A friend posted her family's year-end budget for nomadic housing (aka campgrounds, boondocking, anywhere we can park our homes and sleep) yesterday, and we chatted briefly about nomadic budgets. I was fairly certain I knew what we spent, though after looking back at receipts, I realized I left off part of our time in Austin ($$) and had only counted it for one month (we were there in the last days of October and the first days of November). It gets confusing sometimes when you lay your head down in SO many different places, and numbers are not my thing, try as I might.
I was inspired to create this post after creating a chart of our locations, nights spent, and costs (it’s slightly embarrassing how long it took me to make the chart I did) but I had a lot of fun doing it and it was sentimental and lovely. After all, the last eight months were spent traveling around to locations for my book and many other beautiful places in between for our family, and this year was the year finally got to be on the road the way we’ve wanted to be again after years of waiting and working and keeping the faith when life kept beating us down. It was a momentous time in our lives for so many reasons and having a log of all of the places we did our living this past year was very special.
I am sharing my numbers here because I felt that new nomads or hopeful nomads could benefit from knowing that it is very possible to spend little on camping, even if you’re moving around a lot, which we did this past year. I’ll outline all of that below.
**A note before I dive in: Being nomadic does not look the same for everyone. Everyone’s pace is different: this is often due to jobs, money, family/kids, medical issues, etc. Some examples of paces from a few nomads we know below (including ourselves):
In the past, we have gone at a much more rapid pace (2015), traveled part-time (2016), had a mix of rapid travel and slow months at work (2017), slow months with intermittent travel (2018) and then slow months to start, but then very rapid travel (2019), and to start 2020, we have moved a lot right away and then not so much as we go into the second month of the year.
We have friends who work as travel nurses and are currently in Alaska for one year. Often their assignments are 13 weeks, but they extend their contracts (adding another 13 weeks). They live in a trailer and don’t have a fixed address, just as we don’t.
Other friends we know pack up and move every 3-4 days, but have been living in one place for many months now because their work-life is demanding. We also know a couple who moves every 2-3 weeks, which they find gives them the time and space to really explore on the weekends after maintaining a full work schedule all week.
Being nomadic, to us, is being able to go where the wind takes us. We don’t have a fixed address and our home is on wheels. Except for a brief hiatus, we have been living this way since 2015. Seeing how differently even these four families travel, it’s good to note that budgets are not the same for everyone on the road and all of us full-time travelers have preferences on where we like or need to stay. This is just an example of our budget to help you gauge what your expenses could be if you need to keep them low:
Here is a breakdown of how many locations we stayed this past year:
56 locations in total:
18 boondocking (dry camp/landscape) spots.
13 driveways.
11 parking lots.
10 campgrounds.
3 RV parks.
1 NO Airstream (vacation at our family cottage)
In comparison to our friends above, moving every 4 days would give you about 91 locations per year and moving every 2 weeks would give you about 26 locations per year, so we are somewhere in the middle of those two. We’re moving around a fair amount, though right now we have been laying low and getting some work done, which has been so nice and needed after such a busy and full year.
SO! Our total spent on paid sites in 2019?
$1950.00 (rounded up).
That’s it! 56 locations in one year. On average, we moved once every 6.5 days, though of course, we were often in one place for longer periods and others for minimal time frames. Even with all of that moving around, we still spent less than two grand on our “rent” for the entire year. It makes you want to never leave this lifestyle when you see that number! That’s one month of a mortgage payment for many people. Want to know how we did it? See below.
**Now, another note! It’s important to remember that while this certainly makes this lifestyle seem very accessible (and it IS, and let’s also acknowledge the privilege we have to choose this lifestyle), other monthly costs must be taken into consideration, like gas (more locations, more gas money), and when boondocking, sometimes paying for water or generator gas or the gas to drive into town for supplies and perishables. You still have to make repairs on your home and/or vehicle (home to many), and things break a lot when you’re moving often. Ask us. We know firsthand. It was a tough year for broken shit on our Airstream with how many miles we clocked. Yet right here, we are talking specifically about direct costs related to where we can park our home and can hit the pillow each night.
Here is a breakdown of the ways we parked this year, and why these are beneficial, as well as what it takes to make them work (in brief terms, these all deserve their own posts with more detail later on):
BOONDOCKING
The key to spending less on places to park your home and live your life is by getting a little uncomfortable at times. Now, when I say uncomfortable, that’s subjective. We’ve been on the road so many years at this point that there’s not a whole lot that bothers us anymore. No matter where we are, there are tasks to do and things to fix and places to go and work to be done and so why not do all of that in a beautiful location, for free? Yes, you may not shower for a week or two to conserve your water and you wash your dishes with baby wipes, but this is the stuff it takes (along with monitoring your battery life/solar power, your tanks, and going without AC on hot ass days) to get those free sites with stunning vistas, privacy (sometimes), and quiet. For us, it’s 100% WORTH EVERY SINGLE EXTRA TASK. You can see from the chart above that this is our top preference, and if you follow along on Instagram (or here), you’ll note that’s where you see us the most often. We love to be out in nature, to wake early for sunrises and to watch sunsets, to spend our days living outside. That’s one of the biggest reasons we decided to travel in the first place!
