ONE YEAR FULL TIME RV LIVING COST! (2020 RV EXPENSES)

hey guys in this video we're going to be sharing our 2020 rv living costs if you're researching the rv lifestyle we hope that this video is going to help shed some light on some typical rving expenses without further ado let's roll that intro so we can get into the numbers all right so i'm gonna start this off by saying that rv expenses are variable they are going to differ from person to person depending on how you live this lifestyle how often you move what type of campgrounds you want to stay in or maybe you want to do a lot of boondocking you can get these expenses down really really low or you can live in luxury and get these expenses really really high we feel that we land somewhere in the middle we have seen other youtubers post their expense videos as low as a thousand dollars a month and then others are a few thousand dollars a month so we don't live this lifestyle to save money particularly that's not why we did it we're from los angeles so our cost of living was already pretty high so we have saved money just by default from where we were from but we live this lifestyle to have experiences on the road and just sightsee and you know i mean you know if you follow our vlogs you know why we travel so uh with that said money is kind of personal if you're talking to us face-to-face we're really open about money we don't mind sharing those numbers with friends and family however the few times we have talked about money on our youtube channel we get a lot of critiques so we're hesitant to make this video but with so many new rvers on the road we are really hoping that this will just help people start to gauge as to where they might land with certain numbers so if your expenses are lower than ours congratulations that's awesome if they're higher than ours that's awesome as well we're really just trying to shed some light on this situation so with that said i think we're ready to dive into the numbers now that we've gotten that little disclaimer out of the way and our highest expense for 2020 was actually groceries and when we started going through these numbers that blew me away for some reason so we spent 6569.66 for the year on groceries which works out to be and 547.47 cents uh per month and i actually googled what is the average household expense on groceries because that seemed really high and it's actually 550 a month for a household of two people so we are technically right on track we uh i think i think a reason for the increase in that this year was that we were eating a lot more at home we weren't really going out to restaurants obviously with covet and everything like that so we ate at home a lot and we got the smoker so we were spending a little more money on nicer meals and meats and stuff like that yeah overall i don't think i'm unhappy with that dollar amount i think it's pretty much what i expected it to be actually even a little bit lower than i think we uh budget for every month so yeah not bad not bad all right you want to talk about our next expense is fuel so as you know fuel is one of those expenses that you expect to increase when you hit the road and start driving around full-time and so for us our annual fuel costs were five thousand six hundred and sixteen dollars and 82 cents so that breaks down to a monthly average of four hundred and sixty eight dollars and seven cents uh the thing about fuel is it is highly variable based on the time of the year where you are in the country and how often you move so we actually slowed down this year and move a little bit less than we're normally moving but that was also offset with making some really long cross-country drives multiple times we went from la to florida to l.a to baja mexico up to michigan and all around yes um so it's definitely that's about average uh when we first hit the road and we'd move weekly i estimated about a hundred dollars per week because we'd fill up our tank once a week right before we moved so um it's right around there a little over 400 yeah what we estimated before we hit the road we're pretty close too and i do want to clarify that we actually were able to save some money and when we say fuel we're talking about diesel because we have a diesel truck so we have a tsd card that we got in march of 2020 and then we started using that immediately so we were able to get some savings on our way back from florida to la and we saved a total of 302.61 since having that tsd card this year we do recommend the tsd fuel card if you have diesel it doesn't work for gas right and we will have a link down below to our post that explains everything that tsd is and does and so i would say 300 savings for not doing anything special other than using their card absolutely worth it yeah definitely so this next one is extremely variable it is dining out and experiences so we spent a total of three thousand seven hundred thirty five dollars and forty cents which works out to a monthly average of three hundred eleven dollars and twenty eight cents and when you look at our we have like a graph kind of that shows these expenses it spikes in june it spikes in august and then it spikes when we're home uh you know spending money on gifts or anything like that so june is your birthday august is my birthday month so you could tell that's when we started