Why We Chose the Full-Time Camper Life and How You Can Do it Too

THE GRAND IDEA

We accomplished the American Dream, which is something we thought would make us happy.

My husband, Tyler, had a stable job, we bought a house with more bedrooms than humans living in it, and we started a family. 

I worked from home remotely (and still do) and trying to manage my time with work while simultaneously taking care of a growing boy while my husband was gone became increasingly challenging as he approached his toddler years. 

We maximized his vacation days as much as possible but throughout our day-to-day lives, it felt like he was always gone.

I quickly became tired of feeling like a single mom even though I was happily married. 

Tyler was tired of coming home late, just to find his son asleep for the night.

And Easton openly preferred Mama to help with everything over Dada.

Eventually, we hit a breaking point one night and asked each other:

Why did we buy this house if we never get to enjoy being in it together?

We did a lot of reflecting on what we actually wanted in life and the answer boiled down to… well, each other. 

We did the math and realized we could literally save more than two thousand dollars every single month if we just sold our house, paid off our debt, and lived in a camper that we could pay for with cash.

The more planning we did, the more it sounded too good to be true.

Our cost of living would drop. 

Which means we could work less.

And spend more time together.

It literally felt like a win-win-win. 

However, a lot of things scared us about this idea.

THE RISKS

We still have bills. We still need to eat. Our gas and diesel costs were going to skyrocket. And parking a camper somewhere typically isn’t free.

We didn’t want to just sell our house and kiss all of our money goodbye. We wanted to remain self-sufficient every single month without burning through our newly acquired savings. 

Thankfully, I work part-time remotely for a marketing firm which means we just needed to find another part-time income to be able to make ends meet, and then some.

After doing some research, we discovered a program called Work Kampers. This is an online community that helps match workers with campgrounds. 

Each campground discusses what they need and what they’re looking for, and you typically work in exchange for free camper/RV hook-ups and if you’re lucky, an additional hourly wage. You can also introduce yourselves to the group to see if any campgrounds will reach out to you.

This typically requires you to make a family resume, which is a service I provide here!

We are incredibly thankful to have found an opportunity in Arizona where Tyler will be building tiny homes, RV shelters, and other amenities while I’ll be helping with social media and marketing endeavors and keeping up with my current marketing job as well.

This doesn’t only remove our typical living expenses, but it gives us an additional source of income as well. 

SELLING OUR HOME

Once we knew we were going to sell our home, we started looking around and realized just how much junk we had lying around.

We had accumulated so many random things we forgot we even owned and we had become so accustomed to walking by it every day, we never noticed it anymore.

And to think that we paid money for each and every one of those dust collectors made me sick. 

We started narrowing down our stuff to items that only served a purpose for us and we couldn’t believe how quickly the junk disappeared.

We had to rent a dumpster, we donated more than 6 bags of clothes, and more than 2 cars full of usable items we didn’t need anymore.

It made us realize how much consumerism had taken over our lives without us even realizing it, and how little it was actually paying off.

We thought we’d only have to purge our items once but as soon as we thought we were making progress, we’d find another whole pile of things we didn’t even realize we owned still. 

In fact, the night before our house closed, we were up past midnight getting every tiny little thing out of it - we had no idea how in over our heads we were.

We were thankful to buy our camper before selling our house. This allowed us to park our camper in the driveway and find homes for everything we wanted to keep. 

I, personally, had a really tough time gauging how much stuff we could actually keep until we started finding homes for everything inside the camper and we saw how much storage these drawers and cabinets could really hold.

Besides clothes… I think we did a really good job narrowing down our belongings and we have everything that we truly need. 

CHOOSING A CAMPER

We had a lot to think about when purchasing our camper. We knew we didn’t want a new one - and anyone in any camper Facebook groups would recommend the same.

However, that doesn’t mean you can just pick any ol’ camper you find on the internet. 

We had to think about what pieces of our home we wanted to take with us on the road.

For example, cooking outside is something we used to do often in our house. We are trying to get to 1,000 hours outside in one year and cooking outside was an easy way for us to inch our way towards this goal. 

Because of this, we knew we wanted both an outdoor and an indoor kitchen and were lucky to find a camper that had both.

Another huge factor we had to consider was the fact that we were traveling with two huge dogs. One likes chewing things up and the other is, well, a flight risk. So we knew we needed to have a space where we could secure the dogs when we weren’t watching them.

Finding a camper that had a whole bunkhouse for our son gave us plenty of room to remove one of the bunks and turn it into a spacious dog kennel for the pups.

PIECES OF ADVICE IF YOU WANT TO DO THIS TOO

Let’s just say… We’ve learned a lot throughout this process so far!

Here are a few tips we’d recommend:

DO YOUR RESEARCH

Camper life isn’t for everybody. You’re living in a small and confined space. It feels like you’re always fixing something and always cleaning. And there are a lot of tedious tasks in your day-to-day life. 

If you don’t want to take the time and learn the nit-picky details, it probably isn’t worth pursuing. 

If you’re trying to make this transition for cost-effective reasons, it’s definitely possible.

But you have to acknowledge that there are some larger upfront costs that you have to be prepared for. 

As I previously mentioned, you also have to realize that parking your camper typically isn’t free and you still need to have sources of income or you’ll run out of money fast.

Thankfully, I have a remote job and we were able to find a job for us as a family with Work Kampers. 

Plan, plan, and plan some more

You truly don’t know how much this transition is going to cost until you start factoring in all of the specific details.

You could buy a brand new camper and a brand new truck and spend more than $100,000 right off the bat or you could buy a used camper and a used truck and keep costs down to around $30,000-$40,000 and if you don’t have a family yet and you just need something small, your costs could be even less than that. 

You also have to factor in what area you want to live in or what route you’re going to take once you hit the road.

Finding programs such as Harvest Hosts and Thousand Trails allows you to sleep in different places based on different memberships. 

Rush Acres Farm, Wentzville, MO

Harvest Hosts has been a personal blessing for us - it costs around $150 per year and it has a list of breweries, wineries, family farms, and other privately owned land you can stay on. The first night at each place is free with your membership and some accommodations allow you to pay for extra nights. 

Thousand Trails has more established campgrounds to stay at and the membership costs is based on how many regions of the United States you want access to. We looked into this option first but after researching their locations, we discovered it wasn’t the right fit for us during this part of our journey but we will be looking into it again in the future!

There are only so many bills you can eliminate and some of them are only going to be replaced by different bills. So it’s important to consider you’re entire financial situation before jumping into this big decision. 

Ask questions!

There are entire communities for full-time camper living! This isn’t a new concept even though it’s recently become a popular one.

If you have questions or you’re on the fence, seek the answers until you’re confident that this is the right choice for you. 

Come up with a Plan B, and maybe sometimes, even a Plan C

Believe it or not… We had to buy two trucks. 

Yeah, you read that right.

We spent a minimal amount of money on a truck we thought was good and, well… It wasn’t. 

So we had to start over which left our camper stranded without a way to move it. 

Now, we think we have a much better truck. But unexpected expenses are still arising with it - which you also have to plan for.

If you don’t get the job you want or something breaks or that campground you want to stay at closes down - what’s your Plan B?

Coming up with options beforehand is a great way to prevent stress in the future.

Enjoy it!

This has been a stressful transition for our family. 

We are far from pros still, but we are learning more every single day. 

But every single day, we have those moments that remind us why we are doing this.

Playing in the grass, having slow mornings,, getting dirty, and enjoying our meals outside are just a few of those instances that I look at and get emotional over. 

We’ve craved these bonding experiences for such a long time and it still amazes me every day that we’re embarking on a journey we once only thought about in our dreams.