Anyone living the nomadic lifestyle on here who would be willing to share their general setup, monthly costs, and any tips/tricks/advice?
Get good internet. I found Verizon to be the best for cellular and this was before Starlink Mobile was available. Get a directional cellular antenna and mount (not a repeater/amplifier) and learn how to point the antenna at towers if you plan to do any “boondocking” out in the west of the US. Otherwise, everywhere else these days likely has internet.
Compost Toilet is a win in my book. Very little maintenance and no nasty tanks to deal with. But, it’s not for everyone.
Decide if you need showers in your wheeled home or not. That drives the cost of your rig significantly. Most RVs are absolute trash for quality south of $50k.
It sounds like the pandemic generated such a crush of orders that now even more expensive ones are slapped together at the factory.
Mercedes Streeter at The Autopian (spiritual heir to Jalopnik) has been looking at her parents’ new RV.
https://www.theautopian.com/my-familys-62800-camper-is-junk-...
Pretty sure it was this guy.
Those are some very complicated trailers and he’s charging the same or less than simpler ones.
I nearly felt allergic while reading about the endless quality control issues. Piecework only "works" when people easily can and do verify the product delivered. A combination of customers and shareholders are getting boned by workers, their managers, and the dealerships here. Incentives matter.
This vid is a great illustration of both how easy it is to get into an accident, and how much damage even a glancing blow does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuRtNajq-Yo
Edit: I finally clicked through the autopian link from up thread and it’s reminding me there’s a guy I watch sometimes who does conversion vans. All of his stuff is built around those extruded aluminum rails. He hasn’t figured out how to make use of those last few cubic feet yet but he seems to do a good job and they’re fairly sturdy. Last I watched he was perfecting his showers.
I now wonder what it would look like if he converted buses instead of shop vans. You have a superstructure that might actually survive a hit, they’re already set up for AC units, you “just” need to build repeatable interiors. But you need much more shop space, time, and capital to do something of that sort.
https://www.theautopian.com/this-1948-gm-old-look-transit-bu...
https://www.theautopian.com/how-a-couple-turned-a-gillig-tra...
There, edited it for you for accuracy. :-) Seriously, our Thor retailed for $100K in 2018, and I've been through that entire vehicle while installing solar/inverter/battery. As I've told my spouse, "there isn't a straight screw in that whole interior". I've probably pulled a bathroom garbage container worth of crap out of the walls (leftover trimmings and the like). Yeah, didn't think anyone would look in there, eh? :-)
"South" to mean down or below, and likewise for north, drives me up a wall. If you are standing at the south pole, north is down. There's also no concept of up/down in space, and so northern hemisphere normalcy is false. To Australians, North America is below!
Snide comment aside, it's obviously in reference to standard map orientation. Maps had to be oriented somehow, unless you're advocating for the chaos of arbitrary individual map orientations.
Give it a few months before you start accessorising, we've kept it to a couple of ebikes, camp chairs+table, and a paddleboard. Don't bother with Starlink unless you need to be online 24/7, and if you do get it, consider it only as a supplimentary to a good rugged dual-sim 4G modem.
Back home (NZ) we were in a almost-new Sprinter, which was great on fuel, but less fun once you wanted to go off-road or abuse it in any way. Our 2WD Ford goes places people don't dare bring their shiny new 4x4s.
I wouldn't go over 22' long, especially in Mexico and the fun parts of Canada, otherwise you'll just be touring RV parks with all the other people towing F150s and jetskis and bouncy castles.
I travel for months at a time but have a "real" property to land at, so not completely nomadic. YMMV especially if full-time.
> share their general setup
I own a mid-sized SUV that gets 25-30 MPH. Think RAV4/CRV/Forester/Rogue/etc -- it's all the same just buy whatever you can get a good deal on (definitely RAV4 hybrid if you plan on lots of city driving; otherwise financially it's a wash until you get to $5/gal or so).
- bed platform in the back.
- Passenger seat is converted into a desk.
- onboard storage under the bed, in the back foot wells, and a battery in the spare tire well.
- outboard storage (including spare tire and water) on the roof rack. Solar panels over that stuff. Ran a cable from the panels to the battery.
- I have a little tent setup on the side which is nice when you have a place to land and want to... stand up.
> monthly costs
When on the road, I make due on about $500/mo and live quite luxuriously. I eat out and drink, even. Not counting the cost of the car or health insurance.
That number is going up over time due more to lifestyle creep than inflation. I try to keep my monthly expenses below one twelfth of 4% of 30% of my liquid post-tax assets.
> any tips/tricks/advice?
People spend stupid amounts of money to avoid renting and dependency on others.
Don't buy a bunch of shit. Instead, invest and rent!
Case-in-point: showers. You can blow $50K extra to have a setup that gives you indoor showers. Or, you can buy notes and have 50000*.05/12 = $200/mo = at least a few showers per week AND you get to keep the principal!!! (and that's just the winter months -- for the cost of one hour/month of cold water showering for 9 months you get an extra $1800/yr to reinvest!)
