We Did It! Living Rent Free in January
A family hug!
Four of us celebrating time together at Skooliepalooza in the Arizona desert. Taiya’s new to her camper van in the background.
When we started out on this lifestyle, we were curious about many things.
One of which was, could we find “happiness” and “peace” in such a busy world, if we reduced the amount of “needs” we had and in turn freed up more of our time to for us to be, well, us?
In January we accomplished one of our goals, we lived an entire month rent free!
Imagine a month where you did not have to pay rent or your mortgage, what would you do with that money?
Now imagine what would happen if you could repeat that for three or four months a year?
What would your monthly budget look like? With less need for money, would you work less? Explore more?
While you think on it let us share how we did it.
We camped all month on totally free public lands. (Some argue since we pay taxes it is not free, but for our monthly budget since it had a zero in the “camping fees” column we consider it free! 😊) People may think free land means “unsafe, trashy, or ugly” when in fact many times just the opposite is true.
Million dollar views like this for FREE!
A view of Signal Peak in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge between Yuma and Quartzsite Arizona.
We have spent many nights with million-dollar views of mountain passes, river valleys, and desert sunsets by researching the areas. There are several apps we used to do this, and it does take time, which we believe is well spent for the experience.
As we plan our routes one of the factors, we consider is can we get near national or state parks? We love adventuring in the parks, while camping just outside of it on public lands. Avoiding the costs of fluctuating camping fees, and headaches of reserving spots, while still experiencing the beauty of the parks.
With all the wide-open spaces and public lands in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona there are lots of free camping options. In fact, for us spending winter in the west, was as much about staying close to family as it was a way to mitigate the costs of living.
Full time RV living is not just about having the freedom to control your monthly rent, it allows us to control variable costs of much more.
Our monthly budget includes fixed costs for our insurance, cell phones, internet, and Netflix. These costs are consistent month to month regardless of where we are and how much we travel. Beyond that we are empowered to manage the rest of our expenses. With a little creativity and discipline, we have greatly reduced the amount of money needed to live.
Gone are the days where every month like clockwork bills for heat, electricity, water, sewer, taxes, trash service, show up. No matter how you might try to mitigate them by keeping the house cooler, not watering the yard as much, or reducing your “peak hour” usage, you will get a bill. There is just no way around these costs.
Now we have direct control over the costs of things like our electricity, propane, water, sewer, and fuel costs.
If a cold front is on the way or it looks like snow, we move to warmer weather instead of cranking up the furnace and burning through propane. Sunny weather means we get to use our solar for about 85% of our electricity needs allowing us to not use our generator or campground hookups saving money in gas and camping fees. We can find free or low-cost water fill ups on our travel days to keep the tanks full while gaining a better understanding of our consumption needs.
Our home on wheels.
“Home” for us means freedom! Financial, location, and resource independency.
We love having control of these costs and our budget. Too cold, too hot, too cloudy, rain in the forecast, gas prices rising, we can look at all this and decide if and when we should move and where we will live next.
One of the greatest freedoms we have found in this lifestyle is the financial freedom to decide for ourselves how much just “living” is going to cost us.
Thanks for joining us and we will see you all down the road.