I lived in an RV with solar panels, electrical outlets, hot shower, full kitchen, separate dining room, living room, kitchen area, bathroom and bedroom, and it was the best thing ever, going from national park to landmark every few weeks or couple months and my girlfriend at the time(so long!) eventually broke down and told me she didn’t like it because she wanted to live in a “normal” house and pay rent “like everyone else” as if conforming to a popular, desperate living situation was a good reason to give up basically free utilities, saving about 90% of your income and the freedom to live anywhere as long or as short as we liked.
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.
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.
great idea… too bad RV’s are not designed for long term full-time usage, and the repairs become substantial, and parts can take a month+ to come in. in the meantime you need to find a place to stay where you end up.
I think repairs seem daunting until you actually start making repairs and realize how simple they are.
i had an old winny and the repairs are basically unscrew this piece, screw in new piece.
everyone else with an RV seemed to be able to do the same part swaps just as easy.
If you want someone else to do it, that’s fine, but unless you’re doing a tire rotation or replacing an engine, common repairs don’t present any real hurdle if you have a screwdriver and a wrench.
youtube and forums had step by step instructions for anything I ever had to fix (fridge, 2 fuel pumps, cleaning carb once…that might be it).
under a hundred bucks in repairs over a couple years vs. no rent and saving almost all of whatever income you have adds up to savings pretty quick.
everyone in the RV communities is helpful too and are hapoy to troubleshoot with you and tell you exactly how to do anything with whatever model you have.
or just shoot rhe shit and recommend the next cool spot, haha
I admire anyone who can commit to that lifestyle, but it’s not for everyone. Some people are born with wanderlust and others just want to put roots down somewhere they can call their own.
I don’t think it was so much her desire to confirm to some capitalist expectation of paying an enormous sum just to live in one place on the grid (because honestly nobody wants that), but a desire for stability and space to spread out, which are often in short supply when you live the camper/van/bus lifestyle.
in her specific case, I think the capitalist brainwashing had taken hold pretty strongly.
she literally said " I want to work in an office. I like offices."
as for wanderlust, a lot of these rv people just live in one perfect place the entire time they have the RV.
I understand why from the outside it would seem like stability is “in short supply” in an RV, but in practice, having the financial Independence and ability to move to and live wherever you want as long as you want is the epitome of home-owning stability.
as for space to spread out? with the savings, you can buy an acre a month of your own land and plop your RV on it or build your own cabin if you want to.
living in an RV gives you way more options than traditional rental scenarios.
she literally said " I want to work in an office. I like offices."
What’s wrong with that? I want to work in an office too. I like offices. When I’m in one, I’m in the headspace of “this is work and I am here to focus and do my job”. I actually hated working from home during the pandemic and my mental health suffered greatly because I had so much difficulty “switching off” at the end of each day without the clear separation of environment. I strongly disagree with the notion that someone who desires to work in an office setting is somehow corpo-pilled and a slave to capitalism. I’d really rather be doing something else than sitting in an office for 8 hours a day, but if I have to be working to survive I’m gonna want to keep my work at work and my home at home.
As for the “spread out” point, maybe I didn’t articulate that well, but I wasn’t talking about owning land. Not everyone can fit their entire lives into a tiny home or an RV. I think I could do it, but I’d have to part with a lot of my possessions in order to make it all fit inside comfortably and it’d be difficult to manage. For others, maybe it’d be impossible? Sometimes it’s just little stuff, like having a living room with a coffee table and a furniture set that gives people the comfort of being in a home, even if it isn’t strictly necessary for survival.
“What’s wrong with that? I want to work in an office too. I like offices.”
If you are trying to share a personal story or have contextual questions about my story, please ask them, because getting defensive about your own assumptions related to straw men scenarios you are propping up is bewilderingly off-topic.
“I’d really rather be doing something else than sitting in an office for 8 hours a day, but if I have to be working to survive…”
She was not under either compulsion.
she did not need the money and her job made her unhappy, but believed that the “right thing” was to be told what to do by a “boss” and to bring more profit into the company for the sake of the company and the approval of her corporate “superiors”.
You are continually making incorrect assumptions and drawing false conclusions about someone you don’t know and have not tried to learn about.
Again, if you feel the need to share or ask questions, by all means go ahead, but try to divorce your own assumptions and preoccupations from my experiences.
“Sometimes it’s just little stuff, like having a living room with a coffee table and a furniture set that gives people the comfort of being in a home, even if it isn’t strictly necessary for survival.”
Your stated desire is still to own certain material possessions such as a living room and a coffee table.
We don’t have to linger on the countless RVs with spacious living areas, but as stated in the OP and other comments, if you have the specific desire for a stationary living room but lack the resources to acquire a stationary living room or stationary house conveniently possessing a stationary living room, by living in an RV for a brief amount of time, you can have both a stationary living room and a stationary home far quicker than you can by counting pennies in your tenement.
