Dog Folks wrote:

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Our experience says an RV is cheaper.

I won't bore you with budgets and figures, but one that we find interesting: Our TOTAL maintenance, including tires and oil changes on the tow vehicle over the past 8 years= $102.60 per month. That is right about what it cost to maintain just our pool in the sticks and bricks!!



Simply put: Total dollar expenses monthly in a house=$4,000.00

In an RV= $2,000.00

Yep, cheaper in the RV.

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Are you figuring in monthly cost of staying in campground? 

Every RVer has a situation that dictates their budget. In my case, I can live in my RV comfortably for my mortgage payment including groceries and fuel. That is staying put a few weeks at a time and being somewhat frugal with the parks I stay in, no supersites for this poor ole boy. But I can still drink a somewhat top shelf cognac and craft beers and have a prime steak once in a while for less than it would cost to live in my house.

They say, you spend what you earn. I figure you will adjust your lifestyle in the RV according to what you bring in, adjusted for your priorities.

tigercx1 wrote:

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Dog Folks wrote:

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Our experience says an RV is cheaper.

I won't bore you with budgets and figures, but one that we find interesting: Our TOTAL maintenance, including tires and oil changes on the tow vehicle over the past 8 years= $102.60 per month. That is right about what it cost to maintain just our pool in the sticks and bricks!!



Simply put: Total dollar expenses monthly in a house=$4,000.00

In an RV= $2,000.00

Yep, cheaper in the RV.

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Are you figuring in monthly cost of staying in campground? 

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 Yep. As I said, ALL expenses.   Total of money spent.

We do not ever boon-dock.  We do however do some volunteering and get a free site for 3 months.

-- Edited by Dog Folks on Sunday 8th of June 2014 12:56:07 PM

While we aren't on the road yet, I have done extensive research on what our RV budget will look like, based on "reasonable numbers".  We are looking at the lifestyle we think we'll be doing and I calculate we'll be roughly 25% less than our S&B and that includes a "fudge factor" for unknown expenses. (it gets smaller the more I learn). We figure our "lifestyle" will include higher expenses in entertainment and leisure categories than we are now spending and if needed we could cut that significantly and still not sacrifice enough to impair our enjoyment. Cuts there and other budget items could get us about 33% less expensive than our S&B.  

FWIW

We have been fulltiming since January. We are finding we are spending approximately $2500 less in the Airstream then with a house. We spend quite a bit more on gas for the vehicles, but much less on utilities and no house payment. We stay at a "nice" park once in a while but camp at state parks and COE frequently. We prefer the COE and state parks as usually the scenery is more enjoyable :) and the sites are more spacious. We have no payments for the Airstream or vehicles as they are paid in full. Eating out a couple times a week is something we like to do as exploring local cuisines is part of our entertainment.
All this said, we will only be fulltiming for this year as I cannot convince Hubby to NOT have a house. We are building closer to our children, so will have a house again by end of year.
I could be quite happy fulltiming but will settle for 2-6 months of the year as a compromise; that is what it is all about, finding the best fit that works for both of you. We are fortunate that we can afford both a S&B and to travel. We will see what the future holds, life throws all of us changes and we just roll with it and adjust as best we can.

For us I know that if we did not have a house (or building one as is our case), we would without a doubt save money living fulltime in our RV. EVEN traveling every couple weeks, eating out and seeing sights in each location we have lived way cheaper in the Airstream. Utilities/site fees are cheaper than a house payment, insurance is much less, though gas for vehicles is more than if we stayed put.
If you have the mindset to fulltime you can make it work on any budget.

For example:
Share meals when eating out
Find entertainment and activities in new local that are free or minimal
Research area campgrounds to find the best deal for your needs
Stay in one location for a while, less driving = less gas
Relax at campsite, enjoy the views = less gas

I made a budget as Howard recommends, and try to stay on it or close.
It all depends on your needs and desires.

Good luck!

cejones4210 wrote:

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 We are finding we are spending approximately $2500 less in the Airstream then with a house.

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Just Curious.. Is that per month? If so , what is your monthly budget? 

 

There are so many varibles.. I mean a mortgage could be $700 to $5000 / mo.. or more. I can sure live pretty good in a RV at 5k a month.. 

 

So this thread is useless without applying the real numbers to it... my .02

Bobc wrote:

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I am hoping that a budget of 5-6K per month will get it done comfortably for us.

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 Assuming no debt or payments.. That seems like alot to me. I'm at a estimated 3k / mo.. If you don't mind me asking.. what are you planning to spend the bulk of it on? maybe I am missing something big..

i see some major differences which explains the cost... i plan to pay monthly mostly.. alot cheaper, it seems.. i've seen some nice places for under 1k / mo.. which is my avg budget. Join a couple discount places too..Also seen owners of sites renting very high end spots.. fore pretty cheap.. when they are not there.

i don't have heathcare.. should have it when i hit FL, and turn 50.

Subtracting out those differences alone is 14k / yr.. 1200/ mo.. that's alot closer..

Thanks for sharing...

