Moving to Asheville, Big Travel Plans, and a 326-Mile Bike Adventure

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It’s been a while since I’ve given just a general update on what we’ve got going on. And with some really big plans like moving to Asheville on the agenda, I thought it might be a good time to bring you up to speed.

Besides our big move, we’ve got some fun international trips we’re working on getting on the books over the next couple of years that we’re already super-excited about!

Just to make sure I’m not bored as we prepare for our big move, I’m now training for a 326-mile bike ride from Cincinnati to Cleveland over 6 days. The idea of it is both exciting and a little scary, but I know I’ve got a few months (and a lot of work) ahead of me this summer to prepare for this adventure!

Last but not least, I made a change on this website that you may or may not be happy with. Regardless, I think it’s a change that needed to be made.

That’s right – we’re moving to Asheville, North Carolina, at the end of this year.

And why are we moving to North Carolina? I laid a lot of that out in my post, The Surprising FAFSA/SAI and Roth IRA Conflict that Almost Sabotaged Our Financial Aid Plan. The quick gist is that it accomplishes two things:

1. It gets us out of the Ohio winters. There are some great things about Ohio – the amazing Metroparks system for things like biking and hiking, the wonderful fall weather, and the lower cost of living, to name a few. That said, the winters in Ohio are miserable. It’s dreary, depressing, and seems to go on for way too many months of the year.
2. Our daughter is planning to attend school at a North Carolina college. There are some amazing opportunities for her to save big $$$ and for us to be in the vicinity while she goes there… so, it makes sense for us to become NC residents.

But why are we moving to Asheville specifically?

Well, if you don’t know it by now, I’m a freeze baby. North Carolina fixes that issue much better than Ohio. However, I’m also a whiner about it being too hot! 😂 Yeah, I prefer a nice, moderate temperature. Summers in a place like Raleigh would be too hot for me.

But moving to Asheville – although not perfect temps like our time in Boquete, Panama provided – still presents a cooler summer in exchange for a chillier winter (but not even close to what Ohio’s like!).

So we did a 6-day recon mission in May and scoped out several different areas in and around Asheville. We drove through 17 apartment complexes, toured 11 of them, and narrowed it down to 4. We’ll see which of those is the winner when we go to sign a lease around the October timeframe.

I’ve got a lot more to say on why we’re excited about moving to Asheville, as well as how some of the programs there can make it so our daughter will likely leave college owing zero or close to it when she graduates. However, I’m going to save that for a future post!

For now, just know that by the end of December, moving to Asheville should be checked off our list!

We continue to get our travel subsidized by the credit card industry with no complaints on this from us. I should track this all (I don’t), but I’m sure that we’ve easily gotten tens of thousands of dollars of travel covered through credit card hacking.

There are more than one way to do this, but for us, we tend to apply for a few new credit cards each year that would serve us best. If you’re new to this, it’s not as scary as it sounds. If you’re already paying off your credit cards every month, why not take advantage of the sign-up bonuses that the banks offer on these cards? When we do this, our credit score dips a couple of points from the hard inquiry, but then actually goes up several points because adding more available credit is actually great for a credit score.

A sign-up bonus on spending you were going to do anyway – say, $5k over three months – to gain points that can be transferred to a travel partner valued at possibly $2,500-$3,000 is a no-brainer.

We use Travel Freely to keep track of our credit cards. It’s a completely free service and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s also where we go to determine the next travel card to sign up for so we can keep earning more valuable points!

Most of the time, we get points and then spend them on flights or hotels. You can read more about that on my Travel Rewards page. Last year, though, I talked to Lisa about trying something different and accruing and saving our points for a really big trip instead.

After a lot of discussion and research, we decided that we’re targeting a big trip to Japan in the late spring of 2028. The timing is particular for a lot of reasons:

• We needed time to earn enough points for lie-flat business class seats. And we’ll need to book them about a year in advance to get them as soon as they’re released.
• This will be our last big trip with our daughter before she starts college in the fall of 2028.
• I don’t want to go during the summer while kids are out of school, and our daughter has the flexibility during the school year since she’s homeschooled.
• The popular cherry blossom season generally runs from late March to early April. That’s when things are the busiest and the priciest. The cherry blossoms would be cool to see, but not outweighed by the costs and the crowds for us.
• In 2028, Golden Week runs from Saturday, April 29 to Friday, May 5. This is Japan’s biggest domestic travel holiday, and is supposedly a nightmare for crowds and award space.
• Early to mid-June is when Tsuyu (the rainy season) officially begins.

