Working the dream life for 17+ years.
Road trip planning, budgeting and saving money while traveling in an RV
… and paying for it.
I would have loved to stay and watch the Superbowl with Gene an his new 42″ Aquos HDTV
I am also seriously happy to be amongst some trees with some space at Lake Manatee State Park after that seriously cramped RV “Resort” in Fort Lauderdale.
It is eye-opening, however, to pay $94.00 to fill up the truck from a quarter tank after not spending anything on fuel for nearly two months while we helped make our own homebrew biodiesel.
Whew, what a relief. I just crunched our trip expenses from June to December, and found that we actually came in under budget by almost $12,000! How did we do it? By over budgeting, being ultra careful about things we chose to see and do, and Workamping. Now, this nice little savings is going to allow us to continue our journey even longer than we originally planned, by at least 6 months or so.
Now, let’s talk money. Pay attention; here are some important lessons we learned:
Our RV road trip sabbatical budget and expense report for November 2007, just prior to Workamping gig in Florida for winter.
After driving for thousands of miles over the past few months, I have to say that one of the most vital accessories we purchased for this cross-country road trip has to be our iPod. We got a used 40GB iPod on eBay that has a good dent in it, but it was a deal!
I spent many a late night transferring most of our CD collection onto it before we left, and it was time well spent. I only wish I had copied all of our CDs.
While you can always find classic rock somewhere on the dial, much of this country has really, really bad radio. That’s why I was happy to find out that Amazon is finally offering MP3 downloads!
A summary of our RV road trip budget living expenses for the month of October 2007
Ideas, tips and worksheet for creating a road trip budget forecast plan.
Even when a fulltimer hits the road, the drudgery of paying bills doesn’t stop. My paperwork got a lot lighter since we sold our business, but I still have to push some around. Especially when we receive a package of mail from Jim’s fabulous sister, who’s handling our PO Box for us.
Here’s a question for the web-savvy full-timers:
Would you rather rely on spotty campground wireless service for your internet connection, or have your own more reliable yet much more expensive satellite dish service such as MotoSat? This may be irrelevant to the weekend warriors but for those of us on the road full-time, who need to remain connected for either business or pleasure it is a serious consideration. So consider this…
We have a top of the line .98 meter F2 satellite dish from Datastorm with MotoSat internet service and a Linksys 300N wireless router