to spend money on each other on ourselves you really have 100 control over this category and for us this is what we budgeted before we hit the road we knew that we wanted to rent you tvs go on hot air balloon rides buy water rafts for his birthday this year to go uh you know rafting down the river so this again is a category that we want to spend money in and that we budget to spend money in because that is why we are on the road and we've actually spent less money this year than normal because of kovid we weren't going out and doing as many experiences and we weren't dining out as much our first year on the road and probably your first year on the road that is the budget that gets quickly out of control yes this is the category to watch people yeah so if you are looking at ways to save money and still go out and dine out and have experiences check out happy hour specials just getting your dinner a little bit earlier and uh groupon and a couple other places like that have great deals on experiences all right and the next is something that increased for us when we hit the road but i don't think i would have it any other way and that is our internet and phone bills for us our annual internet and phone cost was three thousand three hundred ninety one dollars and fifty three cents and so that's a monthly average of two hundred and eighty two dollars and sixty three cents so that includes we have two cell phones we have a att hotspot we have a verizon hotspot we have a visible cell phone plan and we have a t-mobile cell phone plan so we're covered so if you're a collector of cell phone plans like i am uh that is i think it's still a pretty decent deal for the sheer amount of plans that we have and since we work from the road full time and even previous to this year the reason i even collected so many was i had a full-time job and i always needed to be online and so i wanted to have backups on backups so our next item which was definitely higher for us this year than previous years is carmen so we spent a total of three thousand one hundred and sixty four dollars and thirty five cents on her which averages out to two hundred and sixty three dollars and seventy cents and if you didn't know carmen is our dog so this last year in october we had some larger bills come through for her because of a scare that we had uh with her not being able to get up so we had a lot of x-rays done we had a lot of tests done turns out it was just arthritis so she's doing fantastic if you're wondering but we do have pet health insurance through healthy paws which did help us with some of these expenses i think it covered uh i didn't write it down but i think it was between seven or eight hundred dollars it covered that so the these expenses would have even been higher without healthy paws because i did subtract them from that total but this also includes her annual vaccines heartworm flea and tick medication her food and her toys so just in case you were wondering having a pet is expensive especially if you love to spoil them like we do so this cost was definitely higher for us i think we normally are closer to spending 70 to 100 on her a month so 263 is a lot for her but that again is just those larger vet bills that came through and next stop is truck and rv maintenance this includes anything that we get to maintain our truck and rv so things like caulking and lap sealant for the rv or any kind of uh knickknacks that we need to repair maybe some some pin nails and glue for well we throw our upgrades in this category as well any upgrades that we do or yeah any little things we wanted to to upgrade with and then overall truck maintenance i try to do as much of it as i can myself but we also take the truck in annually to get things done that i don't want to do items that we replace on the truck include things like fluid changes like front differential rear differential oil transmission power steering and i always try to keep our maintenance up to date and for any items that i didn't know when the last time they were changed i've been changing one or two of them a year and i would say the majority of this category is on the track not necessarily the rv next up is our v insurance now i find this number to be high we spend annually three thousand one hundred and thirty four dollars which averages out to two hundred and sixty one dollars and seventeen cents a month i think why this is so high from my research and talking to different agents is that we are requiring full-time full-timers insurance there is an additional thing that you can pay for when you get insurance on your rv that covers full timers and we also have the special type that if we got into an accident or had a total loss on our rv they would give us a check for what we paid for the rv not the depreciation value so i know those two like special clauses that we get added on is what increases our insurance that leads right into truck insurance which we spend 1767.67 on which works out to 147.31 a month so i have gotten quotes on the rv and our truck to try and get them lower but again with those special clauses we want on there we're not finding anything cheaper but if you're domiciled in texas and you have full-timers insurance and you're finding something cheaper please let us know in the comments this is a category i would love to save