Our Eureka Moment!

On the evening of 6^th August 2011 my husband-to-be and I we’re having a few cheeky drinks at home talking rubbish and having a laugh. It’s at times like these when we often come up with an idea for our next adventure.

I’m not sure who came up with the idea but we arrived at the fact that we should live in a van to save up for our wedding. The more we talked about it, the more it made sense. We thought if we saved my wage and lived of his wage we could save anything up to £20000. Now that would more than pay for our £7000 budgeted wedding and leave plenty left over to start our new life together.

Now doing this sort of thing is something crazy that I would do without even thinking about it, but I wasn’t convinced my other half was being serious, it may just have been the beer talking. The next morning when we both sober munching on our bacon butties we were both  even more sure this was the thing to do. The prospect of being able to save more than either of us have ever had in our life is motivation enough.

With no savings to our name and neither of us on huge salaries we hatched a plan to raise the funds. Now, if we are living in a van, we don’t need most of the ‘stuff’ in our house. We are going to sell everything we own apart from a few select things and use the money to buy a van and if we are really lucky we’ll have some left over as a buffer. When we move out of our rented house we should get a £1000 deposit back which we are going to keep as a reserve fund in case we hate van life and want to move back into a house.

It’s been 11 days since our crazy plan and we’ve made a start on selling everything we own and the total van fund is mounting up nicely. We have £267.45 which has come from selling our bicycles (we’ll get new ones in Spring as a treat), some books and DVDs. We’ve not really tried too hard yet! We’re hoping to spend approximately £1000 to get a Ford Transit/Mercedes Sprinter type van with a high roof, so we are more than a quarter of the way there already. My fella is going to convert it so we can live in it and we’ll start off with just the basics...somewhere to sleep, somewhere to sit and somewhere to put our camping stove. I’m sure it will be a luxury motorhome by the end of our year!

We want to be moving into our van by the end of October2011, which is not that far off at all! At the moment I am a little overwhelmed with all the ‘stuff’ we have in our home and how we are going to be able to sell it all in time. I’m sure friends and charity shops will welcome things we have not managed to sell.