Bumps in the road

This is a post I have needed to write for a few days now, but I haven't even wanted to think about it, let alone sit down and type.

Until recently I thought that baseball offered the best analogies for life, but now I'm starting to think that the road does. You see, we have reached a dead end. Or perhaps just a detour. I don't know.

But the bottom line is that we have decided to postpone our launch date. Instead of leaving in March 2011, things are on hold...for a while. It could be another six months, or a year, or up to two years (likely not beyond that, though).

It's no surprise that thus far, things have not gone as we planned. From the whole Texas-paperwork-fiasco to the trailer breaking within a half-hour of owning it to the housing market taking another nosedive, we have not gotten off to a good start.

These setbacks have forced us to take a closer look at the overall situation, which has been hard in itself. Once you start down a road, you want to keep going.

At some point, though, after hitting pothole after pothole, you start wondering if maybe you took the wrong route.

In literal terms, leaving right now doesn't make financial sense.

Steve went to a required retirement seminar the other day and came home with a breakdown of what he would retire with now vs. when he maxes out his pension (in two years). The difference isn't enormous, but it's significant.

Starting in February we will also have an increase in income that will last until Steve retires. If he leaves in March, we would only see that increase for one month. The longer he works, the longer we benefit.

Obviously we already knew all that to some extent. The biggest factor has been the house. The market here has been depressed for a couple years but had recently experienced an uptick. We expected to be able to take advantage of that and sell the house for what we paid, thereby recouping our down payment. That, in our minds, would compensate for not maxing out the pension and giving up the added income.

But to sell the house now would mean giving up all of it. Renting it out, besides being a humongous headache, wouldn't make a lot of financial sense either, in the end.

Then we also learned that when our mortgage readjusts next year, our payments will indeed increase, but not by nearly as much as we expected.

Add up all the factors, and, frankly, we'd be idiots not to hold off for a while.

Of course, this decision comes with new headaches. If we're staying here, we have to re-Californianize ourselves, making the whole Texas thing a huge waste of time and money (not to mention the toll it took on our sanity).  

It also raises questions about what to do about Homer. To tow him here, as Californians, we need the Class A license. He is way too big to use as an occasional vacation trailer, and it makes no sense to keep him in storage for the next who-knows-how-long. So, as much as it hurts to consider it, we are thinking about selling him or trading him in for something smaller until we need something bigger again.

So that's the situation.

For my entire adult life it has been my mantra not to plan too far ahead because once you start speeding down one path, you're likely to miss other--potentially better--ones.

Still, though, this feels like admitting defeat, like we failed before we even set out. It probably doesn't help that we just watched Lost in America, in which the characters did just that.

It's hard to get halfway to your destination before realizing that you left the stove on. But at that point, you can lose some time and go back to take care of it or you can keep driving and ignore the imminent disaster. Ok, maybe that analogy is a bit too dire, but that's how it feels right now.

I plan on keeping up the blog in anticipation of when we do actually set out. I hope you'll keep reading while we are parked here on the side, waiting for the road to get smoothed out.