug, my whole world was ripped out from underneath me. No fault of my own. No fault of my own. And you can disagree with me. You can call me a victim. You can say, you know, the thousands of millions of people whose houses were all of a sudden underwater overnight. And many of those people who relied on those houses for sources of income and second mortgages and things like that, it just completely wiped out the lower and middle class, a lot of us. And another wake up call about how rigged the system is against the average American, really the average American. I mean, if 43% of Americans are living at or below the poverty level, then the average American is poor and the system is rigged against the average American. And I think we can all agree, I don't care what end of the spectrum you're on politically now, whether you're on the left or you're on the right, I think we can all agree that the greed of the system and that big business is not benefiting any of us. And the great recession really, I think, planted the seed for me, another seed. It was kind of like another straw in the camel's back, I guess. And realizing, and at that point I said, I'm never, I don't want to play this game anymore. I don't want to, I'm not going to play this game anymore. And actually, interestingly enough, right before the great recession hit, I had worked out a plan. I had a budget. I put it on the refrigerator to be completely debt-free, I think within five to seven years, including paying off the mortgage and including paying off the cars, including paying off all the credit card bills. I had a dream then about owning like a B&B on a nice piece of property up in the forest or something like that. And I did, I worked out a plan for us to be debt-free within seven years. And that was like really putting, I don't know, like 80% of our income toward our debt rather than, you know, continuing to spend. And then I lost my job and that went in the toilet. But that was just another reason for me to say, society just doesn't feel like it's fitting me. This isn't working for me. Some good things came out of that. I became self-employed. I started my own business, which really opened up a whole new world and a whole new way of living and being and earning to me, which allows me to do what I'm doing today. And through being self-employed, I started to really embrace some freedom. I could make my own schedule. I mean, yeah, I worked 50, 60 hours a week, but I worked whatever 50 or 60 hours a week I wanted. And eventually once my business took off and became stable, I was able to travel like I'd always wanted to do. My first trip was to Europe for three and a half weeks. And then I did a hike for 30 days. And then I went to Greece for two and a half weeks. And the more I went out and started doing the things that I love to do, and I was doing a lot of backpacking, a lot of camping and weekend trips and things like that. And the more I did that, the more I'd come home especially after being gone for 30 days and living out of a backpack. I lived out of a, I don't know, a 60 liter backpack for 30 days, 40 pounds on my back. And there was a moment where I was sitting in Tuolumne Meadows and this giant bus of an RV went by. And I was just like, they need that to go on vacation. You know, one of those 200, 300,000 like buses. I was like, they need that to go on vacation. And I looked down at my backpack and I was like, and I've lived off this for 30 days. And it really just got me thinking about the excesses of American life, thinking that that's what we need. That's what we need to go on vacation. I don't know. It just seemed a little ridiculous to me in the moment. It still kind of does. I'm not, I'm not dissing anyone who, who, who lives that way. It's totally your choice. It's just not the life for me anymore. And partly, you know, and the reason I say that is because I chased that and I felt like I got burned. And so, you know, this might be a little bit of a backlash to that, but when I came home from the John Muir trail and came back to my apartment and, and, well, and traveling in Europe for three and a half weeks, and I came back to that apartment and I'm like, I just paid $1,700 to store my junk. And I looked around and I'm like, I haven't used that. I haven't touched that. I haven't looked at that in, since I moved in a year ago. And, and again, it was just another straw in the camel's back or just another point of going, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why am I still working 40 or 50 hours a week to buy another pair of shoes? I've got 50 pairs. I don't need another pair. I decided at that point that I needed to live differently. And I wasn't sure how I wanted to do it at first. Did I want to, did I want to live in a tiny house? Did I want to just, you know, rent somewhere cheaper and be in the woods? But the bottom line is I decided to move into an RV because I didn't want to have to pay a whole bunch of money to store a bunch of stuff I didn't need and to live a life in a place where the cost of living didn't match my earnings and it didn't match my lifestyle anymore. The cost of living was so high. I had to work crazy, crazy, crazy just to pay my rent, just to pay the basics of living. And I was like, why am I doing this? And when I started exploring other ways to live, I ran across people who live in RVs. I'm like, oh my gosh, people my age, not just retired, actually live in RVs. And I think Nomadic Fanatic was the first one I found and he was younger than me. And I'm like, oh my gosh, look what this dude is doing. This is so cool. I cashed out what was left of my 401k, which wasn't much. I could own my own house and I could live with very low overhead, which meant I wouldn't have to work as much. That was in theory, that was supposed to be how it was supposed to go. It didn't quite go that way because I started a new business. Here we are, but that's okay. I'm doing what I love. So I moved into an RV so that I could travel more. If I want to go