Two Years As Full Time RVers!

Two freakin’ years as full time RVers!! It’s been amazing, surprising, challenging and a great time for growth and adventure. 

What was our favorite state? Montana, hands down. We loved our time there, especially in Glacier National Park. For the longest time, we would hesitate on our favorite state or place, Utah was always high on the list, but now it’s no contest. It’s funny, when we made a video talking about our favorite state, Bret now says California. 

Are we thinking of going back to a sticks and bricks (what full time RVers call regular houses)? Not yet! Funny story, the first place we even considering looking into was Crested Butte in Colorado….which gets like 200 feet of snow in the winter. As of now, there is no end date. Every location we’ve visited, we find 3x the things to do next time as when we arrived. We also had to significantly change how we were traveling and didn’t do nearly as much exploring and eating as we’d like. Which leads to the next question.

What did it cost us? After being on the road for two years full time in an RV, we can give you a snapshot of what it cost us. Our biggest mistake was treating it like a vacation and going too fast the first eight months or so. You’ll see that reflected in our totals. We hit the road November 1, 2020, so year 1 is November 1, 2020 through October 31, 2021 and year 2 is November 1, 2021 through October 31, 2022.

First, let’s talk about what we spent to get on the road. Deposits for your RV & Truck can vary, this is what we put down.

You can see detailed specs for the most recent months we’ve been on the road here.

What was the hardest thing about being on the road? Most full time RVer content creators will talk about how the first year or so on the road will feel like a vacation and you’ll travel SO fast. We heard this over and over and it’s the one thing I wish we had tried to NOT do. About eight months into our journey, we didn’t have a good system for consistent work…which meant we didn’t have consistent income…we blew through our savings AND amassed a large amount of credit card debt. 

Because of that, we stopped going out much, spent most of our time in the RV and working long days. But, being in that position, we had to look into some other types of work. It caused me to do more work with helping successful business owners record good systems in their businesses. It caused Bret to start personal training again. This was something that I was SO happy about! When we were in the process of hitting the road, a friend came by to pick up some furniture and asked about Bret’s heavy bag. The change in his demeanor was palpable. He is so incredibly passionate about fitness and health. It took a few months, but he was able to pick up a few clients. I was able to pick up a few clients as well. We also were invited into the bonus plays program on Facebook for both Journey with the Gs and Bret’s fitness videos. We’re finally getting CLOSE to earning enough to cover our expenses. 

What happens when you do this big amazing thing and it doesn’t turn out how you thought it would? This is something I’ve been wanting to talk about a lot. What is it like when you have to completely change your life? I’m not going to lie, it’s been a really hard time. We’ve had to make some significant sacrifices. But I would rather work in my RV in lots of cool campgrounds across the US than only travel from time to time and live in one place. Full time RV travel is really awesome, but it takes a little more planning for work than we put in at the start.

What advice would we give someone wanting to hit the road full time? Have multiple streams of income working well before you hit the road. We hit the road with only one big source and that had been getting less consistent. Now we have multiple irons in the fire and are consistently working to add others. We’ve seen some success in content creation (thanks for the reads and views!) and have gotten monetized with our Facebook page and Bret’s profile. We’ve gotten a few affiliate purchases from our links as well. 

We’re settled in Florida for at least the next five months and likely longer, which will help with the spending (hopefully…I do still have an annual pass to Disney World…). 

Bottom line – don’t treat full time RVing as a vacation, it is a lifestyle. And sloooooowwwww down! Trust me when I say you will find SO much you want to do at each place you visit, even if you stay for MONTHS. We’ve spent about 7-8 months in the Orlando area and still have a list a mile long of things we want to do!

What were the memberships we got that we love?
Thousand Trails this has been THE best camping membership we’ve gotten and works really well for what we’re looking for in a campground. It’s not for everyone, but we love it. I did a whole post on how we use our membership here.

RV Life Pro I’ve used RV Life Trip Wizard to plan EVERY one of our trips and to find reviews of campgrounds. I put together a video on how I use it for planning our own trips.

Harvest Hosts This is a really fun camping membership that allows self contained RVs to stay on a business’ property. You could stay at a brewery one day, a church the next and a museum the day after that. Check out our experiences in the Northeast with Harvest Hosts.

Escapees – We use Escapees for a few things. First is our mail handling and forwarding. All of our mail goes to one of our two addresses (Texas for most things, Florida for important things like taxes or licenses). They’ll scan the envelopes and even the contents if we ask, which is great at tax time. They keep our mail until we ask them to forward it to wherever we are. We also used them to get our domicile set up in Florida. It was a very easy process and it could be helpful to stay at their campground while you’re working on that. 

What were the memberships that were just ok?

KOA – more so because we just don’t use it anymore. We used that one a lot last year, but when your monthly cost to use Thousand Trails is sometimes less than a one night stay, it’s hard to use.

Passport America – we used it once but I have friends that love it!

Good Sam – it’s been nice for Camping World discounts but we haven’t used it for anything else

What about the best purchases that we still use?

RV GPS – This is the GPS that we use personally for every trip we take – the Garmin RV 785. We can put in the height, weight, and width of our RV so we don’t drive where we can’t. We do a full review in the video below.

TST 507 Tire Pressure Monitoring System – There are a lot of things that can go wrong with your tires on moving day. This system will let you know how your tire pressure and temperature are at any given moment.

RV Sticker Map Does it count if you don’t show it off? We love this map to show off where we’ve been in the RV throughout the US.

Scratch off road map We’ve used this map since 2015 and it’s such a cool way to see the highways we’ve driven on.

50A Portable Wireless Surge Guard There’s a lot of electricity running through the campgrounds and your RV, having a surge protector is an important tool to protect your rig!

Camping Journal & RV Travel Logbook Keeping track of where you’ve been, what you liked and didn’t like about a campground is so important. This is the journal I use on every trip.

Instant Pot I was never one to do a lot of cooking or baking, until I got an Instant Pot. This has been my best friend in the kitchen since we hit the road (and before!)

Air Compressor Having our own compressor has been a really nice addition to our “tool bag.” When we first got our truck, we had to fill up the tires and regular gas stations did NOT have a high enough PSI. The video below is our review as well as taking a reading of how quiet it actually is.