A lot has happened since our Q1 financial update was published in April. These last few months have been everything except relaxing or smooth. The life we envisioned when we set out on this journey years ago feels like it’s far off in the distance right now. I know we are taking the necessary steps to get back to it, but it’s not going to be easy.

I won’t rehash everything in this blog as I already covered what’s going on in other blogs. Plus I’m just really tired of stressing out over it and questioning where we went wrong. If you want, or need, to catch up you can start here and that will get you up to speed on our current situation.

Our house has now been on the market for over 60 days. We’ve had great interest, but so far nothing we could consider serious. Our current frustration level however doesn’t come from the process of selling our home. We understood what we were getting into when we made the difficult decision to move on.

Currently our frustration is coming from the people around us. Suddenly everyone has an opinion or thinks they know better. It’s not only annoying, it’s compounding our stress level which makes an already difficult situation worse. We know it’s mostly well meaning, but we would prefer a little positivity instead.

There’s a saying that “all real estate is local”. This is what people around us don’t seem to understand. In our former lives behind the iron curtain of stupidity in California it was very easy to sell a house. In fact, the last two houses we sold never officially made it on the market. Our agent put the “coming soon” previews on the MLS and the houses sold in a day for what we were asking.

Selling a house is easy when there is a housing shortage in a population center of millions of people with thousands of those people desperately looking to buy. So that is the perspective many people have in our family and friends circle.

But we are not in Southern California. We live in a rural Texas town with a gas station, a 130 year old saloon and a couple of really good family owned food joints. That’s it. If you blink once driving through you will have missed it all.

The closest big-ish towns to us are at least 25 miles in either direction. Even then we are talking thousands of people, not millions. So the prospect pool of buyers is already slim. There are always people moving out here from the city, but not enough to scoop up homes at a rapid pace.

In addition to the geographic location we have our particular local. Not to brag, but our particular neighborhood is considered upscale and luxury. It’s all custom homes on acres of land with private amenities for land owners only.

Many people here are retired. Many more use this area as their second home for vacation getaway’s. As such, the prices are pretty high for a rural area. That’s something that further narrows down the prospect pool on top of the surrounding population.

What all of this means, and what people close to us don’t get, is that we need to be patient and eventually the right buyer will come. Every home that goes on the market here sells sooner or later, but it takes more time than most places. There isn’t going to be a line of people bidding against each other in rural Texas.

Even traditional methods, like open houses, are rarely used here because they don’t generate a lot of traffic. That doesn’t mean we won’t eventually have one. What it means is that we have to temper our expectations if we do. There isn’t going to be a hoard of potential buyers who decide to drive out into the country one day just to look at our house. It’s just not going to happen like that.

In many ways the same reasons we bought land and built a home here are now the reasons it’s hard to now sale a move on. The best we can do now is try and keep a positive mindset and keep everything looking beautiful. We know it will get done, but we just don’t know how long it will take.

Admittedly, some days are very hard and challenging. Personally, I’m heartbroken over this whole thing and dealing with it sucks. Having temps over 100 degrees every day right now isn’t helping matters much. It makes yard work miserable, if not impossible at times, and being indoors allows far too much time to get into my own head.

The most important thing for us to remember right now is that it only takes one person to get this done. And as difficult as it might be emotionally and physically in this moment, we are well prepared for what happens once we are past all of this. Sometimes we get down right excited at what the future holds.

Of course, there is a financial aspect to all of this as well. Now that we have acquired our RV we have lost a little bit of our current cashflow bandwidth. We know this will only be temporary until our house sells, but it still sucks.

Someday, when all is said and done, we are going to be in a pretty good financial position. Since I have nothing else to do, I put together a budget for our future RV travels. I thought it would be helpful to regain some perspective about how life on the road is from the financial side. I might do a blog on it later so I will spare the details for now.

In short, I used actual numbers from our past travels in the big rig. I knew that it would be a good size overestimation, but better to overestimate the alternative. Since our new RV is much smaller and gets almost double the fuel milage by comparison it will be much cheaper to travel in.

After taking that into consideration along with the ability at stay in places like state parks and small RV parks the cost goes down considerably. Even accounting for more frequent travel we still end up with a sizable surplus on a monthly basis. This is some welcome good news as I had forgotten how cheap it was to live on the road.

When the time comes to finally set out we can pretty much do whatever we want and not be too concerned about the financial side. I won’t go so far as to say we are in a money is no object type of situation, but we will definitely be in a no trade offs situation.

If you recall, on our original full-time RV journey we decided it was best to make some of trade offs along the way. It was kind of a necessary evil so we could stick to our budget and still have the ability to do some cool, but expensive, things.

For example, we work camped in the winter months to get a free site. The money saved on our budget by not renting a site for a couple of months allowed us to splurge and stay at expensive resorts in prime summer locations. The end result was great, but the work camping part was not ideal and often a terrible experience.

With a smaller rig, lower fixed costs and more flexibility we won’t need to do all of that. We will have so many different options available we can stay on the move and not sacrifice our time for our budget. If we want to visit a luxury location we will just do it.

