We have now been living in our RV for over 5 months! I thought I’d write a post to try to answer some of the questions people ask us the most and describe a bit about our life in general in the RV.
Space
Our bunkhouse fifth wheel is treating us really good so far! In my opinion, we bought the best RV possible for traveling with a family. Its actually kind of cool to have everyone so close.And really, its 2 adults and 3 teeny tinies. It might be different if there were 3 teenagers in here or something. But for our family, this thing is huge.
Cost
There are tons of bloggers online who talk about all the various expenses/costs that come along with full-time RVing, so I’m not going to talk about that here. The consensus is that RV living has a flexible price tag, just like living in a house (boring answer). You can do it as cheaply or as costly as you want. For us, we’re spending about the same amount of money each month as when we lived in a house, we just spend that money on different things than before.
Health Insurance
We had to sign up for health insurance in the same state as our domicile, hence why we had our baby in sunny Las Vegas 🙂 We planned a lot of our trip around our health insurance and birth of the baby. In retrospect, I think we could of avoided all that by just going self-pay.
For example, the hospital we delivered at charges a self-pay patient $5,600 for a C-section. They charged my insurance at least twice that, and we pay more than twice that just in the monthly premium, not including dedeuctable. So…
The other annoying thing about it all is that we won’t be staying in Nevada all year, and our health insurance is only valid here in Nevada. So when we go to our pediatrician back in Denver for Henry and Addie, we will be paying out-of-pocket again.
I know our Canadian campsite neighbors must feel so sorry for us (and everyone else in the United States) due to our lame health care system.
Socializing
We have really enjoyed visiting all the people on our trip! That has definitely been one of the best things about traveling. We’ve had so many good conversations with all kinds of people we care about.
In fact, from now on, I’d like to always vacation with other people. It is so fun. I sort of had this American picture of a “family vacation” in my head, where everything we do as a family is just very independent. But now I have a much more fun “the more the merrier” type of perspective.
How can we run/grow/survive our business while on the road?
Yeah, its really difficult. Like super difficult. We thought it would be easier because one of us could take the kids and be outside, exploring, or adventuring, or whatever, while the other one of the “grown-ups” worked on the business. At least, thats how I pictured it. In reality, this does not happen as much as I’d like. Here’s why:
- Thus far our entire trip has been super rainy, no matter where we go. I am pretty sure we are on a master plan to just follow the rain.
- Even if its sunny, we can’t just throw the kids outside and expect them not to run away. It doesn’t work like that. Maybe if we found a large prairie on BLM land. But at the places we stay at, there are neighbors, and roads, and pools, and stuff.
- With 3 so little, we can barely do anything with just one adult.
Despite all that going against us, we are doing okay with it. Business is growing as usual (thanks to some great partnerships back home) and we always have an internet connection so we can always get our work done, even if that means power-working during nap time and then again between dinner and bed.