Can you afford the RV life?
Think you’ve got the bank account to join the RV life movement? How long could you survive if you just quit your job and hit the road? Is it cheaper than being tied down in an apartment or house? Is the call of the road a pull toward a youthful freedom full of Huck Finn style adventure, or a siren song leading you toward certain financial ruin? That’s what we’re here today to find out. We’ve been researching the costs involved in full-time RVing, and we’re going to introduce some COLD HARD FACTS into the almost mythical concept of the RV life. So if you like that cold splash of water in the morning, strap in and come along for the ride.
Some Uncomfortable Truths about RV Life
Today we’re setting aside the creativity, the art, the soul of the voyage. Today we’re killing the vibe!!! I know, I know, it’s supposed to be all sunshine and roses, but the roses need fertilizer too, and sometimes fertilizer is literally poop. So it’s time to get down to brass tacks, we’re talking budgets. If you’re like me, you have a concept of RV life almost as some sort of gap year European backpacking trip. No mortgage or rent to pay, cheap hostels, and like a EuroRail pass that gets you wherever you want to go for like 20 bucks. But what are we basing that impression on?
How can we make real plans based on fantasy? If we’re going to really do this, we need to have some idea of how much we’re going to spend.
We’re using a pretty easy tool to do this, GoodBudget. It’s a super simple concept that starts with a monthly income, and then puts it into “envelopes” so that you can see how much you’ll have left at the end of the month. This is the sort of tool that helps you easily visualize where your money is going, and try to get ahead of it so you can start to make plans, and get away from the hand-to-mouth lifestyle. Everyone should consider something like this, and there are some more powerful apps that also let you link accounts so you can get real-life data, which means your budgets will get more accurate every month.
Of course we don’t have any real-world data yet, because this trip still only exists on paper. So we will have to make some guesses, but we’ll try to do as much research as possible to educate those guesses. Let’s do this.
Likely our largest expense will be monthly payments for the truck and trailer. Now I’ll admit that we could do this a lot cheaper, but we do want to be comfortable and safe. If you go back to previous videos you’ll see the process we used to determine that we needed to spend about 180 grand on a new Dodge Ram, and Alliance Paradigm 5th wheel. A quick trip to Calculator.com for their loan calculator tool shows that if we put down what we plan to, $50,000.00 total, then we’d end up with a monthly payment around $2,400.00 for our home on wheels. Put that in an envelope.
Of course the monthly financing isn’t the only cost for the Luminous Castle. There’s also insurance. I called my good friends over at Geico (not a sponsor, I’m afraid). They estimated that insurance is going to be another $250 per month. A lot of that cost is due to the high cost of full coverage for the truck, the trailer is surprisingly inexpensive, $50.00 a month or so. We technically wouldn’t have to insure the 5th wheel, it’s not required in Nevada. But with such a big investment sharing the road with the lunatics I see out there, insurance seems like a good call. Health insurance is another story. Most insurance plans don’t cover out of state providers, so we’d need specialized insurance, which will go for something like $750.00 a month for both of us. So that’s another grand for insurance. Envelope that bad boy.
Another one that probably sticks in your craw is fuel. The average cost of a gallon of diesel is now $5.32 across the US. We figure we’ll probably jump from one site to another around 6-8 times a month, and each jump should be in the neighborhood of a couple hundred miles. The truck pulling the trailer will probably only get around 10 miles per gallon. That means we’ll use around 20 gallons per jump, let’s call that $125.00 per trip. If we do that 8 times, that’s another $1,000.00 per month. This one was a kick in the pants for me, I did not expect that much. But hey, another fairly thick envelope.
Food. It’s a love-hate relationship for all of us, I know. In this case, the hate part will likely be the bill. It seems that most every week we spend more than we did the week before. We’ll try to eat in as much as possible, but I’m sure we’ll hit restaurants along the way. Fortunately we prioritize health over deliciousness, that helps keep costs down. We’re not really the gourmet restaurant type of couple. If we spend something like $150.00 a week on groceries, and another $100.00 eating out, that would get us to about $1,000.00 per month again. That seems a pretty realistic number, but if the trend continues that will only go up. So let’s get that one in the envelope quick, before it does.
So we’re making payments on the RV, that should be all we have to pay for housing, right? Wrong.
We need a place to park it, and that doesn’t come for free. In a previous video, we talked about some of the great apps that are available to find campgrounds at discounted rates, but we’re still not going to get away with less than $20.00 per night. That’s right about $600.00 per month. Hey, at least the envelopes are getting thinner.
A category that’s very important to me is self-care. Think facial creams, think massages and spa days, think haircuts and pedicures. I don’t do those things super often, but a girl’s got to take care of herself sometimes. Fortunately Erik needs a $15.00 haircut and some razor blades, and he’s fairly good to go. A lot of the things like soap, shampoo, toothpaste, laundry detergent, deodorant and the like are already contained in the grocery envelope, but still we’ll be looking at $100.00 a week as a target for this category, that’s a $400.00 envelope.
Although this trip is about work, not pleasure, we’ll still need some sort of entertainment. We’ll want to hit a movie every now and then (although we are platinum members on the Cinemark app, check that out to save some $), see a concert, something like that. If we set aside another $100.00 a week for that, we should be in good shape. That’s a $400.00 funsies envelope.
We’re getting down to the little stuff now, so it’s just about time to create a miscellaneous envelope. In this one we’re going to put the vehicle maintenance, clothing, little gadgets we’ll eventually want to upgrade, phone and internet service, and about a hundred little things that are too boring to get their own category. By the time you get all those bundled together, this little envelope will probably come out around $750.00 per month.
So my word, this is getting to be a pretty healthy pile of envelopes. Particularly when you consider that we have to assume a $0.00 income when we’re first getting started. We hope we’ll get my photography career moving a bit better by that time, but we can’t rely on hope I’m afraid. So that puts us at a monthly cost of somewhere in the range of $ 7,550.00 per month, or a fairly outrageous $ 90,600.00 per year. In the first year we should also consider the $50,000.00 down payment, for a yearly budget of $ 140,600.00 in year 1. So if we want to commit to 3 years, we’ll need to bank $ 321,800.00. So not exactly that European backpacking trip!
I hope now that you will appreciate the importance of finding those like, subscribe, and notification buttons on my Youtube channel. Anything you can do to support this channel will bring us that much closer to making this a reality. I also hope that if you’re considering getting an RV and heading out on the open road, you’ll give a thought to your pocketbook first. It’s a beautiful lifestyle, and my personal dream. Just don’t hop into it on a whim. Leave me a note in the comments if you’re an experienced RVer who might know some expenses I’m missing. Apologies for killing the vibe, we’ll try to bring it back up next week talking about some investments we’ve made to try to pay for all this stuff. Until then, have a bright and focused week.
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