How Full-Time Camper Life Transformed Our Lives in Just Four Months
- Jennifer Evans
- Mar 3
- 11 min read
When we committed to full-time camper life, the goal was to obviously improve our quality of life. You don’t sell your house and risk everything for just “any” opportunity. But we had faith that if we made the move wisely, we could reap some lifelong positive benefits, and after only four months of camper life, we could already say that the risk was well worth it.
This life transition was harder than any other transition we’ve been through and throughout the first few weeks, we had our doubts. But after settling into a “groove,” learning more about how our camper works, and finding our new “normal,” this transition has ultimately paid off and we are confident that things will only get better from here as we continue our educational journey.
If you’re considering camper-life or are in the brunt of the “transitional” phase and losing faith, here are ten benefits that we’ve seen over the last four months:
WE'VE LOWERED OUR EXPENSES
Prior to living in a camper, we lived in a 2,200 square foot house in a neighborhood with an HOA and the most expensive water in the state of Missouri. This neighborhood was in the “county” but only 5-10 minutes away from all of the city’s amenities which is what drew us to living there in the first place.
At the time, my husband had a job that paid well but was working 50+ hours per week that were sporadic, inconsistent, and exhausting. On top of that, I was working from home while trying to raise a growing baby and life didn’t feel balanced once so ever.
We were both working so incredibly hard for a home we never got to spend time in together and it felt completely pointless.
When we added up our mortgage, our electric bill, our water bill, and our HOA fees (before factoring in any of our other bills), our monthly grand total was $1,647.
Now that we live in a camper, we take seasonal campground jobs that include our parking fees and our utilities costing us zero dollars of “living” expenses.
Now granted, while many bills have gone away, we’ve had to add a few too. We are currently paying $299 per month for our camper and $200+ for health insurance that’s no longer included in our employment agreements. We’ve had car insurance go up (since it covers our camper as well), and diesel costs can get high when we’re moving our camper from location to location.
But after you factor in all of the bills from pre-camper life and compare them to all of the bills from post-camper life, we went from paying $2,424 per month to now paying $1,397 per month which is saving more than one thousand dollars per month.
Now granted, we don’t make as much as we did back then either. However, bills were a whopping 56% of our take home pay when we lived in a house, and now bills are only 37% of our take home pay now.
It’s truly been a win-win!
WE KNOW OUR NEIGHBORS
Since we take seasonal campground positions, our neighbors are also our co-workers. Now, most people would probably say “I’d NEVER live in a community surrounded by my co-workers” but if you’ve ever been camping before, you know that camping draws some of the most laid-back and good-hearted human beings you’ll ever meet.
We’ve had the opportunity to work and live with people from all over the country, and everyone has their own unique story of how we ended up working at the same campground at the same time.
When we lived in our house, we only knew two of our neighbors and everyone else kept to themselves.
While we have the opportunity to keep to ourselves when we want to, we also have more opportunities to socialize. Since most camper families tend to spend more time outside, and everyone is parked relatively close together, everyone’s outside is all right next to each other.
The adults can have bonfires, the kids can play, and it feels like way more of a community than our neighborhood with a complaining HOA ever was.
We cook meals together, we help each other out, and we have learned such valuable lessons from one another!
WE'VE MET SOME AMAZING PEOPLE
Since you live and work with the same people, you definitely get to know them on a pretty personal level.
You hear about people’s past, you learn people’s morals, and you learn to rely on each other for various things.
It’s always bittersweet to think about leaving a campground (even though most of the positions are seasonal) because everyone has their own agenda, their own future goals, and while your paths cross temporarily, those paths do come to an end.
While you have typical factors that make a job good or bad like management, pay, benefits, etc., nothing makes or breaks a job more than the people you work with, and when you get to know them so deeply, it makes you feel naturally more passionate about what you’re doing which can make the end of an era feel more emotional.
One of the biggest fears people had when we told them we were moving into a camper was how our two-year-old would be able to socialize with other people, and he is socializing with others now, way more than he socialized in our house, and I love watching him thrive in this environment.