There are lots of places out west and in the south (TX, NM, AZ, NV, TN etc.) in the $300-350/mo range including a pool, rec room, free cable, free wi-fi, etc. (w/metered electricity). Some offer good fishing too, if that's your thing. Some remote places with fewer amenities but beautiful scenery are less than $200/mo, with seasonal rates even lower. It all depends on how much you want to spend and what location and amenities you desire.

Chip

For us it's definitely higher. But that's because of our choices plus unanticipated maintenance and upgrades. I don't keep a close budget, it's kinda loose as I'm sort of chasing it after the fact more for our own understanding than requirements.

As Lucky Mike indicates you can do it on almost any budget but because of CHOICES we made, we're more like MarkS suggested, we're spending what we earn. We have loan payments on our car, truck and our Trilogy and that's not been a problem. We certainly could do it on less but we've done it our way.

We've attended grandaughter's graduations in both Washington state and Massachusetts, another's beach volleyball tournament in Seaside, OR, took a helicopter ride in the Mt. St. Helens volcano, toured San Antonio, etc. visited friends & family in WA, AZ, CA, TX, IL, OH, and now NH. We attended a funeral in AZ. We enjoy good beer and nice wines, dining out in nice local restaurants and occasionally picking up the check for friends and family. We have created memories that we cherish and had we flown and done the hotel/car rental thing to do much of that our expenses would have been the same or higher.

Fuel and campground costs are much higher here in the Northeast where we currently are. Food is higher because we're buying in smaller quantity as Ruth mentioned.

We're loving this life, cramming in lots of fun and experiences and living it as fully as we can.

We could have done it for much less and Brian, I think you're right on with your planning.

Had we continued to workamp as originally planned our expenses would be much less. To repeat, much is about choices we each choose to make.

Sherry

Bobc wrote:

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if you take a average site fee of 45.00 a day that alone would be 16,000 plus

health insurance about 10,000 per year
food 6,000.

just that comes to 32,000 per year thats 2666.00 that does not leave much for anything else

Gas
Taxes ( Truck,RV etc)
other insurance ( Life, truck, RV
entertainment
cell phone
WiFi
TV
etc. it all adds up fast

dont think i could come close to 3K a month unless we got a lot of very cheap sites ( not really interested in Walmart camping)

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 Bob,  where did you get the idea that site fee would be $45/night on average?   While there are a few places that charge that much (Lake Pleasant in Bothell, WA, which is close to downtown Seattle) that is usually only for a big metro area or a MAJOR tourist area (like Washington, DC).   We've just spent 12 nights at Birch Bay, WA (just south of the Canadian border) - our cost per night = $0.   We budget $600/month ($7200) a year and that includes our annual dues for our membership parks.   You need to do a little more research on what is possible in the way of nightly fees.   I take it you are not on Medicare yet since your health insurance costs are quite a bit more than we experience.

 

Barb

 

I've camped alot in Upstate NY, Vt, and Ma. I don't recall those kind of numbers.. However, we don't stay in the village of lake george either as example, when we go. We had always tried to stay away from the tourist spots.. which are pricey. There are 5 places within 15 min of there , at a third of the price.
I think the " knowing" where to camp is going to be hardest for us.

In NY and NE, We even had yearly rentals at a rate of about 1000-1200 / year ( 7 mo ).. But that was maybe 10 years ago..

We plan to roll in .. rent by the day 1 or 2 .. if we like it.. pay for a month.. if we don't .. Just move on to the next place.
The parking location will be the deciding factor.. I hate being boxed in.

We are not fulltime but we take extended trips. We have found travelling west from Indiana we drive a bit over twice the miles we do when we travel east. Even though fuel is normally our largest expense we find we spend about the same amount in total even though we drive twice the miles going west. Camping going west is much less expensive for us than when we travel east. That is just our experience based on trips of a couple of months duration.

Health insurance/ when we start we will be 64 and 63 so we will not be able to take advantage of Medicare yet and because we wiil be traveling outside of the Ma. Area we will need a IPO plan to start and we have seen cost between 950-1350 per month for the 2 of us. I am sure every state will be different. we don't plan to change our home state untill we get out there figure out what we really want to do.

Campground fees, I have not figured in any membership groups, even thou we are life time good sam members. i will have to check to see what groups work best for each zone we will be traveling as there seem to be some big saving here.

being from the Northeast i just can not wrap my head around 15.00 site fee's unless it is in a parking lot somewhere.

Bobc wrote:

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being from the Northeast i just can not wrap my head around 15.00 site fee's unless it is in a parking lot somewhere.

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 Some will higher, some lower or none at all.  15/night is just an average that will include some boondocking...0/night(not just walmart though it it may happen on ocasion while moving to a distant next location)  lower early in the week(with P/A discount), weekends higher unless in a location for more than a few days, club parks are very reasonable with the membership(30 nights a year is roughly 17/night, 100 nights cuts to roughly 5/night)...  We're not shooting for 15/night every night. Sure we'll probably end up some nights at 40, 50 or even 60/night as needed but not every night... Ouch!!

