Budget

When we first started thinking we’d like to go full time RVing, of course I had to figure out whether I thought we could even do it, financially. So, I worked on a budget! So fun! So here it is. And the best part is, we decided we could indeed do it financially and that was exciting! Of course a few things had to be done financially in preparation to make the budget doable, namely getting out of debt. We paid off our car, sold all but one vehicle, sold the house to avoid a house payment, paid off all the credit cards, etc.

I have researched and seen budgets in all ranges and some that are way lower than ours, and those travelers are doing it no problem, but I wanted to figure very conservatively in order to ensure we could definitely do it. However, I do have a lot of room in this budget and since I want to go full time RVing so badly, if I needed to, I know I could do it for even less that this budget. That’s the cool thing about going RVing. If you need a tighter budget, it can be done. You just have to see what things are important to you for your budget and make it work! Once we get going, I will give an update to see how close I was and make changes where things maybe didn’t turn out the way I thought.

So here is our tentative monthly budget. Below the budget, you will see explanations on certain items, explaining how I got to these figures.

Eat out, Entertainment, Misc. – Again, hard to guess, but I took what we currently spend on these items over a span of a few months and averaged it monthly. This way, we at least will be able to do as much of it as we do now. We will have room to work on many areas of the budget where we may spend more here and less there to make up for it and balance it out. We have many places where we can be flexible. Again, a really great thing about RVing is it doesn’t have to be fixed. It is very flexible and has a lot of room for changing things up to make it work. If we want to do more entertainment in one area of the country, we will be careful before or after that part of our trip to be able to budget for it. One of the places we have where we can make room is in our camping; by boondocking for periods of time, we can save money on camping, giving more room for entertainment or other things. Also, we can stay longer in one place to save on gas for driving if need be. Like I say, very flexible.

Internet, Phones, TV – These are our monthly charge for these items. We have internet with our cellular provider as well as a separate internet provider. This was a priority for us to be able to be sure to have access to internet.

Storage – We will get a very small storage unit for the things we can’t bring with us, but just can’t part with. There is a sad story about our first storage unit. We had a obtained a storage unit to begin storing some things getting ready to leave, and I had put 95% of all my collectables and valuable items in there. Jerry had put a few of his in there also. Well there was a fire and I lost all but a couple of items (over $35,000 worth!). Insurance max pay-out was $5000. Oh well. It’s just stuff in the big picture. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, we will get another small storage until for the very few items we need to store.

Auto Insurance – I have been using Geico for many many years. Did my research way back when, and periodically will check again to ensure I am still getting the best deal, and so far I will be sticking with them.

RV Payment – Yep. We are still financing our RV. I know of many travelers who did not want to have this payment on the road, so they bought a good used RV and paid for it outright in order to have that room in there budget for other things. That was not in our cards.

Save for annual vehicle registration – We are going to make Florida our domicile state and have looked in to what the annual registration fees will be for the RV and the car.

Medical – This is based on our needs. Everyone would be different here. We have opted not to pay for an insurance plan but to rely on using online and over the phone Dr.s and discount medicine programs and see how that goes. With all the research we have done, we think it will work.

Gas for the RV and car, and for propane – RV: This figure is based on an average amount of days that we plan on traveling per month. Car: this is based on the average amount of time we plan on driving to see the world around where we are camped. We will be monitoring these costs as we get going to see where adjustments need to be made. Propane: since I will be doing the majority of my cooking using the instant pot and griddle, we will not use a lot of propane.

Save for annual Camping memberships – We have done a lot of research and have opted to become members of quite a few memberships for different reasons: Thousand Trails, Resort Parks International (RPI), Coast to Coast (CCC), Harvest Hosts, Boondocker’s Welcome, Escapees, Passport America, Good Sam Club. We will find out during our first year traveling which of these memberships turns out to pay for themselves the best and may drop one or more of them the next year. But we believe they will all be beneficial to saving on cost.

Campgrounds – Since we will be using our memberships, our cost for camping will probably be much lower than the $300/mo. we have budgeted. For many months, we will have no cost for camping depending on where we will be. This $300 most likely will not be needed and I will adjust it after we see what campsites we end up using and how much it costs us. If you add the monthly amount we will spend on the camping memberships, it brings our monthly camping amount to $380/mo. And that is very cheap compared to paying even for the cheapest campsites at approximately $30/night which would come to $900/mo. So, needless to say, our memberships will save us a lot of money.

Mail Service and laundry – We will be using Escapees for our mail service. They offer different levels of service but we will be starting with the basic service at $95/year to see how that goes. I have guessed at an amount for postage and laundry. We will do laundry at campsites and laundromats. This will be adjusted once we see what it actually costs, but as always, I have attempted to figure conservatively to give myself wiggle room.

Save for misc annual fees – There are always those pesky little annual fees for certain things. Plex is the server we use to watch movies we have saved on our hard-drives.