WE'VE GROWN SINCE LEAVING OUR "COMFORT ZONE"
Whenever you make any major changes in your life, you’re bound to grow. Where we come from in Missouri, there are a lot of people who never leave their hometown. Not to travel, not to move, nothing.
They hang out with the same five people and go to the same restaurants, and while that is self-satisfying for some people, we never felt like that.
When we lived in our house, on our days off, we would try to drive to somewhere new or try a new activity or bring our son to a new park and eventually, we burnt out our options and that’s when boredom really started to set in.
We have relationships back home that we care deeply about, but the relationships that have meant the most to us are still going strong even though we’ve moved across the country.
Our strongest relationships understand what our values are as a family and knew that leaving our small town was what was best for us. They support us, they believe in us, and they love hearing about what we’re doing.
Whether you’re moving houses or changing jobs or moving cities or getting married or having babies, these milestones will change who you are as a person.
The part about our journey is that we made several of these changes all at the same time. We sold our house, moved into our camper, quit a job, moved our camper more than 1,300 miles away, and started new jobs all within 30-60 days of each other, which is part of why the transition phase was so challenging.
But looking back at it, we’ve learned a lot and we feel like new and improved human beings.
WE SPEND MORE TIME OUTSIDE
While we don’t feel “claustrophobic” in our camper (except for maybe in our shower…), it’s natural to wake up in the morning and want to feel the sunshine on your face.
In a house, we found ourselves spending all day inside on some days, which made it hard to be motivated to get things done.
We had a whole toy room for our son (on top of his bedroom) and we had everything we needed (plus some) in our house, so we never had a reason to leave some days.
There are several factors that change that for us in a camper.
One, our fridge and freezer are small. And while that may seem inconvenient sometimes, it naturally pushes us out of our camper and whenever we go grocery shopping, we almost always play at the playground too and we make sure to soak up some sun while we’re already leaving the camper.
We also only have so much room for toys inside, which has encouraged us to purchase some more outdoor toys. Sometimes, our son likes playing with his inside toys. And other times, he’ll come up to me and ask me if he can go play outside.
The property we live on is also naturally beautiful so when we get the chance, we love going on walks, playing with rocks, and just absorbing the world around us.
WE'VE AVOIDED SEASONAL DEPRESSION
Traveling with the weather has been truly life-changing. In Missouri, the winters are cold, snowy, icy, and dark.
St. Louis averages 201 sunny days per year, where Holbrook, Arizona averages more than three hundred.
This makes us naturally want to move our body more, which naturally makes us want to eat better, which naturally makes us feel better.
My skin has cleared up, I’ve lost weight, my energy levels have increased and it hasn’t necessarily felt like I’ve been “trying hard” to achieve those things.
I’ve been able to naturally form better habits and I highly contribute that to seeing more sunshine.
In Missouri, I remember feeling ill-motivated as soon as I woke up because of how dark or cold it was outside, and some days, it felt like that lack of motivation would drag on. It was hard to “snap out of it” and sometimes those ill-motivated days would turn into ill-motivated weeks and before I knew it, I would be behind on everything (which didn’t help my motivation either).
It felt like a never-ending cycle and being somewhere warmer and sunnier has helped fight those feelings altogether.
Our mental health is overall better. Plus, we’ll be out of Arizona by the time the brutal heat rolls in.
WE'VE BROKEN FREE FROM "SOCIETAL NORMS"
People can oftentimes feel overconnected to their jobs. In fact, my husband, Tyler, was trying to use his job at a national retailer to move him to a different store so we could relocate like we wanted to.
But they just weren’t budging.
He spent months applying for different positions, interviewing over and over again, and nothing was working out.
Eventually, he came to the conclusion of “why am I letting my job dictate our family goals of relocating?”
However, this realization came with some hardships. People can get tunnel-visioned on things like retirement and their resume, and their years of service, and they forget to live a life they actually enjoy.
There are so many people who dream of their retirement life and then never live that long, and I can’t think of anything worse than spending your entire life working a job you hate, just so you can live a great life if you make it to retirement.