So for us, the sweet spot looks to be from mid-May until early June.

We haven’t even figured out a lot of this plan yet. Right now, we’ve just got our heads down, focusing on building our points chest to be able to book our flights.

We’re actually planning to have 600k+ Chase Ultimate Rewards points between the two of us by the end of this year. The reason for the high goal is that getting three lie-flat seats on the same flight might be a challenge… at least at first. If we find three seats, we book and life is good. But if we can only find two seats, we’ll book those for my wife and daughter and then book me on a separate flight.

We’ll then keep an eye out for another seat to open on their flight or two to open up on my flight. We don’t want to cancel the existing reservations right away, so we’ll need more points to book the additional seat(s). Once that’s done and everything looks good, we’ll then cancel the other seat(s) that aren’t needed.

We’ll also likely get a United card at the end of this year. Although booking flights through transfer partners might be cheaper, having a United card now shows award seats that non-cardholders don’t see. The opportunity for three seats on one flight will hopefully be a little better than we’d see otherwise.

With any points we haven’t used, we’ll look at using those for resorts or hotels in Japan.

Once we get our plans in place for the Japan trip, I’ll be sure to share. As a side note, our friends whom we traveled to Hawaii with for a couple of weeks earlier this year are likely joining us. They’ve become our travel buddies!

Speaking of our travel buddies… we had a nice plan involving moving to Asheville in the spring of 2027 and then taking it easy. Then our friends started talking about a trip to Ireland and Scotland that they want to do…. guess when?

Yup, the spring of 2027.

Of course, it would be wrong to let them travel to the UK without us (and Dublin – did you know only Northern Ireland is part of the UK?). So we changed our moving plans so we could impose on their travel plans.

We’ll get the fun of moving to Asheville done at the end of the year so we can let the dust settle. Then we’ll be ready for this trip, which is now looking to be 19 days long.

We’ve booked our flights to Dublin already and had to do some forward thinking in remembering to book our flight out of Asheville instead of Cleveland.

We’re just now starting to get a framework in place, but the plan is to do something like:

• 7-10 days in Ireland
• Less than a week in Scotland
• Maybe 4-5 days in London

Here’s where things get interesting. As you might already know, I struggle with long flights. We did book economy for the flight to Dublin, which I’m going to suffer through.🤞

But, long story short, I found a two-week transatlantic cruise out of Southampton (London) to Florida. I love cruises, and I definitely don’t like being on long flights, so this was a winner in my book. Luckily, everyone liked this idea as well.

The problem… it was pretty much sold out. I was able to find a cabin for our friends, which they booked. But we need three people in our cabin (two cabins for us would be too pricey) and those are hard to come by.

Right now, we’re on a waiting list (we’re in the top 5 on the list). There’s a pretty good chance that a cabin will open up in February once final payments are due and cancellations happen. But we also can’t rely on that being the case either.

So, I booked a flight back to Asheville for us on that day out of London Heathrow Airport. I used points for this on purpose so we can cancel the flight if we get a cabin on the cruise and get all our points (and taxes/fees) back. I hated to do that, but it made sense for the flexibility. Here’s to hoping we get to cancel this flight!

Initially, the plan was for us to cut back dramatically on travel after moving to Asheville, but so far, it looks like we’ve just made the trips more elaborate instead! 🙂

I’ll fill you in more on this trip as well, once we iron out all the details.

My best friend since high school proposed biking the Ohio to Erie Trail. I’ve lived in Ohio almost my entire life and had never even heard of this. But Ohio’s got one of the best park systems in the country, and it turns out that they’ve basically connected several trails to form a 326-mile bike trail from the Ohio River in Cincinnati to Lake Erie in Cleveland.