You are still mistaking the liberty of having the ability to do anything you want for the supposedly fearful theoretical momentary lack of specific possessions.
If you are trying to share a personal story or have contextual questions about my story, please ask them, because getting defensive about your own assumptions related to straw men scenarios you are propping up is bewilderingly off-topic.
Uh, what? I think you’re the one who is getting defensive here.
You are continually making incorrect assumptions and drawing false conclusions about someone you don’t know and have not tried to learn about.
Again, if you feel the need to share or ask questions, by all means go ahead, but try to divorce your own assumptions and preoccupations from my experiences.
Oh! Now I think I see what’s happening here…
I’m not trying to make any assumptions or conclusions. Yes, I am just sharing a personal anecdote with you. We’re having a conversation, not a debate. Sorry if you took that the wrong way. I’m not trying to convince you that you are wrong about anything, because quite frankly, I don’t think I’d be able to do that nor do I have the desire, especially since I don’t know anything about you that you haven’t already shared.
On that note, I think I’ll excuse myself from the thread. Have a good’un.
“I’m not trying to make any assumptions or conclusions.”
You are repeatedly drawing incorrect conclusions based on false assumptions:
“…I don’t think it was so much her desire to confirm to some capitalist expectation of paying an enormous sum just to live in one place on the grid (because honestly nobody wants that)”
which is an incorrect conclusion based on a false assumption.
You are clearly trying to have a debate from false premises:
Your vague platitudes of
“…but it’s not for everyone…” and “Not everyone can fit their entire lives into a tiny home or an RV…”
falsely implies that someone argued RVs are for everyone, which didn’t happen and is clearly not the point of my comment.
Then you pretend your attack against me is actually an attack against you with classic gaslighting:
“We’re having a conversation, not a debate. Sorry if you took that the wrong way”
You argue that some people just need "stability and space to spread out, which are often in short supply ", defining spreading out as a living room and a coffee table, not acres of land, ignoring that 1. material possession(acres, houses, coffee tables) are simple to acquire given immediate financial independence and 2. You are still mistaking the liberty of having the ability to do anything you want for the supposedly fearful theoretical momentary lack of specific possessions.
i cannot recommend it enough. prices are very clearly delineated by suburbia and state, so you can buy a cheap one outside of the city or in an adjoining state for thousands less with lower mileage.
all the YouTube channels have every tip and practical advice you need before starting a journey, and they’re fun and educational to watch, you can really get a sense of the lifestyle from a few videos, although everybody kind of does it in their own way.
I lived in an RV with solar panels, electrical outlets, hot shower, full kitchen, separate dining room, living room, kitchen area, bathroom and bedroom, and it was the best thing ever, going from national park to landmark every few weeks or couple months and my girlfriend at the time(so long!) eventually broke down and told me she didn’t like it because she wanted to live in a “normal” house and pay rent “like everyone else” as if conforming to a popular, desperate living situation was a good reason to give up basically free utilities, saving about 90% of your income and the freedom to live anywhere as long or as short as we liked.
enjoyable, easy way to fight the power.
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.
great idea… too bad RV’s are not designed for long term full-time usage, and the repairs become substantial, and parts can take a month+ to come in. in the meantime you need to find a place to stay where you end up.
I think repairs seem daunting until you actually start making repairs and realize how simple they are.
i had an old winny and the repairs are basically unscrew this piece, screw in new piece.
everyone else with an RV seemed to be able to do the same part swaps just as easy.
If you want someone else to do it, that’s fine, but unless you’re doing a tire rotation or replacing an engine, common repairs don’t present any real hurdle if you have a screwdriver and a wrench.
youtube and forums had step by step instructions for anything I ever had to fix (fridge, 2 fuel pumps, cleaning carb once…that might be it).
under a hundred bucks in repairs over a couple years vs. no rent and saving almost all of whatever income you have adds up to savings pretty quick.
everyone in the RV communities is helpful too and are hapoy to troubleshoot with you and tell you exactly how to do anything with whatever model you have.
or just shoot rhe shit and recommend the next cool spot, haha
I admire anyone who can commit to that lifestyle, but it’s not for everyone. Some people are born with wanderlust and others just want to put roots down somewhere they can call their own.
I don’t think it was so much her desire to confirm to some capitalist expectation of paying an enormous sum just to live in one place on the grid (because honestly nobody wants that), but a desire for stability and space to spread out, which are often in short supply when you live the camper/van/bus lifestyle.
sure, nothing is for everyone.
in her specific case, I think the capitalist brainwashing had taken hold pretty strongly.
she literally said " I want to work in an office. I like offices."
as for wanderlust, a lot of these rv people just live in one perfect place the entire time they have the RV.
I understand why from the outside it would seem like stability is “in short supply” in an RV, but in practice, having the financial Independence and ability to move to and live wherever you want as long as you want is the epitome of home-owning stability.
as for space to spread out? with the savings, you can buy an acre a month of your own land and plop your RV on it or build your own cabin if you want to.
living in an RV gives you way more options than traditional rental scenarios.