Now, obviously retirement and job stability are important and we don’t completely disregard those. I’ve had the same remote job for the same company for almost two years and don’t plan on leaving any time soon.
But balance is the key.
Now that we’ve broken free from societal norms, we can view life with a whole different lens on, and this new perspective has changed everything for us.
WE'VE TRAVELED TO NEW PLACES
We had a whole bucket list of places we wanted to see in Arizona and its nearby states. Had we stayed in Missouri, we would have had to hop on a plane (and pay a tremendous amount of money for plane tickets) every single time we wanted to see one.
Living here for a total of five months has allowed us to see so much in such a short period of time.
On our days off, we don’t feel bored anymore. We simply have to decide which bucket list item we want to see next.
I’ve also grown up with family members scattered all over the world and we’ve gotten to see my aunt and uncle and three of my cousins while we’ve been out here. My aunt and uncle, I only see once a year or once every two years. I only see my cousins once every 3-4 years. And being able to spend quality time with them while we are living closer to them has been a dream come true.
Life is too short to die with a bucket list and this is allowing us to see more of the states we are living in over a reasonable amount of time (while spending only a reasonable amount of money) and everything feels more within reach.
WE AREN'T SURROUNDED BY CLUTTER
The amount of clutter we had in our house was embarrassing. When we were getting ready to close on our house, we had to stay there until 1 AM the night before because every time we’d open a cabinet or open a closet, we’d find more junk we hadn’t sorted through yet.
When you’re in a house, you can buy whatever you want and if you don’t end up using it, there will be a spot in your house where it becomes out of sight, out of mind and you don’t realize how many times that happens when you’re in a house where you can simply shut doors or cabinets.
In a camper, we have very limited space. Everything we own has a purpose. Everything we own has a home where it belongs. And when we’re out and about, we only buy things we truly need because we knew there’s nowhere else to put it.
Our camper can get messy very quickly, especially with a toddler, and sometimes it can feel like we still own too much. But even when we do a deep clean of our entire camper, everything feels more in control.
There is simply no way to put things out of sight and out of mind in our camper so we become more motivated to clean everything up (so it doesn’t drive us insane).
Not to mention that the control it has put on our spending feels amazing.
Life feels more simple, more organized, and more peaceful.
WE EAT ALMOST ALL OF OUR MEALS TOGETHER
My biggest motivation for moving into a camper was to spend more time together as a family. I’ve spent the last 3.5 years married to the love of my life, yet somehow I always felt like a single mom.
Every time our son would accomplish a milestone or just do something cute, I’d be bummed about my husband being at work and missing it. I know that obviously working is a necessity for our family. But I kept telling myself “oh, my husband will catch the next cute moment” but then the next one would roll around and I’d be alone, and the one after that, and the one after that one too.
After a while, it felt extremely discouraging. When you dream of starting a family with someone you love, you think about all the amazing things you will do together, but you never think about the time you spend apart.
We went from eating maybe one meal per day together (and never the same meal), to sometimes being able to eat all three together.
His shifts used to be either 7 AM - 5 PM, 10 AM - 8 PM, or 1 PM - 11 PM and he’d usually work all three shifts in the same week. It felt like our life revolved around his work schedule and I’d reorganize my entire day just to maximize the amount of time we had together.
Now, my husband starts work at 9 AM, which gives us time to eat breakfast together (compared to his old common 7 AM start time). He’s able to walk back to our camper to join us for lunch. And he’s done by the time the sun goes down (since he does maintenance) and he comes home just in time to join us for dinner.
To me, time is the most important thing and eating three meals per day together has given us a chance to spend more time together as a family and to feel like an actual unit again.
Our son has formed a stronger relationship with his daddy, I’ve formed a stronger relationship with my husband, and life feels balanced again.
CONCLUSION
While we know that everyone’s experience living in a camper varies from one another, we could not be more grateful that we stuck out the hard times to make this work.
Living in a camper has come with some unique benefits we never knew were possible and we hope to continue this lifestyle as we navigate our way through life.
Comments