*We use Campendium and FreeCampsites.net to find our boondocking sites.
TRUCK STOPS & PARKING LOTS
While you’re traveling and need to get somewhere fast, after a long haul day, why not cruise right up the highway off-ramp and into a truck stop lot and fall asleep to the hum of a hundred truck generators? No, seriously. It puts me to sleep SO FAST and I LOVE it. We often stop at truck stops to make meals too. The only time we don’t eat in our kitchen on travel days are obligatory “we’re back in California” stops at In n Out, which we limit to once a year because we just can’t stay away from that state! We love California so darn much. We are also big fans of Walmart, Cabelas, Cracker Barrel, and rest stops, when applicable. We use the AllStays app to locate lots and stops that allow overnight parking. It’s $9.99 to purchase, but when you think about all the free stays we’ve had as a result over the last five years of travel, it’s worth every penny.
DRIVEWAYS
Driveways are also a great option if you have friends or family that offer you a spot (especially for exploring in big cities where RV parks are few and far between, or beach towns with jacked up camp prices)! We tend to abide by the old “fish and family stink after three days” rule though. Except for a few very specific people in our lives, without fail, no matter what anyone says (such as “stay as long as you like!”, “make yourself at home!”, “mi casa es su casa”, “the neighbors won’t care!”), after three days, your big hulk of trailer doesn’t look so cute in the driveway anymore, and they just want to get to their trash bins in with ease. We don’t blame anyone. We all want to be generous and warm and open, but sometimes we overestimate how much we want to give. I’m guilty of this too. We like to preserve our relationships with people and we find that in following our three-day rule, we get quality time with our people and no one gets annoyed with one another.
STATE & NATIONAL PARK CAMPGROUNDS
We do like state and national park campgrounds. State parks sometimes have hookups for a reasonable rate, sometimes they have no hookups for a ridiculous rate. It depends on where you are! National Parks are usually around $25-$35 per night and we haven’t seen a hookup yet, but we love being IN the park. It makes it so much easier for our kid to do her Junior Ranger program activities and for us to get in some good hiking. As invigorating as all that fresh air is, a lot of NP’s are BUSY and crowded, and it’s so nice to be able to swing back to the campground for lunch in our home instead of braving a busy dining hall, and it’s great to drive only few minutes back home after a long day exploring in the park. Many people we know boondock outside of the park for free and drive-in during the day and we have done this, but it’s not our preference.
*For booking, check Recreation.gov or Reserve America.
RV PARKS
RV Parks. Okay, here’s the thing. Most nomads hate RV parks, especially KOAs. It’s like this badge of honor to hate how close you are to your neighbors. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t love my short and squat little Airstream being flanked by two diesel pushers, rendering our windows useless, buuuuuut...sometimes it’s necessary, or even just plain nice, to crash at an RV park for a while. We’ve done it to take extra long showers, when there’s nothing else around and we’re zonked, to have a place to stay with hookups while one of us works a job close by, to get laundry done, to have extra heat and/or AC, and once in 2017...we stayed at an RV park during a heatwave for a week just to use the pool every day. It’s okay to stay in them! Don’t worry about judgment from other travelers, just do you.
We use the Campendium app to find RV Parks.
VACATION
Last but not least, being nomadic is NOT A VACATION. When nomads take vacations, it usually involves getting out of our tiny wheeled homes and staying somewhere else, preferably with a bathtub. Mostly, the best part about a vacation outside of the Airstream for us is that we don’t have to work to keep ourselves rolling down the road for a bit. We don’t have to find places to sleep, find water and power, or fix things, et cetera, in addition to our full-time careers and parenting.
It may look glossy and perfect on our Instagram accounts and there are plenty of people who perpetuate the myth in order to curate a perfect feed and remain impossibly positive, but I am just not one of those people. I think it does a disservice to people who want this lifestyle. You deserve to know the truth and be able to plan accordingly. Living like this takes WORK, and we’ve got to take vacations from it, just as anyone takes a vacation from their real-life and slips away for a while into a place where they can relax and rest. My wife and I have done some really intense things and gone through a lot to have this life. It wasn’t as easy as “sell things, buy new camper off the lot, tell my boss I’m working from the road now”, so when we take vacations, we really take them!
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In conclusion, I sometimes wonder how different our journey would have been had we'd had good guidance when we were inquisitive hopeful nomads. I think it would have been better in some ways for sure, but we were flying blind. It’s a lot different for those getting on the road today or even in the last couple of years. There definitely weren’t many people traveling full-time when we started, at least compared to today, and there certainly wasn’t another two-mom family. We had no real family to compare it to, though now there are other families like ours who are on the road! It’s important to pass along the knowledge we’ve gained throughout the last six years of this journey (from the concept of travel to traveling to where we are now, it’s been six years!) and I plan to do this more here on the blog. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, and so I am so glad that inspiration struck last night to write this post! My hope is that others can glean from our years of experience.
Let us know if there are any topics you’d like to see either via email, on IG, or right here in the comments!