If you are young and single, anything bigger than Transit Connect is unnecessary. Honestly, I've seen people live in priuses for years at time quite comfortably. As that number as gone up, so too have the number of lobsters/cocktails/burgers/dates.
Try not to work from the car. A transit connect or RV beats an SUV you want to work from the car, but I promise you would prefer to work from a coffee shop or by following the weather and working outside as much as possible. You'll end up avoiding work days in the rig even if you have the space, so why blow stupid amounts of money? You live out of a car; I promise you won't want to also work out of a car.
Got any pics of your rig?
I've been slowly building out a 10-foot cargo trailer similar to this: https://www.trailersplus.com/Nevada/Las_Vegas/6-Wide-Cargo-T...
I got laid off at the start of Covid, but I had enough money saved up that I wasn't in a hurry to get a new job. I looked at lots of manufactured trailers and considered vans as well.
Vans are great because you always have everything with you, but that also means you always have everything with you. Trailers are great because you can drop them and just have a normal car, but then you have to find somewhere to drop them. In the end, I went with a trailer because they're a lot cheaper and I didn't want to go cutting holes in van.
I'd initially planned on getting a manufactured trailer, but all the ones I looked at didn't seem worth the money. The real deal breaker for me was I wanted to do a lot of camping near ski areas and cheaper trailers (sub-$50k) all have plumbing outside the insulated area. I didn't really want to spend $30-50k and then not be able to use the plumbing.
Driving back from an RV dealership, I saw someone pulling a U-Haul and that got me wondering. Sure enough, there's tons of content on youtube of people building out cargo trailers. I actually started by renting a U-Haul for a week and camping out of it in the middle of winter. It wasn't great, but it worked.
At this point, I'm pretty happy with the choice I made, but it's been a ton of work and lots of uncertainty. It's a lot less stressful cutting a hole in a $5k trailer vs a $20-70k van, but it's still pretty stressful. I basically knew nothing about building when I started out. You can just start camping in a cargo trailer right away and it's still better than a tent ... or a teardrop trailer imo.
I've come up with lots of tricks along the way and at some point I'll blog about them. I still have a million ideas I want to try building too though.
I have some pics and stories on my photoblog (another thing I'm working on): https://photoblog.mallocs.net/
https://thedogisdriving.com/six-months/
I found Visible to be fast enough at 5mbps for most things. I hooked up a Wifi router to serve as a client for those cases where I wasn't tethering.
I think it is tougher when you try to work a remote job, since you basically do everything in the same small space. Eat cook work sleep read etc all in the same x square feet.
You can get a pretty decent truck/camper combo for under $100k.
For internet, we use a combo of Verizon (via a Wineguard antennae on our roof) and Starlink (the not-mounted, mobile version) and it's worked wonderfully. Verizon works great near cities. Starlink works great in more remote settings as long as there aren't trees, but the extra long starlink cable makes it pretty easy to find spots where I can connect.
We largely moochdock (staying in family/friends driveways), but when we travel we will alternate spending a week or two in remote parks, then parks nearer a city, etc. so that we get a good combo of civilization and nature. Parks near cities normally run us around $40 per night, and more remote places are largely either free or around $20 per night. There are a surprising number of random costs that have popped up over time, and our budget typically is cheaper than when we owned/rented different houses, but not by that much.
My wife and I can comfortably make it about 7 days without any hookups before we need to go to a park. We have solar + a gas generator, so we never have issues with electricity. It's usually either running out of fresh water or filling our black tank that will limit our remote stays.
There are high highs and low lows with RVing. Highs include being able to work comfortably from literal caves and beaches with nobody in sight (Red Rock Park in CA is gorgeous and nobody goes there, as an example). Lows include being stuck in a place we didn't like for two months after we needed unexpected window/body repairs and couldn't drive. Having your house be your mode of transportation can be extremely limiting. We don't tow a car or have the tow capacity to in our current RV, but I wish we did.
My biggest piece of advice is to meet new people and to see old friends/family as much as possible. Hot tubs and hiking are my go tos for meeting new people, and I've made some incredible friends doing each. But it's different than before I was nomadic. I meet people, and two days later we're hiking together, and three weeks later we're hiking in Hawaii together staying in the same AirBnb, and then one of us goes to the midwest and the other to California and we don't see each other for months/years. It's fast paced and fun, but it can also do a number on your mental health if you need consistency in your life. A therapist helps me, as do frequent trips to see family/friends, as does having friends at my place of work that I chat with remotely, but coordinating in-person meeting can be hard when many of my nomad friends could be in any of 48 states most of the time.
I love my RV, and choose to live in it even when I have other options available (like if we're at a cabin, hotel, etc.). If you can make an RV your happy place, it can be a lot of fun touring the world.