Saylorville Lake Cloudy 80 degrees - humid
If you are considering going full-time, consider how much you do online now. Because you will do EVERYTHING online once you hit the road.
I have noticed that when it comes to couples, there seems to be one who is quite tech savvy and one who could care less and can barely send a text. In this lifestyle the Internet is quite literally a lifeline. I marvel at how people functioned from a financial and business standpoint 25 years ago when Wi-Fi and smartphones were the stuff of the future. People often ask how we manage everything. If they ask Champ he simply says, “Britt takes care of it all” he really has no clue and doesn’t want one. I do everything online, from finding our volunteer ‘jobs’, to all things money related, to about 1/3 of my shopping. The only thing we don’t do is stream TV and Music. I’m too cheap to pay for unlimited data. 8-gigs last me pretty well each month. DirecTV entertains us on the small screen most of the time.
I will say that Verizon is the way to go, as far as data goes. We were loyal US Cellular customers for 18 years and always happy. Our first winter south we had a lot of trouble with speed and being throttled. After several, increasingly heated calls to them I found out they don’t even offer data service south of the Texas/ OK border. They contract with Verizon to buy small amounts from their towers. People I know with AT&T have good service if they are on the beaten path but lose data strength quickly when they venture too far away from populated areas. We switched to Verizon and have had no trouble the past year, no matter how remote we were.
We get very little snail mail. We tried a mail forwarding service the first year and it was adequate, but we found that above the regular reasonable monthly cost, they nickel and dime you to death for everything else. We are fortunate that my daughter now handles our mail for us and sends it when I ask her. The down side is if you send me a Christmas Card I probably won’t look at it till spring when I return. If you send an invitation I will likely miss the event. I’m so wired these days and email, or text is really the best way to communicate. Or, do the old-fashioned thing and pick up the phone and call us! I really don’t care about fancy engraved invitations anymore. It’s not like I’m going to save it for sentimental reasons like the 3 boxes of that stuff I tossed when we purged.
All business is handled on-line. We even did a loan online last winter. You know those annoying checks the credit card companies send you weekly it seems? You can call them and opt out of all paper mail marketing. Some of them take a couple of times to get the message. If you threaten to close your account, they seem to be more compliant with your wishes.
If you worry about conducting business online, I’ll say the same thing here I used to say to my account holders in my banking days who didn’t “Do the Internet”. Everyone you do business with (including your doctor) is conducting their business with you online. You can choose to take advantage or not, but your information isn’t any less secure by not using their online services. Breeches happen every day, fraud is a reality. Use strong passwords, change them periodically and make sure you are on your own secure connection. Monitor your accounts regularly. No public Wi-Fi for anything you don’t want the whole world to see.
Some days I stop and think about how reliant the world is on electronic data transfer. While it makes life sail along smoothly and makes everything fast and convenient, a hiccup in the cyber world will stop everything dead in it’s tracks. That can be disconcerting when you are 1,000 miles away in some remote area. A small stash in the underwear drawer eases that anxiety.
If you are the techy try hard to get your travelling companion to at least watch you pay bills or see where the e-statements come from. Hopefully they will pay at least a little bit of attention. I feel sorry for my kids, if anything happens to me, they’ll be saddled with their lost Dad trying to sort out our online financial life. Or more likely doing it for him while he sits beside them looking like he’s trying to read Latin. Mine doesn’t even know how to open the email account. Venus/Mars again. Somehow it works for us.
Still no AC and hot weather looms in the very near future. Of all the things to be without in an RV, air conditioning is a tough one. Our guy is coming back tonight to narrow down the electrical issue either to a switch before the compressor or some kind of overload in the compressor. I wait anxiously, since the first will likely be fixed tonight and be cheap. The latter will be expensive, and we’ll be roasting in a couple of days. The fancy basement heat-pump is nice when it works but I long for a $700.00 rooftop air conditioner that Champ could have replaced by now.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about attachment to ‘stuff’
Until then...
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