We Live Together Separately #vanlife

Pamela Madore
Feb 8, 2023
4 min read

Updated: Feb 18, 2023

It all started 7 years ago when I glued a picture of an old VW van with a blond hair girl lounging out the back, onto my vision board. I have always believed in vision boards because they allowed me to see what I was thinking about visually.

Quite often I would glue something on the board and later lose interest so I took the picture down. Many times the pictures came to fruition.

That VW van lived through it all and the more I looked at it, the more I knew I wanted this lifestyle.

I started thinking about how I could make this happen.

I needed an income
I needed money to buy the van
I was married

Just a few little obstacles. I decided to take them one by one.

Income

My entire career I have been either a Realtor or a Mortgage Broker or both. The industry is always changing and we came to a place where electronic signatures were accepted on all documents except the closing documents.

This was a major win for me because it would now be possible to be a Mortgage Broker from anywhere. I am only licensed in Texas but I could be in N Dakota and no one would know. Of course, I didn’t know it then, but when I finally hit the road COVID was just arriving and no .was having any sit-down appointments. Phone, email, and text were the way of doing business. Perfect.

I would only be able to refer my real estate clients but that was OK. Most of my income came from being a mortgage broker.

Money to buy the van

At this point, I had no idea what I wanted and how much it would cost so I decided to just make as much money as I could and see what happened.

My husband and I didn’t have any debt. We had recently sold our house and moved into an apartment while we decided what to do next. We didn’t have much debt so we paid off what we had.

I went to work. That is not to say that I didn’t always work but it is to say that every time the phone rang I would just stare at that VW while I answered it. I was on full-time focus and I didn’t screw around.

I saved just over $60K in a year. That should be enough to get started.

Married

I had a couple of things to work out in that department. I was married and I wanted to stay that way. But I knew that my husband and I could not travel together. We are both quite bull-headed and the first argument would be who was going to drive.

It was time for “the talk”. There were a lot of things we agreed on.

We had no interest in ever owning another house.
We did not like apartment living
And we didn’t like where we lived

We could just move to another part of the country but we didn’t want to buy a house and apartment living wasn’t for us!

What was left? My VW picture was about to become true.

During our talk, it became clear to both of us that we could never live together in such a small space. Our solution? Two vans. His and hers. We had no idea what that was going to look like but we moved forward anyway.

We started looking for vans. There were none in our area and most people had no idea what we were talking about. I knew I wanted a new one. I am not a snob but my daddy always taught me to not buy other people’s problems.

We found one that my husband was interested in used (his daddy never taught him what my daddy taught me). It was way down in S. Texas so off we went.

When we got there and looked at it, he wasn’t impressed. After all, it was used.

However, upon looking around they had a brand new one that I totally fell in love with. It was my dream van. It was an upgrade from the VW but I knew I had to have it.

So I bought it on the spot.

We bought our vans pre-covid before the prices skyrocketed. I was out the door at $95K, A brand new Ford Transit with a house inside.

I put $30K down and financed the rest and drove it off the lot!

My husband liked it, too, so he found one just like it in Denver. He flew up and drove it home. Same price and terms.

We purchased them a few months before our lease ended so I went on a few practice trips. He wasn’t really interested in my idea of going out in the woods for a few days with no one else around, so he didn’t go.

That was when we knew we wouldn’t be traveling together. He is more of a city boy than I am. With that revelation on the table, we knew what we were going to do. Live together separately.

On January 1, 2019, we moved into our vans. It took us a minute to get orientated but we were soon on the road. He went east and I went west.