I’ve written before about how much it costs to live fulltime in an RV, at least when stationary. On the East Coast, it’s not really any cheaper than being an apartment dweller. Well, in our case it isn’t cheaper. But what about travel? Is that any less expensive?
For the past two months while we were on the road, I kept track of every single penny we spent. I held onto all the receipts and wrote everything down in a little notebook that I carried with me, breaking the expenses down into various categories. I tallied everything up when we got home, and the figures below reflect the amount over (or under) what we would normally spend while parked, not the total amount we spent on that particular item during the trip:
- Fuel +$1,325 (That’s for hauling the rig nearly 4,000 miles and driving the unhitched truck almost another 3,000 miles)
- Site rent -105.00 (Not surprising that this was cheaper. Site rents here in Maryland are absurd!)
- Dining out +805
- Entertainment +$260
- RV Maintenance and Repair +/- $0 (Except for the underbelly pan which we haven’t yet replaced, we didn’t spend anything on the rig that we wouldn’t have spent anyway)
- Gifts and shopping +500 (mostly souvenirs and my shoe shopping spree)
- Groceries and household expenses +400 (I bought all the food goodness I just can’t get here in Baltimore).
Total for trip – $3,395
So, for less than $3,400 above our usual household expenses, two people spent 60 days traveling over 7,000 miles and visiting 8 cities. That’s $28.30 per person per day for lodging, travel, food, drinks…everything. Is it even possible to get a traditional, all-inclusive vacation package for so little?
My tax refund earnings from teaching a summer class more than covered the costs of the trip. We paid almost entirely in cash, putting only a couple of tanks of gas on our credit cards, so we incurred no significant debt.
We could have done the trip more cheaply, sure. We could have boondocked more, eaten out less, not have done a lot of shopping or traveling around unhitched, but, hey, we wanted to actually have fun! So we did, and in the end, it was totally worth it.
Wow, that’s amazing! Way to go on such a cheap vacay!
I’m actually pleasantly surprised to find out that the trip cost so little comparatively speaking. I felt like we were spending money like water.
Now, the economical RV vacation would mean that the ONLY category in which we spent more than we do when usually parked would be fuel. That would be the truly cheap way to go, and perhaps as we get better at this, we will also become more frugal. I think we did well for our first time, though.