How do you let go of your home that you have worked so hard for, to move on to bigger, better things? Well, you have to do some serious thinking and take the plunge in order to make your dreams come true.

Deciding what to do with your home (for home-owners) is a very stressful part of prepping for your RTW trip.

After three years of saving money and countless evenings of discussing all the places in the world we would like to experience, we came to a point when we realized that the time was coming near to actually start making some serious decisions if we were going to make this trip a reality.

We had been invited to a cousin’s wedding in London in early June 2013.  We figured this might be a perfect starting point for our adventure.  Since we would already be paying for a flight across the pond, we might as well stay for a while.

The first major decision that had to be made was what to do with our house.  This was actually a very emotional decision since this had been the first home I had purchased on my own and the first home we shared as a married couple.  We discussed our options whether to try and rent the house or to sell it.  Ultimately we decided that renting the house would be more of a hassle and would create worry for us if for some reason we had a renter move out while we were gone and then got stuck paying a mortgage on an empty house (keep in mind, I would not be working while we travel) until a new renter could be found.  Selling the house would also allow us to have more liquid assets, and not paying a monthly mortgage would allow us to be able to save more money for a few months until we left on our trip.

So we put the house up on the market around the beginning of October, and thanks to our amazing friend Shia Makor our house sold very quickly and we were no longer home owners by the beginning of November.  I could not be more grateful for how quickly Shia sold our home (If you live in the DFW area and need some real estate help, she is definitely a gem!).

Now that our house had sold, where would we live? I had already received approval from my amazing boss to be able to do remote telework, so we decided to move back to our roots, New Mexico.  Both of our families live in New Mexico and Scott had plenty of work related projects that needed to be done in the next few months, so it worked out perfectly.

We packed up all of our belongings (you’d be amazed at how much two people and a dog can accumulate in three years) and headed out West.  We said goodbye to our beautiful home, where so many memories were made, and the wonderful city of Dallas that we had called home for the last few years and drove away into the sunset.

This picture was taken right before we drove away from our home for the last time. November 2012.