Thinking About Camper Life? Here are 5 Tips to Consider First

Our Camper Set Up in Colorado Springs

Just because living in a camper has become the newest internet craze doesn’t mean it’s for everybody. 

It can be expensive, challenging, mentally draining, and downright brutal sometimes. Ask anybody who’s done it for their honest opinion.

If any full-time RV lifer tells you that it’s all fun and games, they aren’t telling you the truth. 

Now, that doesn’t mean that the best rewards don’t come after the hardest challenges. We’ve had the opportunity to meet some phenomenal human beings, live in some breathtaking places, and experience things we never would have experienced had we still lived in our home in Missouri.

But if you’re seriously considering this lifestyle (or even just dreaming about it for now), it’s time to listen to some tips so you can be better prepared than we were.  

HAVE A PLAN

Blown Out Camper Tire

Something potential RVers need to keep in mind is that everything in your life changes. Your home, your surroundings, your job, your future, your family. 

Think about your last transition. Maybe you got married, had a baby, moved houses, or changed jobs. If I had to guess, none of those things went perfectly , and I’m sure you have at least one horror story or two like we did.

Now think about getting married, having a baby, moving houses, and changing your job all at the same time. Pretty crazy, right? 

While you may not literally experience every single one of those specific things simultaneously, it’s important to recognize that you will be transitioning every part of your life, and if you’re truly going to commit to something so large, you must do your research and have a plan. 

A lot of the camper lifestyle comes with “freedom.” People seek that freedom to move because their tired of being tied down to societal norms, and that’s where a lot of our passion came from, too. But there’s a difference between being free and being reckless. 

You don’t have to know where you’re going or how long you’re going to stay. But you do need to think about some of the following:

Working on our Truck in Missouri

If you find yourself in a bad situation, how are you going to get yourself out?

If your truck or camper experiences detrimental damage, are you prepared to fix it? 

Are you trying to change locations every few weeks, or are you looking for more seasonal/long-term stays?

What are you going to do to keep a consistent income?

If your income relies on internet stability, how are you going to constantly ensure that you have that? 

Are you prepared to take care of any humans or animals that are traveling with you in a multitude of different environments?

You don’t need a specific agenda, but you do need a specific plan. Set yourself up for success, not failure. 

MAKE SURE YOU INSPECT YOUR TRUCK AND CAMPER THOROUGHLY BEFORE BUYING THEM

Working on our Truck

Speaking of setting yourself up for success, make sure you inspect your potential truck and camper very, very thoroughly before committing. In fact, if you think you’ve inspected it enough, inspect it one more time. 

This was our biggest mistake that we are still paying for (literally) more than a year later. Our camper was in great condition and the truck… Not so much.

When you live in a camper, having vehicle problems can mean putting your home at risk. We’ve been stuck on the side of a highway twice due to lagging truck issues. The first time, we saw our home on the side of a busy interstate for hours as we waited for a tow truck, praying that no one rear-ended it with all of our personal belongings. And the second time, we slept on a (very wide) shoulder of a highway for several days while we figured out what to do next. 

When things like this happen and you end up in unexpected locations, you potentially risk your home, your safety, and you risk running out of necessities such as water, electricity, and propane. Needless to say, this kind of situation can become dangerous in a hurry.

If you are in a financial position where you must pick between investing more of your money in a truck or a camper, remember that you can’t move your house without a successful truck. But a successful truck can pull a not-as-nice home perfectly fine.

Now, you definitely can’t cheap out on either of them, or you’ll suffer some unimaginable losses. But learn from us and make sure both of your necessities are working flawlessly before hitting the road. 

RECOGNIZE THAT PURGING YOUR ITEMS WILL TAKE MUCH LONGER THAN ANTICIPATED

Our Home Before Moving In

Before living in a camper, we lived in a 2,200-square-foot home that had 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a two-car garage, and a large basement. The more we started purging our items, the more we realized that we weren’t even close to finishing what we had started. 

It felt like every time we’d open up a cabinet or closet door, we found a whole stockpile of items we didn’t even remember purchasing, and all of a sudden, it dawned on me just how much we fell victim to American consumerism. 

The amount of clothes? Outrageous. The number of coffee mugs? Unnecessary. The amount of craft supplies? Don’t even get me started. 

If there was room for storage, we had it full. 

We ended up splitting up our items between the following piles:

• Sell

• Donate

• Trash

• Keep

• Send to my parents, for the sentimental items

Easton's Nursery in our Home

We sold items we forgot we ever had. 

We donated more than seven oversized trash bags full of clothes and shoes to one of our local charities. 

We had a commercial-sized dumpster sent to our house, and we filled that thing up to the very top, and then some. 

Anything we kept had an exact home inside our camper.

And for the small amount of wedding or newborn stuff we weren’t ready to part ways with, they’re sitting nicely in my parents' basement until we decide what to do next with them. 

And just like that, our 2,200 square foot house started looking less and less like our home, and more and more like the structure we bought. I thought I would go through some emotions, emptying out the home we brought our baby boy home to. But as the house became bare, I knew that what made it a home was us. The two boys I love and the memories we made together. 

Leaving the structure behind didn’t bother me one bit. 