money on and we use farmers and the foremost uh insurance for our rv so foremost is a farmer's brand so yes all right what is up next laundry so we chose not to have a washer and dryer in our rv because of the weight and so for the last year we spent 282 dollars and 50 cents on laundry so based on our usage it would take four years of using a onboard washer and dryer to make up the cost which will be at four years in this year 2021 yeah but but still not having that extra weight uh probably saves us in gas mileage and we like to get all of our laundry done at once because we hate doing it yeah so we actually prefer doing our laundry in laundry mats or at the campground but if you don't like laundry facilities then you know this is a cost you can think about of when will it be worth it to put uh laundry in your rig and not have to spend it on other sources all right so with that said that leads us into propane so we have two propane tanks that we fill regularly we use this for our heater and our fridge or we have an rv refrigerator when we're boondocking and then obviously even if we're on full hookups we will still if it's very cold use the propane heater to heat the rig so we have spent 590 dollars and 52 cents which averages out to 49.21 per month and again when you look at the graph for this one it's the winter months that we're spending money and then there's pretty much no expenses on this category through the summer months yeah we use the i mean our fridge just sips on propane so we could probably leave uh just our two 30 pound tanks in there all summer and not refill them once right all right so then speaking of boondocking costs we do consider propane to be a boondocking cost which we're going to get into a little bit later so then moving on to generator gas now this is again just money we spend on gas for the generator and so that works out to be 167.38 which averages 13.95 a month and so this again is just gas we use for our generator which we only use when we're boondocking so this is what we consider a boondocking expense as well so that leads us right into campground fees now when we say campground fees these are campgrounds excluding thousand trails so we do have a thousand trails membership which we're gonna go over but the campground fees are just state parks um private campgrounds yeah they're mostly private campgrounds so anything we just pay in addition if that makes sense and that cost is one thousand nine hundred thirty five dollars and 45 cents which averages out to a monthly cost of 161.29 so not bad yeah i feel like most of that is from one rv park as well which we spent uh a month at a nicer rv park right outside zion yes when the pandemic hit we said we have money in this category and we said we're spending it because we have to leave this thousand trails park which then goes into our thousand trails cost so our annual membership renewal fee this year was 894.45 which works out monthly 274.54 now this includes our thousand trails renewal as well as our trails collection renewal if you are interested in a thousand trails the cost the different membership options all of that we'll have the link down below because it is a in-depth topic we find it very worthwhile as you'll see yes so we calculated the the initial purchase cost of thousand trails for us our first year on the road so our nightly rate worked out to be a lot higher 3000 trails because of that initial buy-in which we bought used so this is just our annual renewal fee and then i'll say this one quickly and then i'll go into the nightly rates we also have an rpi membership that is 120 a year which works out to 10 a month and we have not used that uh program once this year so we actually think when it comes time to renew for this year we're not going to renew it yeah and when we first hit the road uh we did use it again a decent amount because anytime there wasn't a thousand trails we'd be looking for rpi uh campgrounds but now that we have the full battleborn inverter system we just go boondocking instead so yes we've found that it isn't something that we're using yeah so now we're gonna go into our nightly rate really quick just a little side detour before getting into the last of our expenses here but we spent 118 nights boondocking in 2020 so if you take our propane cost and our generator gas cost and you divide that by 118 you get an average nightly rate of six dollars and 42 cents so then we spent 137 days in thousand trails parks in 2020 and if you take our annual renewal fee of 894 and divide that by our nights you get a nightly rate of 6.53 a couple cents more than boondocking yeah and we love them both yes and then our other paid sites uh like state parks and private campgrounds that was 110 nights this year and that works out to be 17.60 per night so which is still a great rate it is it is but when we we get really into getting that less than ten dollars a night when with our thousand trails and our boondocking so we're pretty proud of ourselves for uh the first two categories there so tolls this is a new one for us being on the road because there's not many toll roads that we would take in southern california i think there's one that i remember but i don't think i ever paid for the tolls so we always forget to budget for this and then but we do have a new transponder that we got