-- Edited by biggaRView on Wednesday 11th of June 2014 12:36:20 PM

Passport America Club......P/A.......if you search it or if you go to the main page you can click on it.....there is a special running right now and if you look for howards recent post you will get bonus months added on for free using howards code in his post...or just PM Howard for info

Much cheaper. Even with averaging about 900 bucks a month for campground fees and going out to the pub more than when we lived in the house. We had no mortgage on the house and have none on the rig either but even if we did the rig one would be less than our house mortgage was, but that obviously depends on where your house is/was.

H&L live on about 36K a year IIRC. We're above that…but then we don't boondock, don't park without hookups and like our wine and beer. Overall we're averaging about 12000-15000 a year less than living in the DC suburbs.

 

Not sure if this will help, when we went on the road I decided to keep really detailed records for the first year to help us with budgeting future years. Some of you will laugh at the following stats or label me as OCD, but hopefully at least someone will find this useful. I'm a spreadsheet junkie, former financial analyst, type A personality who loves details.  While I've learned a lot about flexibility and have managed to achieve a much better attitude of "rolling with the punches" as life throws unexpected changes our way, I still revel in knowing the details and being able to track things at a minute level of detail. 

Not sure I'll have this level of detail going forward, but after almost a year on the road I just looked back at the records I've been keeping, over the last 11.5 months we've averaged $671/mo in campground fees. We spent 2 weeks in Quartzsite last winter, so that was our longest boon docking experience, we've had 10 nights of enroute Wally docking nights, almost a week at a Casino, 142 nights at state/county/ city parks, 65 nights at commercial RV parks (13 of those were at a special "friends and family rate" due to knowing other workcampers for $10/night), 82 at membership parks (Passport America, Good Sam's, places we get discounts, etc.), 23 at Fairgrounds where we can usually find cheaper rates and 13 with free parking at art shows that we do. Mentally we budgeted $750/mo for campground fees, obviously we're under that number slightly, our highest month was $820, lowest was $430, average was $671. We've camped in WA /ID / MT / SD / WY / CO/ UT / CA / NV / AZ / OR / TX / OK / NM over the past year.   Wow, just realized we've hit 14 states in a year, hadn't added those numbers up before  Haven't gotten any further east than TX and not sure we really want to, but that's another discussion, let's just say we enjoy the more wide open, less populated areas of the West.

So, I know that average monthly camp fee is more than $1200 less than the total of our mortgage, utilities, property taxes, home owners insurance, etc.   We have slightly higher fuel / insurance costs than before, but we're still coming out 1K/mo less than when we had the house. 

We are still working so probably spend a bit more on "conveniences" than we need to, but honestly, sometimes I'd rather pay someone to do the maintenance work on the rig that we could do, but would take away from our free time. For us it's a tradeoff, we have more expendable funds to enjoy doing activities we didn't use to have time for, we have funds available for charitable giving in excess of what we ever had before, we're still saving for retirement at an accelerated rate but enjoying life more than we did when we had a house.  So from that perspective we've achieved our goals and have a satisfaction with life that we didn't even know was possible.

Our first year out we averaged about $5500 per month. A large budget item for us was entertainment. Since we are from the west coast we wanted to see the sites on the east coast and we did. About 4 days each week we were paying entrance fees to attractions. We wanted to see all the history we could take in.

We bought into Thousand Trails zone pass program and it worked well for us. We spent approximately 120 nights at $3.00 per night. All of it on the east coast. For us, during the first year it was more about what we wanted to see and not necessarily about the campgrounds.

We budgeted $750 per month for camping and $500 for diesel fuel. Camping was under budget thanks to TT and diesel fuel was slightly over based on the 15k miles we drove.

It was a busy year but it turned out to be just what we wanted for the first year.

In addition to the 15k on the MH we put about 12k on the toad. In all we covered 32 states.

We have since slowed down and have been back on the west coast since Nov 2013.

I have another 18 months before we start our new adventure. But I am planning on starting also with a budget of around 6k per month. Heath insurance alone is going to be over 1,000 per month, 500. For food,500. For fuel, misc. taxes and fees 1,000, site fees 1,000 per month. Already at 4,000 with out the intertanment and what ever else. The 6k still goes fast. I do see it getting cheaper after year 2.
By maybe 1k.
I would must rather plan on a large budget to start and then maybe cut back from there.
We want to make sure we can do all the stuff we want to do and do much parking lot camping. Which does not excite us at all,unless it it just a one night hold over while going from A to B.

Can,t move the beach house !!
I am sure it can be done cheaper. But for us.
I think we can enjoy our selves and not be to concerned about having to seek out cheap campgrounds that will take our planed trailer size (41').
Again I would rather plan for the higher number and then cut back if needed.
We will be on a 5 year plan. We will remain flexible. As the only thing you can be sure of is that thing will change.

I do it for 30 k or under total per year....(actually alot less than 30k) its all in your needs and lifestyle

I don't know how it's going to turn out for me, as I only just started out this week. But as the first of the month just rolled around, this is the first time I have NO MORTGAGE PAYMENT!!! It will also be nice this month not having to pay the electric, gas, water, landline phone/internet and sanitation bills.

Of course, we probably just spent double that on repairs and lots of odds & ends we needed.