As we move towards our goal to full-time RV living, we had to have an experiment to see do we like this lifestyle? How does it work with working on the road, what about the pets? So we didn't answer every question but we answered a few big ones.
Yes we love the lifestyle
Yes I can work from the road
Our little pup was great!
So with this we were curious on costs of moving around and wanted to share that with everyone.
Here will break down the costs of a month of travel that we did recently.
This included a range of RV’ing that we experimented with to understand what full-time RV’ing will cost us.
In the month of July - Off we went, we really didn't plan to be RV’ing for a month but this is what it turned out to be. We ended up in several locations on our trip and driving over 3300 miles. We did a range of RV sites and did some moochdocking.
We left the San Antonio Area and returned 23 days later.
What I Learned
A few things that I learned -- I did some VERY VERY long drives -- in the future 200-300 miles a day would be a much better pace for me. The other thing that I learned is that with these long drives I am stopping every 180-220 miles for gas, this really makes for a long day as an average RV stop can go anywhere from 20-45 minutes. Most of ours were over 30 minutes. A little spoiler is that we have a new truck that will be replacing the Tundra (Blog coming soon) Also during our drive we had 1 issue with a tire blow out between Estes Colorado and Des Moines, this added to our drive time as we had to change out the tire. Also in Des Moines we went ahead and replaced and upgrade all of our tires to an E rated Goodyear tire with much better handling along with higher ply. The trailer ride improved greatly with these new tires.
Miles, Driving and Costs:
We have a 2018 Tundra 4x4 with the 5.7 gas engine and our trailer loaded with our payload etc was about 10k pounds.
Here I breakdown our costs. we drove almost 3300 miles and spent almost 1000 dollars in gas. With an upgraded diesel I hope to shorten the number of stops. One thing we did with our travel from Colorado to Iowa was we ran about 10 gallons of water I our trailers freshwater tank which allowed us to use the restroom on the trailer, this helped with our stop time greatly and I highly recommend it.
So on this adventure we were "vacationing" at a destination location in Estes CO, over the 4th of July AND a river side site. This was very expensive.
We had a great time as you can read in our other posts, so we vacationed for a week, moochdocked for a week and stayed in little town for a week.
Things we learned -- Vacation hotspots suck for working, the cell service was slow, the WIFI was awful as in most RV sites.
Staying overnight for one night - Pull through sites are awesome as you can stay hooked up to the truck. Also I don’t dump my tanks if I don’t have to. But I won’t travel with them over half full either.
One tip is I have a short 10 ft sewer hose and if I do need to dump my tanks on an single overnighter. I’ll wait until we are ready to leave and position my trailer so we can use the short hose. Makes life way easier and gets you moving faster. 20 and 30 foot sewer hoses just take so much more time. Sibley was awesome -- We would of stayed for 2 weeks straight, It was a gem of a little city with a nice city camp site, pool, golf and great weather. Moochdocking was a lot of fun (This is where you camp on someones property for free) - We spent a week with family and friends and really enjoyed the change of pace. We had all of our services and awesome WIFI from our family.
Here is our cost breakdowns of our lodging.
Summary we spent a little over 2,000 dollars for the month. This is a lower than we spend on our mortgage payment and a lot lower if you factor in the other expenses of our house. Our comparable expenses at home are close to 3300 a month.
overall this is allowing us to understand the costs of doing this full time.
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Remember don’t wait for your dreams to happen. Set goals and make them your reality.