in florida that works on sun pass and easy pass and so we used it as we were in driving around indiana this year which was really really nice to have yes and so we spent this year on tolls 159 and 70 cents which is about 13 and 31 cents a month and that's not bad because i really like the transponder because we don't have to carry cash or any of that anymore yes if actually that reminds me of a quick tip if you're going full time and you're from the west coast like us and you're not familiar with tolls definitely add this into your budget and have cash in your car or rv or truck whatever we have two items left we want to talk to you about yeah the next go for it next up is coachnet which we use as our roadside assistant program uh we've had it since we hit the road and it's a hundred and forty nine dollars a year or twelve dollars and forty two cents a month we didn't use it this year although we had two cases where we could have uh but instead i decided to change the tires myself but overall i still like the security of having a roadside assistance that is specialized in towing rvs just in case anything ever happens to the truck we did use it when our truck fan belt broke in tampa or in miami a couple years ago and they were able to get our big truck to a dealership and get it fixed because it was not going anywhere so overall i think yeah it's roadside assistant it's one of those kind of must-haves especially when you're on the road yes and then our last item that we're going to discuss with you is health insurance and i threw this one on here last because i actually forgot about it um but it's an an important thing obviously and a lot of people ask us about this so we spend 4 471.92 for the year which works out to 372.66 a month now this plan does cover both of us and we have a nationwide ppo plan through us health group our agent's name is porsha and she is awesome she helped guide us through this process because we were really dreading when we hit the road getting rid of our insurance through our companies and then having to ensure ourselves so she walked us through the whole process the application process then had a presentation with the different plans different expenses what would be covered what wouldn't be covered she's just extremely knowledgeable highly recommend her and those are our expenses so you may have noticed we did not include our truck payment or our rv payment if you want to calculate stuff like that for yourself there are plenty of online calculators out there where you can put in the price of the truck you're looking at your loan terms what the current interest rates are and you can find a really accurate payment plan out there which is why we didn't feel the need to share our personal uh payments on that one so without those two payments included our total for everything else is 39 203.48 which works out to an average monthly rv living cost of 3260 and in our opinion that is not bad that is what we kind of budgeted for when we were hitting the road and we're hitting it on the mark so again you will find people out there who have a much lower number than this and you will find people out there who have a much higher number than this hopefully this video will shine some light on certain rving expenses that you can start thinking about and just start thinking about what membership programs you want to invest in how much boondocking you want to do how much traveling you're going to be doing and things like that and overall just remember that things like groceries and dining out and your internet phone spend is a very personal to your lifestyle so you can usually estimate based on what you're spending before you're hitting the road to kind of estimate those categories we recommend you start tracking and budgeting your expenses now before you hit the road so you can kind of get an estimate of how much you spend and we recommend a program called ynab or you need a budget we've been using it for about five or six years now and i really like the budgeting concept that they have where you budget the money you have and not money you don't if that makes sense yes keeps you from going into debt exactly and helps you get out of it if you're in debt so we'll have a link for that down below but that's it for our 2020 rving expenses so don't forget to like this video and subscribe to join the getaway gang we'll see you next time bye guys hey guys in this video can you stop licking your mouth hey guys in this video we're does the camera look crooked it looks crooked huh well it looks like the camera itself is crooked which makes sense why you had me moving the table crooked hey guys in this video we're gonna be we hope that this video will help sh shed some light carmen your mom is rusty i'm filming you

Channel: Getaway Couple

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Keywords: one year full time rv living costs, how much does rv living cost, full time rv cost, how much does living in an rv cost, cost of full time rv living, rv life, rv living, full time rv living, rv living cost, how much does it cost to live in an rv, rv living expenses, rv living budget, full time rv life, rv cost, rv expenses, getaway couple youtube, RV living costs one year, fulltime rv living fifth wheel

Id: EIyyndMURRk

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021