Well, here we are at the five year mark, and I am pretty excited.  I love data and finally we have plenty of it, so it’s time to really look at what this lifestyle is costing us. But before we get into that let’s start with 2019 and see how the year went.

As you can see in 2019 we totally blew our budget.  This was largely intentional as we were making more money at the end of the year, but we also had some unforeseen costs.  The biggest negative variances were Dining Out, Truck Maintenance, Gifts, and Home Repairs.  Some of that was discretionary and some was not. I am not going to going to go through every category this year because I want to focus on the five year numbers.    If you would like to delve into the details please see each individual month’s report out for that information.    

Here are the Mins, Maxes, and Averages versus budget for 2019 only.  It is interesting that most of the categories on average were just a little bit over.  That does add up of course but the big variance is in Home repair, where we were over on average by almost $500 a month.  Some of that was discretionary and some was mandatory.  I will say that at the five year mark stuff starts to wear out or break.  Just like in a sticks and bricks home where all your appliances seem to break at the same time, we had several things that needed replaced or fixed this year. Since we have almost 50,000 miles on our RV and our truck hit 100,000 miles that makes sense I suppose.

OK, so let’s talk about the five year numbers. In order to give people a means of comparison I have removed all the items that I consider “one-offs”.  The reason I did this is everyone needs to eat, have fuel, etc, but not everyone pays for a Mor-Ryde system or their daughter’s wedding.  I also left out health insurance because this is extremely variable for people.  Essentially I am presenting five years worth of our BASE COSTS.  In no way should you assume these will be your only costs.  First of all, everyone is different.  Secondly, stuff happens.  No matter who you are or how you travel you will have extra costs come your way in a five year period.  That’s why a savings account is so important.  We started the lifestyle with $40K in savings and five years later have $17K left.  That $23K is what we spent above and beyond what we made on the road and our regular expenses.

Let’s jump in! Can you tell I am excited?  I’m such a nerd.

 

A couple of things really jumped out at me when I put this together.

1. The annual totals were far less than I would have thought.  Prior to going on the road we were making around $160k a year in total and spending every penny of it.  I had serious doubts that we could ever lower our spending to a level we could support while working non-corporate jobs but it turned out we could.  The combination of having a free place to stay and spending less money while we were working had results.  The downside was we had to work way more than we originally thought to even make this much money, but it was possible.  The money we made did not cover any extras though, which is why our savings was slowly depleted.  In particular I was proud of 2017 where we really focused on cutting costs and 2016 where we managed to go to Alaska and still control our spending.
2. The categories were largely consistent year to year. We both thought we would see a steady decrease as we learned how to live on less, but that didn’t really happen.  For us it was a bit like playing whack-a-mole.  We would make progress in one category and another category would pop up its head and increase.  We would focus on that and something else would happen. To be honest, the biggest downward trends were due to external forces (ie:  AT&T offered a less expensive cellular plan) rather than any big changes we made. The one area we saw a MAJOR trend upwards was home repair.  This was significant but it is not all due to things breaking.  Lots of those expenses were discretionary.

Let’s look at some trending graphs:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My absolute favorite data view was the five year monthly averages.  Averages with minimal data can be dangerous, but we now had 60 data points which is plenty to finally say this is what living in an RV costs us.  Of course there are things we can do to lower individual costs, but we have largely shown at this point we have done what we were willing to do.  I was personally thrilled that the monthly BASE COSTS are only $3827.  Again that is without any large, one-off expenditures or health insurance, but it is way better than I ever thought it could be. I did leave in cigarettes because we have very little alcohol in our budget.  Substitute your vice of choice for this amount.  Overall,  I am really proud of how we have controlled our spending these last five years and we have proved to ourselves at least that this lifestyle is sustainable.  That’s a big deal for us!

 

If you made it this far good for you!  Please keep in mind your mileage will definitely vary.  I hope this five year look was helpful though.

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