to Europe for 30 days, instead of paying $1,700 to store my stuff, I could put my RV in storage for less than a hundred dollars. If I want to go hiking for 30 days or 60 days or six months, I can, same thing, I can put my RV in storage. If I want to travel the world indefinitely, I don't have to, everything I own is in that, you know. So I just put it in storage and it's still there when I get back and I'm only paying less than a hundred dollars while I'm gone to store it, which made a lot more sense to me. I saw a quote recently. I actually, I posted it on Facebook. The quote is, how did you free yourself? And the answer is by embracing my own power. And that's how I feel about my life. I freed myself by embracing my own power, my own power to be able to make a living without having to rely on an employer. I make my own rules now. And yeah, I didn't escape the rat race quite as much as I think I thought I would because I am very much on YouTube and I'm still relying on ad revenue. I came out here to live authentically. I came out here to be my own boss, to claim my own power. And so I'm really loving the choices, the power that I now have in my life. I have claimed my power to earn how I want to earn, to live where I want to live. I don't, I don't buy a bunch of stuff anymore and I can travel whenever, however long, wherever I want. I am as free as a bird, literally, and especially now, unfortunately, since my puppy passed, I am free to do whatever I want. And with that freedom, I'm going to be going in some new directions in my life and in my channel. And I'm really curious now, we'll take this time, let's do a poll up here. I'm going to do a poll. How many of you would be willing to go anywhere with me, do anything with me? It doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, traveling the U.S. in an RV, but you want to go with me wherever I go. You want to see the things I see. Take the poll and let me know if that is you, or are you just here for RV stuff? You just want to see the United States or whatever. You just want to see my RV travels and that's it. You don't want to see world travel. You don't want to see hikes. You don't want to see anything else that's going on in my life. You just want to see RV. Take the poll up there and let me know, because I'm really curious about what your answer is going to be. Although I think I already know, because I've done a couple of polls on the community tab and on Patreon. All right, and so that brings me to our new look. I have a new logo and I waited, I purposely waited to do a logo. I mean, as a marketer, you know, logo should have been one of the first things that I did, but I perfectly, I purposely waited, because I knew Capone wasn't going to be with me forever. And any logo that I did the first few years would have had to have Capone in it. And I knew that once he passed, then in a way, the logo would become irrelevant, right? I mean, if I had a logo with me and a dog and people were just new to my channel, they would expect a dog and there wouldn't be a dog. And so that wouldn't be true to my brand. And while Capone is always going to be with me, he's always going to be with us. He's always going to be a part of this journey. I thought it would be wise to just wait to do a logo. And so now I have a new logo that encompasses everything that my channel is and will be in the future. Here it is. You're going to notice some really interesting elements in there. And I wanted to launch this now, two weeks before I make the big announcement about what my next chapter is going to be, what my next adventure is going to be. I'm going to be announcing that two weeks from tonight. So be sure to stay tuned for that. In addition to the new logo, I've got new headers that look like this. And so just know that over the next week or so, I'm going to be changing the headers on all of my social media platforms. I'm going to be changing on Facebook, on YouTube here, of course. And you will start seeing our new look. It's not mine. This is our channel. That's how I look at it. And this is it. This is our new look. And you're going to find out which of these elements are applicable to the next adventure that is coming up in my life, in our life, because I'm going to be taking you with me. All right. I hope you found that interesting, informative, relatable. That's really what I strive for most is just to be relatable. The Great Recession hit millions of people. So I know I'm not alone in some of my struggles and in really where it led me and it led me out here. So, you know, all in all, I can't say that it was a bad thing at all. Maybe if the Great Recession hadn't happened, who knows where I would be today. And like I said in my last video, I am exactly where I want to be right now. I'm happy. I'm content. And life is really good. We have a new feature on Patreon, which I'm really excited about. I launched it, a soft launch this week on social media is a real personal video from me when you join Patreon. That's right. It's really cool. It's like this integration they did with a company called Bonjoro. So when you join Patreon from now on, you're going to get a personalized video from me just for you. And I've enjoyed making them. I've made about six so far this week, and it's really kind of fun just to make a personal hello, welcome video for new patrons. So you want to get a personalized message from me, a personalized welcome, be sure to check out Patreon up here. I'm going to put a link and I hope to see you there. It's a really great community and a lot of fun and a lot more stuff there that the general public has never seen. There's over 300 videos. There are a lot of it is stuff that the public has never seen. Thank you all so much for being here. Stay tuned for the big announcement two weeks from tonight. I'm going to be doing a premiere and I can't wait to share our next adventure with you. Thanks for being here. I'll see you soon. In the meantime, be happy, be free and be kind. I'll see you soon.