Thinking this would be a great time to bond with an old friend, even though I’ve only ever taken casual bike rides, I agreed. I’m a fool, of course.

Then he went and broke his ankle when jumping out of the way of a reckless driver while jogging recently. And he told me that he wouldn’t be able to train properly until that heals… what a whiner! So he wanted to push this bike adventure back until next year.

However, as I mentioned, we’re moving to Asheville at the end of this year. So after getting turned down from some other friends for it (including everyone’s friend Fritz from The Retirement Manifesto), I decided that I was still going to pursue this on my own.

So, I bought a used 2010 Specialized Tricross bike, and I’ve been riding it for the past couple of months…

I’ve purposely been riding with most of what I’ll carry on this big adventure (hence the bags on there). I figure I might as well train with the weight on there so it won’t seem any different when I do the actual ride.

I gotta say… it’s still early, but I’m already doubting myself a lot. As I type this, this has been my longest ride:

My game plan is to do this in late September or early October (play it by ear based on the weather) and break it up with 6 days of riding:

Day 0: Arrival in Cincinnati
Day 1: Cincinnati to Xenia (~60 Miles)
Day 2: Xenia to Westerville (~65 Miles)
Day 3: Westerville to Mount Vernon (~45 Miles)
Day 4: Mount Vernon to Millersburg (~42 Miles)
Day 5: Millersburg to Akron (~65 Miles)
Day 6: Akron to Cleveland (~40 Miles)

I’ll stay in hotels each night. Some people camp along the way, but I’m getting older. That would mean lugging a lot of extra weight (tent, sleeping bag, etc.), sleeping on the ground, and not having easy access to a shower every night. So, yeah, the hotel idea wins out for me!

Regardless, I’m already starting to second-guess if I can actually do this. Day after day of riding that many miles? It’s a little nerve-wracking to think about.

I’ve still got a few months to train, so we’ll see. I’m excited and nervous about the whole idea. When I pulled off hiking up Volcán Barú in Panama, it was truly an awesome feeling. So I like the idea of conquering another impressive physical feat, but can I do it? I guess time will tell.

I’ve been sharing our net worth updates since I started this blog in May of 2015. I think it’s important for others on the path to financial independence to see others’ numbers to be able to:

1. Realize that this is possible through saving and investing in the “slow and steady” way.
2. See others’ numbers to be able to just gauge if you’re on the right track. Your goal might be more or less, but at least it’s something to see since not a lot of folks who have made this happen are publishing this information.

I pull our net worth off our free Empower Dashboard on the first of every month. That does all the hard work for me, so I just need to log in to see the latest trend on our net worth, run retirement or fee analyzers, see the transactions for all our financial accounts, etc.

So, yeah, I’ve been updating my net worth on my Net Worth page and the website sidebar for years now.

That said, we’ve been fortunate to reach financial independence and see our net worth continue to grow, even in early retirement. But that’s also the biggest issue.

We’re not on the path to FI anymore and these updates aren’t as useful to those who are. I’ve also started to become concerned that it only takes one nut job to be a problem with what we’ve worked so hard for to get to where we are today.

And then I read a post about this very same topic from my friend/acquaintance Carl at 1500 Days. After seeing that, I decided it was time to do the same.

So, I’ve pulled my net worth growth chart from my Net Worth page, and I removed our latest net worth updates from the sidebar. I’ve tried to be transparent with everything I say or do from the start, so this was tough decision, but I hope you understand.

There you have it – our plans on moving to Asheville, the big travel plans we’re lining up, a 326-mile biking adventure I’m not fully confident in doing, and a change in the website with our net worth. We’re keeping busy for sure! Life is good.

If you enjoyed this post, consider hopping on my email list where I’ll keep you in the loop about new posts and other things going on. I’ll also send you some really cool freebies, including my popular Coloring the Globe Travel Tracker (discussed here)!

Plan well, take action, and live your best life!

Thanks for reading!!

— Jim

PS Gemini generated this cool image, but it was too busy to also add my logo and title to it. I didn’t want to waste it, so here it is for your enjoyment…