Welcome to our first post on our new blog, Average Joe’s RV Living Blog! We started this blog to document our new passion – a life on the open road, with our home following along behind us. Why would we want to RV full time? In case you are thinking about this for yourself, here are our top reasons for deciding to RV full time.
In Which We Decide to RV Full Time!
Reason no. 1 to RV Full Time: Saving Money so We Can Travel and Have Fun!
Right now we have a lovely home in a pleasant, very livable and walkable community. We are very happy here. However, we have less than 10 years left before retirement age, and we are starting to think about what life will look like if we spend decades of retirement in our condo.
On a retirement income, we will be stretched just to afford all of the expenses associated with our home, including mortgage, insurance, hydro, strata fees, cleaners, and property taxes. We would not be able to afford to do what we really love: travel. We love to walk and bike and hike but … another 30 years of walking around this neighborhood? I don’t think so … it just sounds boring.
On the other hand, if we sell our condo, we will have enough cash to buy an RV and a trailer, and still have a very comfortable nest egg in the bank (apart from the retirement savings we already have – which are not nearly enough on their own, but start to look good once we add the profit from the condo).
Once we go on the road, our expenses will plummet down to a fraction of what they are now. This would be true even if we stay in RV parks all the time. But we are more attracted to the idea of dry camping and boondocking, either in state parks or completely off the grid. From all the YouTube videos we have watched, this option seems to give us more nature and fewer neighbors, and appeals to us a lot more. So, we plan to spend more money up front to make ourselves self-sufficient: maximize our solar panels, add in a couple of generators, and have two 6 V golf cart batteries instead of one 12 V battery. This will enable us to park our home almost anywhere, and be able to live without shore power for days or even weeks at a time – without rent or utilities to pay!
Best of all, we will be able to follow our passions every day – traveling, hiking, biking, discovering new places, visiting places we have always wanted to see. Depending on when we start, we will begin either with Alaska or Oregon – both stunningly beautiful places that are very high on our mutual bucket list. We also plan to spend a lot of time in Mexico, as it is one of our favorite places – and up till now, we have not been able to afford to spend more than two weeks at a time there. In our RV, we hope it will be more like two months!
Reason no. 2 to RV Full Time: Because We Both Love to Hike and Bike
Speaking of mutual bucket lists brings me to another reason we have decided to do this: because we get on well enough, and have enough common interests, that we are sure we can make this work. We both love new places and nature. We both love to hike and bike and have adventures. For that reason, we vacation very well together. And we are confident that we will be very good at full time vacationing! Hey, we have been pretty good at full time working – this has to be easier, right?
Reason no. 3 to RV Full Time: Because We Get Along Well Enough to Only Need a Small Space
Finally, living in a small space – can we make that work? Maggie asked me that early on in the process. I pointed out to her that we spend most of our time in the condo on one couch together, or else in one bed together. It is not as if we require acres of living space to be comfy!
Of course, this lifestyle would not be possible without good communication skills, so we can respect each other’s needs in close quarters. We already have good communication skills, and I have come across many couples who say they have improved their communications skills with each other better while on the road. So we are feeling confident and optimistic about this too.
Reason no. 4 to RV Full Time: To Downsize and Simplify Our Lives
We look forward to simplifying our lives. We started downsizing when we moved from a house to a condo, but we now realize that we are still tethered by an enormous quantify of inanimate “stuff.” On the road, everything needs to have a purpose, and hopefully more than one purpose. We will not be drowning in inanimate objects that we never use. We look forward to that kind of simplicity. We think it will remove stress from our lives, which will improve our health and our longevity. We don’t want to be working so hard on maintaining all our stuff that we kill ourselves, or just lose the ability to have the active lives we enjoy.
Reason no. 5 to RV Full Time: To Give Ourselves the Gift of Time
We have both worked for many years, and now, we want to give ourselves the gift of time (before we get too old to be able to enjoy it). It seems that we spend all our time working to afford our home, and then working in our home. We are starting to wonder what the point of this is? Sure, it is what everyone does … but we would like more time to simply be in in the moment, and enjoy what we are doing.
Right now our most important daily activity is going to work. We want to make it so that our most important daily activity is going for a bike ride or a hike. Or maybe just reading a book or writing a post.
We plan to apply for our pensions as early as possible, and escape the 9 to 5 rat race. That will not be enough to live on, but we will have this blog to make some money from, plus our other blogs, Average Joe Cyclist and Electric Bikes Blog. None of these will make us rich, but together they will go a ways towards financing a simpler, cheaper lifestyle.
Reason no. 6 to RV Full Time: To Get Enough Sleep!
We find that we seldom get enough sleep. Do you have this problem? Actually, this seems to be the norm for working people, who are often stressed, and always have too much to do. Of course, sleep deprivation is just about the worst thing you can do to your health. We look forward to getting as much sleep as we need, and perhaps rejuvenating ourselves a bit. We plan to follow the sun, going to bed quite early so we can be up with the sun and off on a bike ride or a hike!
We are very excited about this new plan, and are currently working hard on researching and finding out all we can about it. The subject is a lot more complex than we ever imagined, and we have tons of choices to make and shopping to do! (Yes, the flip side of this downsizing project is we have to buy some new stuff … oh well.) We have found tons of great resources on the Internet, and I will share some of those in my next post, which will be about the Top 3 YouTube Channels about RV living.
What are your reasons for thinking about full time RV living? Please share them with us in the comments!
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