So many days, so little time!

The calendar says that I have 172 days until retirement. But there is just so much to do. We plan to leave town just three weeks into July and really hope that everything is finalized by then. I think of all this work as divided into six categories.

Divesting of all of our stuff: We have listed a few things for sale. But the winter weather makes it difficult to round everything up, clean it, and get it advertised. We have a lot of clothing that will be donated, probably to Goodwill. Most of the bigger furniture will go into storage. I have scouted out storage units and focused on a couple in New Hampshire. And then there is the Red Hemi.... to sell or not to sell?

Selling our house: We have not had any formal conversation with any realtor yet. Being an old house and needing a lot of work, it will likely only appeal to a narrow audience of buyers. If it sells too quickly, where do we live until July? But then it may linger for months and we just leave it empty and locked up. This one makes us the most nervous.

Prepping our motor home for full-time living: Again, the winter weather is an obstacle. We want to replace or reupholster the couch and dinette, tear up the carpeting and linoleum and replace it with vinyl plank flooring, and rethinking the packing strategy. Stocking and storing stuff for full-time living is much different than for a week long camping trip Things like a printer, file storage, the amount of cookware, linens, and clothing requires a lot of thought to stow the stuff you only need occasionally and make the every-day stuff very accessible.

Motor home maintenance: Springtime brings the vehicle safety inspection. That becomes much more important now that we'll be putting many thousands of miles a year on the RV. This year, we'll replace the shocks with much better Bilstien's. We need to carefully inspect the tires to make sure they are sound. Last year we had the steering stabilizer installed and boy did that make a big difference.

Healthcare: Next to selling the house, this is the single most important category. Being nomads makes choosing the right health care plan very difficult. Fortunately for us, Medicare is available across the country, available from most practitioners and hospitals. But covering medications, vision, hearing, etc is problematic. Medicare Advantage plans are regionally based. That would require returning to a home-base for those services. There are some programs available to nomads, but much more research is necessary before the final decisions are made.

Domicile decision: Big brother passed the Patriot Act after 9/11 that requires banks to insist on a physical address of its customers. So what is our address once we sell our house? We do not plan to buy a new place right away. It might be a year or two or three before we do that. So where do we get a drivers license or register our vehicles? South Dakota makes it easy to become a resident, get your license and register your vehicles. They also have some of the cheapest health and vehicle insurance rates in the country. So in all likelihood we will become South Dakota residents.

Six months seems like a long time until you look at all of the work that needs to get done to facilitate the dream of becoming a nomad.