Hi. My name is Corbin and today is my first day of being homeless. For most people, the day they end up "on the streets" would mark a day things were definitely not going well. At the very least it would mark a bump in the road, an instance of life NOT being as it should. For me though, it's all part of the plan. See, Chelsea and I have this big plan. It's less of a plan and more of a big foggy idea with a few propper nouns and feelings buried in it.
There will soon be a post devoted to The Plan that you can read if you're curious about it. But here, I want to talk a little about how we are making the Plan happen. There are a few huge things that need to come together before we could start to enact the plan or even the countdown for it.
We had to shop for and buy a dependable and sound vehicle to construct a lifestyle on
We had to envision, source, and build a living arrangement for said vehicle
Beta test this setup in order to ensure we wouldn't go crazy with discomfort or realize we've fucked everything up and imagined an impossible way to live
Pair down our possessions and decide what's coming with us
Save more money than we've ever saved before, as fast as we possibly can
Becoming voluntarily homeless is a great way to fully or partially accomplish a majority of those goals. I'll explain how in a moment, but first, Let's take a minute here to define what I mean by voluntarily homeless. I just got done researching various definitions of homelessness and sidetracked into the statistics of homeless demographics and the sorting of homeless people into various categories but still couldn't find anything that spells out if it's a condition of being able to find housing or able and willing to do so. How many people are homeless in New York or San Francisco who could potentially rent a trailer or even own land in some other part of the rural interior? Does the act of voluntarily putting myself in this situation mean that I'm not actually homeless and can't even use that word if I want to?
Here's the thought experiment I used to figure out if I'm actually homeless or not.
I'm currently sitting on an old purple couch in my friends garage, where I've been posted up with Chelsea since we vacated our house and handed over the keys to the place. While an old purple couch in a nice dry garage is absolutely palatial for us, it's unfortunately not "home" because it's not ours. Legally, if any one of the people on the lease of this house decided to, they could come and tell us we have to leave right now and get off of the property. Similarly, the leasing agency, or the actual homeowner, could do the same. By the laws we made for ourselves, we would have to go or face arrest for trespassing or whatever. Then, anywhere I went after that, someone could just say, "No, I'm sorry you can't be here, you have to go away now" and I would seriously have to be in a perpetual state of going away forever. Of course that wouldn't happen; in actuality I could just go to any one of a million parks or public places or businesses where its cheap to be a patron and as long as I moved around a lot it would never get to the point where people are actually telling me to leave -and, oh right, now I'm just describing what homeless people do. Odds are you, like most other people, have a safe haven where nobody can legally mess with you, and even your landlord would take a whopping 30 days to actually be able to kick you out of the house and put you down the Slippery Slope to the Going Away Forever Train. If you're l̶u̶c̶k̶y̶ ̶e̶n̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ awesome enough to own land or a house or condo or something its even harder and damn near impossible for someone to put you on the old S.S.t.t.G.A.F.T. Chelsea and I don't have that protection, and In my mind, that makes us homeless.
This is the view from the purple couch/our new home aka "the garage." Pretty great huh?
Remember those bullet points necessary for the Plan?
As I said, the whole homeless thing is great for at least 3 of these, and that's why we decided to do it. In fact, I've been thinking about deciding to be homeless since at least 2013 and imagining it in this scenario in this town and talking to Chelsea about it since 2015. Not a spur of the moment thing is what I'm getting at here.
Obviously, not paying rent allows us to save a huge amount more every month. $1025.00 to be exact. Factoring in a hundred or so dollars/month in utilities and home supplies it's hard to imagine us generating that kind of money in any other way, even if we picked up second jobs. Additionally, moving from a 1 bedroom house with yard, garage, and basement into a storage unit, a truck, and the corner of a garage required a serious shedding of stuff. This sort of purge could have only been accomplished from not having anywhere to put it. Want to have less crap? take everything you haven't used every week this year and put it in a big pile. You can keep anything you want but you have to dig it out, pack it, load it, drive it, unload it, and pay someone to look after every square foot of it. Try this and you'll probably find all kinds of creative ways to get rid of stuff just to avoid dealing with it any longer. Like Tyler Durden says: "The things you own end up owning you."
And of course, if we're going to be devoting all this time to beta testing our rig, we might as well just go all in and live out of the damn thing for a while before we depart. If we're hoping to be on the road for a year, why not start early and save ourselves a few thousand dollars in the process?
So, that's the long and short of why we've decided to be homeless, but much more interesting is how one actually manages it. As I said, we've been thinking about this for a while and doing our homework on people doing similar things. People on /r/vandwellers/ for example, have been pretty crucial for developing a strategy for the build and preparations. In addition, there are some nice happenstances or bits of fortune that make it really easy for us to get by without a residence. For example: Chelsea's place of business has a workout/shower facility in the building and my job provides me with a gym membership that I can use to take care of all of my personal hygiene needs. In addition, Fort Collins has a ridiculous amount of public parks, libraries, natural areas and pedestrian spaces that one can occupy anytime without reprisal. The only real trouble is finding someplace to sleep. Unfortunately, that also seems to be the most socially unacceptable thing to do in public places for some reason. For us, there's the garage, at least for the time being. After that we'll be sleeping in or around our pal Tenzing Norgay aka. Sherpa.
In the time it's taken for me to complete this post, over a week has gone by. Enough time for us to practice the whole non traditional living situation thing. Here's what a "typical" day might look like for us:
Wake up several times from early morning to mid-morning and rollover and complain each time before going back to sleep because we're amazingly lazy people who love the act of not getting out of bed.
Get up and greet an ever changing number of human and animal housemates, guests, SOs, visitors, strangers, whoever.
Cook up a bigass breakfast, usually cooking or preparing way more food than we could eat for a single meal but sharing it with everyone and/or keeping leftovers to make subsequent meals. Even when we had a house, we generally tried to aim for high volume when cooking. That way we only had to spend a few hours a week doing it, thus rarely ever needing to resort to eating out, except for special occasions.
At a little before noon, I drop off Chelsea at her job, where she cleans up and works for 9 hours. Then I'll go to the gym and swim or exercise for a bit before going to work at either 1pm or 2pm. Here I stay until midnight.
Late that night we rendezvous back at the garage and pack or pour a nightcap and go to bed. I usually stay up an hour or two reading, writing, or browsing the web while Chels tends to get her internet fix before I get "home".
Weekends are/will be spent visiting friends in other cities, meeting up for camping/climbing/hiking trips, working on the truck or picking up overtime shifts to boost our savings even more.
All of this has been tough for us. Really tough. We've had more disagreements and heated arguments lately than months ago before the moving process began, and It's been a real struggle to try and continue "normal" life while simultaneously directing so much effort to planning and pushing toward our goal. But that's ok. We never expected this to be easy. It's not surprising that turning our entire paradigm of life upside down over the course of a couple of months has been painful. There's a real meaningful idea floating around in my head that I'm trying hard to nail down. Something along the lines of "ÿou can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs" but less cheesy. More like: You can't expect to make any real progress in one direction of your life without making sacrifices elsewhere. It's not like you can decide to sacrifice your morning latte one day a week to earn yourself your dream vacation either. The sacrifice needs to be proportional to the size of the goal. Just like a rocket propelling itself to space, in order to propel yourself meaningfully forward you need to forcefully shed mass and energy behind you in magnitude equal to your forward progress. We've lost literally a few tons of mass in the last month, and done plenty of emotional and physical work to get here, but for us, it's all part of the plan.
