How much does it all cost?

Often folks want to know how much it costs to live in an RV.  Well, I have to preface this by saying that the way we fulltime is not the way most people fulltime.  Instead of living on the road, we are parked most of the year.  We both still have our day jobs and a mountain of debt.  We aren’t retirees who sold our house, paid cash for a new Class A, and still have a nice pension to pay the bills while we are on the road.  We also aren’t super-frugal people who saved up, paid off all our bills, used the money we got from selling our possessions, and then paid cash for our rig and now do a lot of boondocking or workamping so that we don’t really have much in the way of monthly expenses.

Those are the smart ways to go.  Naturally, we didn’t take either route.

We didn’t own a house when we got into this.  As I’ve said before, we were renters.  One reason we chose fulltiming was that we weren’t prepared to buy a house.  We didn’t have the downpayment nor the creditworthiness, and neither of us was really interested in being locked into home ownership in an uncertain housing and job market, especially given the high cost of real estate and property taxes here on the East Coast.  We didn’t want to become another statistic in the foreclosure fiasco, but we were also sick and tired of apartment living.

So what we did was save enough money for downpayments on the RV and the truck and finance them both.  We don’t own the land on which we park, so that means we also have monthly site rent, rent which also includes our water, power, sewage, and trash.  We pay for our own propane and cable/internet/cell phones.  All in all, the cost for living month to month is similar to (even a little more than) apartment dwelling.

Let me break it down:

Monthly fulltiming costs:

Trailer note: $327
Truck note: $589 (keep in mind we had a car note before in the amount of $425 a month, so the expense was increased by $164)
Car note: $267 (we have a second vehicle, so this cost has not changed.  What will change is that we will add a storage cost when we leave during the summer, so that will add about $50)
Vehicle insurance:  $216 (for a truck, a car, and the RV)
Site rent: $795
Propane (in winter): $120-$150
Cable/internet/cell phone:  $200 (this has not changed from when we were apartment dwellers)
Diesel: $100 (we aren’t currently traveling; this will increase monumentally this summer when $100 might be what we spend in a day)
Our groceries, credit cards, student loans, vet bills, and entertainment costs haven’t really changed at all, and frankly they make up the bulk of our expenditures at around $1700 per month.

Total costs: $4344.00

You begin to see why we have to keep our day jobs, no?

Monthly apartment dwelling costs:

Rent: $950
Renter’s insurance: $20
Utilities: $300 (why it was so much we could never figure out; we lived in a 600 sq. ft. apartment!)
Car notes for both vehicles: $692
Vehicle insurance: $183 (for the two cars)
Gas: $100 (about the same because although the Nissan was more efficient, I commuted a longer distance)
Cable/internet/cell phones: $200 (same)
Groceries, student loans, credit cards, vet bills, entertainment: $1700 (same)

Total costs: $4145.00

So you can see that this lifestyle — at least the way we do it — isn’t really saving us anything.  In fact, there are costs I haven’t detailed here such as maintenance and repair.  We have a four-year extended warranty that was rolled into our note, so whenever something breaks, we can have it repaired for a copay of $100 as long as it’s covered.  So far we’ve been lucky and most repairs have either been covered by our vehicle insurance or by our extended warranty.  Even so, the $100 outlay each time (more upfront because we are actually reimbursed by our warranty provider) takes a cut out of the budget.  There are also tags and inspections, but we’re good for another year on both of those.

We also had to pay a lot out of pocket for things we never had to buy before like drinking water hoses, winterizing materials, sewer hoses, wheel chocks, special 12V light bulbs, de-flapper clamps for our awning, little bars to put in our fridge and cabinet to keep things from jiggling around when we move the RV, a ladder so we can get to our slides and roof to clean and inspect them, a back-up generator, a power inverter, a portable propane heater for emergency heat, an outdoor carpet for under our awning, a rack for drying our clothes indoors, a special washer/dryer that works on 110 power … the list goes on.  All these things have meant me teaching quite a few extra classes this past year so we could afford them.  Of course, most of these are one-time expenses, but some of them aren’t, like the special light bulbs, the chemicals we use to keep our holding tanks functional, and the in-line filters for our drinking water.

All this adds up, so much in fact that we’ve discovered there’s not much left over for travel.  I’ve had to work hard to put away a little each paycheck to save toward our summer trip.  Last fall, a big chunk of that got spent on repairs and most of these items I’ve just listed.  That meant our much-anticipated winter trip to visit new friends in Florida was canceled. We could have really used that break from the weather and the day-to-day.

Our summer trip WILL NOT be canceled, however.  I’m saving money from my tax refund and from my regular wages so we can make the trip to Texas and parts West.  The campsite fees won’t be much of a problem because we’ll be trading our whopping $795 a month site fee for whatever costs we incur while on the road.  I have to say that in other parts of the country campsite fees are MUCH less than they are here.  We’ll be able to park for a month in San Antonio for less than $400, half of what we pay now.

So why not move back to Texas and save a tremendous amount of money?  Well, I have a great job here, and my partner’s family is here, so for the time being, here we are, snow and all.  Admittedly, it seems we’re doing it backwards and we should be living up here in the summer and down South the rest of the year, but such is not to be right now.

You might wonder why we’re doing it at all if we aren’t traveling as much as we hoped and if it costs so much.  Well, in the midst of this punishing winter, we’ve found ourselves asking that same question from time to time.  Honestly, we can’t afford to make a different choice at this point.  We’re pretty much locked into this lifestyle for a while.  We couldn’t afford to store the RV, pay the note and insurance on it and on the truck, PLUS pay rent on a house or apartment.  That’s just not viable.

For now, though, I’m still kind of enjoying this life.   It can be tedious wrestling propane tanks in and out for refills and dumping holding tanks, but I do like not having a commute to speak of, a quiet spot to live with no noisy neighbors, and the satisfaction of knowing that this trailer really is ours and if worse comes to worse, we can, in fact, move the RV should one of us have to take another job or if we need a site that better fits our needs.  That would be much harder to do living in an apartment or a house where we would be committed to a long-term lease or mortgage.  Mind you, I don’t necessarily speak for Alexis who is a bit more reliant on her creature comforts than I am and gets frustrated when they are compromised in some way.  Even so, she’s been a pretty terrific sport throughout this entire experiment.

One step we’re taking this year to make this life a more affordable and enjoyable one is reducing our debt load.  Both of us are planning to pay off all or most of our credit cards in the next few months.  If we manage that feat and don’t run the cards up again, that will save us a tidy $600 a month, and that money will allow us to save for more trips and let us have more emergency funds should something dire happen to us, the rig, or our animals.

Will we continue to do this forever?  Who knows?  What I do know is that we are committed to doing it for the time being.  When it finally becomes much more hassle than it is worth, I imagine we’ll reassess, but for now, we’re just meeting the challenges as they come.

In my next post, I’m going to take a break from telling you all about what’s difficult and expensive about this life and focus on something more positive.