Be prepared for a very, very long process. Nothing about emptying out a house that you’ve had for years will go by “quickly.”

CONSIDER YOUR WORKING OPTIONS DURING CAMPER LIFE

Working from a Coffee Shop

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve talked a lot about money in this blog post. That’s because money is extremely important in RV life with all of the constant unknowns. 

While a lot of people choose camper life to lower their cost of living, we are just now seeing the financial benefits around 13 months later because of how large or detrimental the upfront costs can be. 

You have three primary options when it comes to working on the road:

• Working remotely and traveling whenever you want, wherever you want

• Accepting seasonal jobs and staying in one place for a few months at a time OR

• Settling down in one place and working a “regular” job

Let’s break down the pros and cons of each, shall we? 

Working remotely has its perks. I’ve done it. It feels amazing to log into a computer wherever you want and get paid for the work you’re doing and the time you spend doing it. But unless you’ve found a phenomenal gig, working remotely can lead to a poor work-life balance. 

The work/home line tends to get blurred, which can lead to you taking calls during dinner or sacrificing your weekends to work, and it’s hard for things to feel truly balanced. It also may become difficult to work in a place (home) that is supposed to feel relaxing, and unless you have a tremendous amount of motivation and self-discipline, this can set you up for failure. 

Easton is participating in a foam party at work

Working seasonal jobs has been great! We did this for our first year, split between two different assignments, and had two drastically different experiences with them. Our first was rough. Rough on our minds, rough on our bodies, rough on our bank accounts. We were off-grid, which wasn't a good fit for being brand new at living in a camper. But we learned a lot and had a much better second assignment come through for us that was a much healthier fit. 

We had the opportunity to work with (and therefore live next to) some incredible human beings that we still keep in contact with to this day. And seeing how campgrounds operate from behind the scenes has been a really cool experience for us. 

It felt like we had the opportunity to “test drive” a city to see if we’d actually want to settle down there or not, without any massive ties or reasons to be forced to stay. 

Something we didn’t like about seasonal jobs is that it felt like as soon as you arrived at your assignment, you were already looking for next season’s job. When jobs didn’t fall in your lap, it felt like you were a ticking time bomb waiting to see if you were about to fail or not. 

And after you spend months all day and all night with these phenomenal people you met, one day, you wake up and watch everyone load up their rigs and drive in different directions from one another, onto their next adventure. 

Probably the biggest problem we had with seasonal work was a lack of routine. My husband and I were both working full-time and had our three-year-old. Some days, we’d work the same hours as each other, and our son would come with us all day. Other times, one of us would open and one of us would close, so our son only came for a few hours. Our days off during the week always changed. And it was difficult to be able to establish a routine. 

I never knew that I could miss routine, but it quickly became something I craved.

I wanted to prepare dinners so they weren’t always so sporadic. I wanted to find activities to be involved with in the community. I wanted to get into a workout routine. And it felt like those things were so much harder because I couldn’t be consistent with anything. 

So we’ve recently shifted to option number three… Settling down and getting “regular” jobs again. Now you might ask, what’s the purpose of camper life if you’re just holding still?” 

One of our main goals with camper life was that we wanted to get out of our hometown, but we didn’t know where we wanted to go.

Easton playing at our campground in Estes Park, Colorado

Test driving different places has allowed us to find a city we truly love and that we don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.

Out of all three options, this has been the best balance for us.

We work part-time at the campground we live at to avoid rent, water, electric, trash, and sewer bills. But besides that, my husband works a full-time job with benefits, I work part-time with social media clients, and I get to spend the rest of the time raising my son without having to bring him to work every day with me.

We still live with less. We still have a low cost of living. And we get to live in some amazing places we would never be able to live in otherwise, on one primary income.

It’s important to consider all of your working options, maybe try out a few, and decide which avenue makes the most sense for your particular goals. 

BE FLEXIBLE

Finding the Good in the Chaos

Camper life comes with an insane amount of twists and turns. As soon as you think you have it all figured out, life throws you a curveball that makes you have to rethink your actions and decisions, and sometimes, change directions altogether.

Before we experienced our first truck hurdle, we had a 3-wee,k East Coast road trip scheduled. I spent weeks handpicking locations, activities, and places to stay. I spent money and had a whole spreadsheet ready to go and we were supposed to leave only a couple of weeks after selling our home. 

When we started having truck issues, we initially thought we were going to be delayed by a day or two. So every little problem we had, I just rearranged the trip. I spent hours constantly changing the route and the accommodations when needed because I couldn’t fathom the thought of just canceling everything.  My husband and son hadn’t been to that part of the country yet, and I wanted so badly to get them there. 

But surely enough, cancellation is exactly what had to happen. 

My brain was stuck in tunnel-vision mode , and what was supposed to be an exciting new beginning turned into one of the most stressful times of our lives.

I was absolutely devastated.

Looking back, I now know that we’ve had a ton of incredible memories on the road since then. While I would have loved to go on this road trip with my family, making the camper life transition helps keep this an option in the future, and I know that we will still get there one day.

CONCLUSION

If you’re willing to be along for this crazy roller coaster, follow these tips, and stay flexible, camper life can be a wonderful fit for you. It’s been a wild journey - and one we wouldn’t trade for the world.