The train is still moving towards its final destination. The“train” represents my husband and I. A “final destination” is our departure day, the day when we’ll leave the US to explore the world, searching for retirement “haven”, which we know does not exist. We just want to find the place (country and city/town), where we will have the same level of comfort or better that we currently have.

Our priorities have not been changed. The main priority is to improve our health and preserve and, hopefully, increase the savings. The last part is not a simple task, knowing what’s going on the stock market. The rest we can buy.

There are many steps that have been completed as of today:

• My husband completed the minor repair and touch ups while we traveled in Tibet. We even had an open house rehearsal – showed the house to our neighbor who wanted to buy it. He spent two hours in the house, checking every inch of it, including … the sound system and TV which we are not selling. Finally, he asked us do not move anywhere, stay in the house, and allow him to visit us so he can enjoy the house and surroundings. You guessed correctly, he is not buying the house (out of his price range) but loved every corner of it.

• Selling a lot of stuff on eBay, craigslist, and the consignment shop called “Linda’s Stuff”. Linda’s Stuff gives me 62% of the sale price. Many local consignment shops were willing to give me only 40% of the sale price. Linda’s Stuff arranged a free pickup without a limit how many items to consign with them. They can send you a check or deposit the proceeds to your PayPal account. What can be more convenient that this?

• The virtual mail forwarding address has been established with the Traveling Mailbox. (http://www.facebook.com/TravelingMailbox).It was a straight forward procedure. How we selected the mail forwarding service can be found in this post. Now I am busy with changing addresses for the non-essential senders like professional membership organizations, airlines, and hotels memberships, etc.

The next steps on our ”To Do” list are to notarize legal documents, scan the tax return documents for the past seven years (yak!), and update the wills and other legal documents.

Wish us good luck to complete all on time.