About Us
Taking the plunge
When we first met and fell in love, one of the things we had in common was our love of travel. We always dreamed of retiring and seeing the world.Then a few years ago, when retiring was in our sights, we decided to try to travel full-time.
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We ran the numbers and decided we needed and wanted to downsize. So we sold our home and all our furniture and anything else that might tie us down. We rented a 10x15 storage unit in LA to store our clothes and personal items. We filed our papers and retired. This blog is here to give you a road map to how we put this all together.
How It Got Started
What were we thinking!
Planning our Escape
We both love to travel and experience new places and people and about four years ago we started to seriously plan how we could retire and travel full-time. The numbers came together and I retired in March 2019 from my beauty products company and Ken retired on July 5 2019 after almost 35 years as a photojournalist. We have of course made some plans but we also want to keep our travel free and easy, we could be traveling for six months or six years we are just going to see how it all plays out. We have never blogged before so it will be interesting; we hope to create a fun and entertaining review of our travels and experiences.
So we made the decision to "Take Off" and it was time to do some planning.
Here are some of the things we did to get the ball rolling.​
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Financial planning - We started by working with our financial planner to help us reach this goal.
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Sold everything - We began going through the garage and deciding what to keep and what must go. We sold our furniture or gave it to friends and charities. This you must start early, many months before take off.
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Address - You need a place to have mail sent. A trusted family member or friend. Almost everything can be paperless on line but there is always something that needs a place to go. That will be your #1 contact person.
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Organized our keepsakes - Clothes were a big deal. We knew we would be in and out of the storage to pack different clothes for different trips. We purchased a lot of see threw containers that we labeled. Her clothes on one side of the storage, His on the other. And a few hanging racks for Jackets and dresses. We used our sheets, that had no beds, to cover the hanging clothes in the storage.
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Planned trips for future dates - When we left we basically had two or more years planned out. We have used miles for trips a year away and are constantly planning down the road to help save time and money. Become your own best travel agent.
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Family - We had a lot of conversations with family preparing them for our departure. Prepare them! Some people don't understand your desire to travel.
Oh No! Covid
As everyone knows in March 2019 everything changed for everybody. We were in LA ready to go to the airport to spend three months in Europe, but obviously that never happened. So having no home just a storage locker for the clothes we had to find places to hunker down. That's a long story but the bottom line is eventually we went to Trilogy in Peoria Arizona and bought a home. We have been living in Peoria since July 2020.
So now we are loving our home here near Phoenix Arizona, but don't get me wrong, we still have the bug to travel and we are continuing to see the world. Tara and I will continue to tell our stories of travel here at
KenandTaratakeoff.com. Please follow along.