Once we get going it will be interesting to see what our actual monthly expenses amount to. It would be great to significantly build on our savings during this part of our journey. Someday we will want to get off the road and settle down again. When that time comes we need to be better prepared than we were this pastime, mentally and financially.

On that note, let’s see where we ended up for Q2.

Our Portfolio Quarter Ending June 30, 2026:

Portfolio Value = $1,726,067

Portfolio Increased By $151,884 or 9.65% From Q1 Ending 6/30/2026

Portfolio YTD Change = +$98,771 or 6.07%

Net Worth = $2,015,836

Net Worth Increased By $212,003 or 11.75% From Q1 Ending 6/30/2026

Net Worth YTD Change = +$158,841 or 8.55%

Overall Q2 was a great quarter! The big gains over the last 3 months made up for the very rough month of March. A month that put us in the red to end Q1. At one point we were on the cusp of hitting $1.75M. Hopefully we hit that and much more before year end!

In addition to big portfolio gains we reached a huge net worth milestone in Q2. If you remember, we were excited that we came close in to hitting $1.9M in Q1. Well, we blew right through that and closed out Q2 crossing the $2M mark for the first time ever!

BUT, There are a couple of points of clarity that I would like to make about this before we pat ourselves on the back too hard. As you know we like to be very transparent.

First, we are both thrilled and humbled to even be able to say that our net worth has reached this level. It’s absolutely amazing to think we haven’t worked a real job for almost 6 years and yet our portfolio and net worth still keep on growing.

Secondly, aside from the nice rebound in our portfolio, a good amount of our net worth increase was due to home value appreciation. After we receive our appraisal from the county each year I typically update our assessed value.

However, knowing that we were putting our home on the market and that there are large costs associated with that I decided that a preemptive adjustment needed to be made.

The reason for this is twofold. First, it just didn’t feel right to throw in a huge number and blow up our net worth. Second, while that would have been the true number at this moment in time that would change the moment our house sells. Then I would be forced to turn around and make an adjustment in the opposite direction later. That seemed like it would be sloppy and, quite frankly, lame.

So in the interest of keeping it real and my own desire to not make things look stupid I did some calculations. I based that calculation on what our realtor gave us in regard to total fees, commissions and our home valuation.

Using that information I was able come to an amount that should closely equate to any fees and commissions associated with the sale of our home. From there I deducted this amount from our assessed valuation to come up with a net home equity value. I feel using this number gives us our true net worth number taking it all into account.

It’s not perfect as we won’t know the actual sale price and actual fee and commission amounts until it happens, but at least we are in the ballpark.

This gives our readers a more of a honest assessment when it comes to our net worth. It also spares me from having to explain the adjustment later. Sound fair? Good!

Honestly, the fact that our net worth stayed above $2M after making that adjustment was unexpected. It makes me more proud of how far we have come.

As you know, I have also been working to get our allocation more in line with with where we are in life. This has proved to be quite tricky. In Q2 I bit the bullet and made another round of adjustments to try and rebalance. Well, right after I did that stocks took off and bonds took a dump. So essentially we are right back to where we started the quarter on a percentage basis.

So I’m done with it for now. I will revisit it as part of my year end and probably make it an annual ritual. Hopefully by then everything is a little less volatile and I can get a better picture of where we are at.

So far Q3 seems to be off to a rocky start. That’s not totally unexpected considering the geopolitical issues and how far the markets ran in Q2. Not to mention this is a midterm election year which always seems to have some mid year volatility.

The good news is that earnings are very strong and the AI trade is real. If we can ever get past these geopolitical issues and eventually the midterms I think the markets will run hard into the year end. Earnings are way too strong for the markets to remain flat or down going forward.

The prices might seem high right now, but they really aren’t. If anything the market is getting cheaper with these huge earnings reports. And with current price movements trending flat to down it will just get better. Just my opinion.

Before I go, I just have to say how great is it to have a new FED chairman! What a breath of fresh air! Finally a FED meeting Q&A without a bumbling fool contradicting himself every other sentence. Short, sweet and precise. The way it should be.

Despite the rhetoric from the talking heads and what the stupid betting markets say I still don’t think a rate hike is on the table right now. We just saw how fast inflation numbers can drop when the oil market stabilizes.

Oil dropped about 25% in no time on a lousy MOU. Gas prices in Texas dropped a dollar a gallon in a matter of days. Before this latest flare up stalled it we were heading back below $2.50 a gallon in quick fashion. Also, the last inflation numbers were pretty weak compared to what was expected.

Because of this I see everything just staying in a holding pattern while the middle east deal gets sorted out. If everything stabilizes I think most indicators point to lower inflation levels. Oil prices alone will drive it down more than expected.

Also, remember what Warsh said in his Q&A. He focuses more on the inflation number to the LEFT of the decimal. That sounds like 2.9% is the new 2% to me and we are not that far off from that number. Again, just my opinion.

Alright, that about does it for our Q2 2026 financial update. Stay strong, stay invested and we will let you know if anything changes on the home front.

Happy Investing!

Joe

Check out our online store StuckonCamping where you can get some of our designs on stickers, magnets, shirts, hats, tote bags and more! Check it out for camping, hiking, RV and other outdoor designs! Help support our blog by clicking through one of our Amazon Affiliate product links before you make a purchase. We will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.