Welcome aboard..............Start small. Go out on small trips and see how it goes.
Baby Steps.

Welcome.

"You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?"

Credit to the musical South Pacific.  Hey, what can I say.  It's true.

Happy future trails.

I know that if we are not both "on board" it would never work.  I don't really think either of us is cut out for full-timing, but I have always essentially felt the pull of the gypsy ancestors in me.  I'm thinking we will get a small-ish trailer (was really enamored of the camp-inn tear drop but realize husband won't want to be outside that much) and start traveling here and there.  He wants to keep working anyhow for at least a couple more years.  I am working part-time.  We have zero debt, daughter just graduated college and son is independent now (I have one grandson and since they are living overseas right now I also want to travel there - a place where caravan is by camel).   I have a smallish pension with medical insurance covered (yay being an ex-fed!) - so in many ways we are in an ideal situation.  It's just that our dreams overlap but are not identical.  So we are going to remodel the house first, and keep it and travel part-time.   Mostly we just need to get out of the area (Chicago) during the winter.  

But the full-timers really have the best insight, advice and are overall really great people to internet-lurk over.   Thank you for the encouragement....

 

Well the last two have been beyond brutal.  But I think you are planning on half of you heading south first, to test the waters, right?  That sounds like a good plan to me.  Hard to be the one working here in the winter though....

welcome and I know dreams come true. I hope yours does.

Thank you for all the encouragement! I know I won't get him ever to full-time, but I am pretty certain he will come around to part-time...especially during the times of year when it is sub-zero here and in south Texas you can bird-watch in your shorts and a t-shirt. And what I have learned from Howard and Linda and many of the forum members is that there is not huge amounts of travel on a daily basis. My plan of attack is to identify particular locations that he would love, and show how we can do this for a month or two at a time and really have all we need and want right with us. He has been willing to look at the options (mh, travel trailers) so it's not like we have reached an impasse or anything. There is hope. I don't want to give us a firm date but I am hoping for Class of 2016, if we are allowed to have a Class of for part-timers! Not sure if there is a firm rule on that one.
Its fun to sit and dream, but better to live the dream.

Cactuskate. I'm not sure if this will help you but my hubby is just one of those "let's go for it" with anything and everything in life and I'm the cautious "what if" on everything. We are like chalk and cheese but ironically have been together since I was 18. We discussed about someday going full time for well over a decade. I personally couldn't get my head around for several years not having a SnB "home" to go back to and knowing if we wanted to come off the road we were in a generally long term always rising market place we'd return to where our children are based. We'd never be able to afford to get back on the property ladder here, and we are just not the renting type.

Well in a nutshell what I'm trying to say is people do change when exposed to different things. The biggest change to my mindset to finally go FT in 2017 was that we've gone more and more extended longer trip times as the kids have gotten older and we've managed to shed some of our crazily heavy workloads in earlier years. Health issues started to raise their heads with mobility and so on and the final straws for me were the crazy rises in house insurances, property taxes, how we are treated as non-homesteaders in our dream location canal to gulf home we built in Fla and today being told our flood insurance for not being resident down there now is adding an additional $250 premium to recoup some of the affects of Katrina and the likes they paid out on. Primary residents are only being charged $25 extra premium. We pay over $8300 property tax as non homesteaders but our neighbours only in the $3000's. I am slowly starting to feel very bitter about their "them and us" policy and if we knew this back in 2008 was going to occur we'd never ever have become foreign owners = you live you learn and can't predict everything. Our insurance rates here in Alberta went up 70% in one year due to fires/floods/wind damage from 2013 claims. So believe it or not, changes and exposure to what seems a less stressful and rewarding life can make any of us have a change of heart over time. Also aging does a tremendous 360 Deg turn when one day we realize that we really can't replace old man time, and we either gotta hurry up living or hurry up dying and we finally have chosen the former and are on track selling up everything slowly but surely.

Striking a balance/compromise that initially satisfies both your desires and needs is the key, then give it time, you might be shocked - maybe your hubby will do a 360 deg on his thought patterns OR ........ maybe you might think "thank heavens we didn't sell up everything and go FT". We all react differently and I know tons of folks where one partner would stay on the road permanently they say, but the other one couldn't bear to be without a SnB base = bottom line they make it work with compromise and discussing each others needs, wants and desires.

I recall my hubby saying to many folks over the years "I'd do it in a heart beat but she'd never ever go FT", now how uncanny I'm pushing like crazy to get done and outta here.