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Karmen Johnson certainly had the trappings of traditional success in her mid-20s: the corporate job in finance, the new house and a wedding in the works. Then she took a hard left turn in the early 2020s and transformed working from home to working and living on the road.
She got a taste for what folks call van life—outfitting a truck, bus or van as a mobile home and traveling the country for months at a time. She persuaded her employer, Indianapolis-based credit union Elements Financial, to allow her to work remotely and way off the beaten path. She was involved in a near fatal accident in Texas that could have ended her wandering ways, but she instead used it as a wake-up call to devote more of her life to a deferred dream of becoming an artist. In addition to her remote marketing and communications job with Elements, she now takes commissions to create large-scale murals across the country through her firm Karmen of Earth Designs LLC.
In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Johnson discusses the challenge of rearranging your life and career in a way that feels truer to your values. She also goes into great detail about the logistics of van life and the accident that pointed her in a new direction.
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