What’s wrong with that? I want to work in an office too. I like offices. When I’m in one, I’m in the headspace of “this is work and I am here to focus and do my job”. I actually hated working from home during the pandemic and my mental health suffered greatly because I had so much difficulty “switching off” at the end of each day without the clear separation of environment. I strongly disagree with the notion that someone who desires to work in an office setting is somehow corpo-pilled and a slave to capitalism. I’d really rather be doing something else than sitting in an office for 8 hours a day, but if I have to be working to survive I’m gonna want to keep my work at work and my home at home.
As for the “spread out” point, maybe I didn’t articulate that well, but I wasn’t talking about owning land. Not everyone can fit their entire lives into a tiny home or an RV. I think I could do it, but I’d have to part with a lot of my possessions in order to make it all fit inside comfortably and it’d be difficult to manage. For others, maybe it’d be impossible? Sometimes it’s just little stuff, like having a living room with a coffee table and a furniture set that gives people the comfort of being in a home, even if it isn’t strictly necessary for survival.
“What’s wrong with that? I want to work in an office too. I like offices.”
If you are trying to share a personal story or have contextual questions about my story, please ask them, because getting defensive about your own assumptions related to straw men scenarios you are propping up is bewilderingly off-topic.
“I’d really rather be doing something else than sitting in an office for 8 hours a day, but if I have to be working to survive…”
She was not under either compulsion.
she did not need the money and her job made her unhappy, but believed that the “right thing” was to be told what to do by a “boss” and to bring more profit into the company for the sake of the company and the approval of her corporate “superiors”.
You are continually making incorrect assumptions and drawing false conclusions about someone you don’t know and have not tried to learn about.
Again, if you feel the need to share or ask questions, by all means go ahead, but try to divorce your own assumptions and preoccupations from my experiences.
“Sometimes it’s just little stuff, like having a living room with a coffee table and a furniture set that gives people the comfort of being in a home, even if it isn’t strictly necessary for survival.”
Your stated desire is still to own certain material possessions such as a living room and a coffee table.
We don’t have to linger on the countless RVs with spacious living areas, but as stated in the OP and other comments, if you have the specific desire for a stationary living room but lack the resources to acquire a stationary living room or stationary house conveniently possessing a stationary living room, by living in an RV for a brief amount of time, you can have both a stationary living room and a stationary home far quicker than you can by counting pennies in your tenement.
You are still mistaking the liberty of having the ability to do anything you want for the supposedly fearful theoretical momentary lack of specific possessions.
Uh, what? I think you’re the one who is getting defensive here.
Oh! Now I think I see what’s happening here…
I’m not trying to make any assumptions or conclusions. Yes, I am just sharing a personal anecdote with you. We’re having a conversation, not a debate. Sorry if you took that the wrong way. I’m not trying to convince you that you are wrong about anything, because quite frankly, I don’t think I’d be able to do that nor do I have the desire, especially since I don’t know anything about you that you haven’t already shared.
On that note, I think I’ll excuse myself from the thread. Have a good’un.
“Oh! Now I think I see what’s happening here…”
What do you think is happening?
“I’m not trying to make any assumptions or conclusions.”
You are repeatedly drawing incorrect conclusions based on false assumptions:
“…I don’t think it was so much her desire to confirm to some capitalist expectation of paying an enormous sum just to live in one place on the grid (because honestly nobody wants that)”
which is an incorrect conclusion based on a false assumption.
You are clearly trying to have a debate from false premises:
Your vague platitudes of
“…but it’s not for everyone…” and “Not everyone can fit their entire lives into a tiny home or an RV…”
falsely implies that someone argued RVs are for everyone, which didn’t happen and is clearly not the point of my comment.
Then you pretend your attack against me is actually an attack against you with classic gaslighting:
“We’re having a conversation, not a debate. Sorry if you took that the wrong way”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mental-health-revolution/202203/i-m-sorry-you-feel-way-and-other-gaslighting-tactics#:~:text=Gaslighting subject matter experts caution against addressing the,engagement and incites further gaslighting from the abuser.
You argue that some people just need "stability and space to spread out, which are often in short supply ", defining spreading out as a living room and a coffee table, not acres of land, ignoring that 1. material possession(acres, houses, coffee tables) are simple to acquire given immediate financial independence and 2. You are still mistaking the liberty of having the ability to do anything you want for the supposedly fearful theoretical momentary lack of specific possessions.
Mmmm now I want to travel the country in an RV
i cannot recommend it enough. prices are very clearly delineated by suburbia and state, so you can buy a cheap one outside of the city or in an adjoining state for thousands less with lower mileage.
all the YouTube channels have every tip and practical advice you need before starting a journey, and they’re fun and educational to watch, you can really get a sense of the lifestyle from a few videos, although everybody kind of does it in their own way.
Cool story bro.
thanks, it was a cool time.