this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Sounds neat, but financial savings isn't what makes life good.
I think a lot of people are not fit for that lifestyle because they want to see family more frequently. In general, people don't move very far from their birth place.
Anyway if I were single and childless, I'd probably be a nomad too. Not just to save money, but to see more of what the world has to offer in the limited time that I'm here.
Perhaps something similar is possible with tiny homes or just an apartment when the kids move out.
tldr: it's the versatility of RVs that is so beneficial, rather than strictly the immediate financial independence.
The immediate financial Independence is nice, but the good part about RV life is that you can make it into whatever you want.
it is a tiny home you can keep in the same spot for a week or a year. you don't have to leave your family unless you want to.
the nomad style that you're talking about is accomplished right away, of course.
if you want a non-mobile hone, you live in the rv for 6 months to a yeat and you've saved a down payment, rv a year and a half and you have the first several months of mortgage and whatever repairs you're inevitably going to make right after you move in that you didn't notice.
and it's good practice for owning a larger nom-mobile home, cuz you'll get used to fixing things like the plumbing or mechanical or electrical issues, all on a smaller scale than fixing the same issue in a house.
you can find out what you're comfortable with fixing yourself or not all while saving money.
I met a lot of RV families and it seemed a pretty comfortable lifestyle for families as well.
It's like everything about rv life seems impossible or at least a major hurdle until they have the RV, and then 2 weeks into it, everyone's like oh, this is way better than struggling and they can parlay the RV experience into whatever lifestyle they want to.
i know one guy who lives on a houseboat now, one family with a kid who's digging the nomad thing, several who bought houses, a lady that only lives in national parks, several people in the free desert communities that are real communities, there's just so much you can do with it.
dang, I might be talking myself into going back to that haha
what do these people do for work? this seems like a fairly priveledged idea to entertain as far as I can see. like great if you're making techvalley money on some work from home job, but thats defintily a pretty steep entry fee
tldr: RV entry fee is lowww, it's all about practicality, not privilege.
the RV entry fee?
the US has a huuuge 2ndhand RV market, and a lot of suburbanites will gladly take a few grand for you to take their RV off their land.
i got mine from a couple who lived in an rv for a year, saved their down payment, then bought a house.
there are a lot of ads asking people to come take away RVs for free on CL because the owners can't be bothered to check if the vehicles work.
for a no hassle drive off the lot, ready to rock rv , 5k will get you a decent house on wheels, after which point anything you're bringing in is savings.
you can get puttering RVs for a couple grand.
a few jobs by rv owners I knew: one dude worked at t mobile, one girl was a barback, guys were retired, one lady had an etsy shop, Walmart workers, a mechanic, so on.
people living their lives how they want to live them without being forced to trade away their lives to pay rent.
not a ton of privilege there, i didn't know any tech bros.
i did know one guy who was some kind of programmer, but in my experience, RVs are much more about practicality than privilege.
Mine was about 5k, sold to me by an electrician saving for a house, i added the solar, then there are minimal expenses in a fully paid-off house, so anything i brought in that i didn't spend on food, utilities, or repairs was savings.
i had no repairs for the first half a year, that repair was a $30 fuel pump, so savings were good!
pfft, here, case in point:
running, clean title, 99k miles class C, but house windows and interior decisions are missing, so it only costs $1500!
1500 plus some scrap plywood and paint?
house.
surplus solar panels, inverter, battery? 500 bucks tops, free electricity from them on.
invest what is less than one month of rent in a lot of cities into an RV and then stop paying rent altogether.
RVs are the best!
I looked into it, and even on the East Coast there's tons of camp sites you can just cycle through to stay in one region. Especially if you're trying to keep costs down, you're going to slowly move around, not take huge road trips.
The long road trips would be the attraction for me. Setting up a trailer on local trailer parks in rotation doesn't sound appealing at all.
Anyway, I'm in Scandinavia and living in a camper isn't a feasible way to save money here. You could probably pay the mortgage for a house for less than the camping fee.
Oh yeah. RV sites here can be up to about 1,800 USD a month. Rent and mortgage can easily run 3 times that in the US. And then a lot of vanlife people will park along the national forest roads and only schedule nights at an RV site to change out liquids. Which drastically cuts down on "rent".
It's not feasible at scale though. We really just need to fix our housing prices. Where I am some places went up 60 percent the last couple years.