RPF0572-Full-Time_RV_Living-A_Mid-Action_Review
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00:00:43.040 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, a mid-action review of what it's like to live on the road in a trailer, including discussion of budgets, gear and the psychology.
00:00:55.160 | I'll share with you the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can be equipped to either give yourself some good advice or perhaps, who knows, somebody else.
00:01:20.400 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:01:30.600 | My name is Joshua and I am your host.
00:01:32.240 | And today I'll be basically interviewing myself, trying to bring you some real world experience of having lived on the road full time with my family, traveling the country 4,500 miles in the last month, which is a lot of driving.
00:01:44.320 | Yes, indeed.
00:01:45.360 | I'll tell you what's working, what's not so that you will be equipped to make your own decisions a little bit better.
00:01:50.240 | I think you will find if you have any interest in this topic of living on the road, traveling full time, whether that's as a retiree in your 80s or whether that's doing it now when you're 18.
00:02:03.600 | I'm going to share with you some some lessons learned.
00:02:06.600 | And I think you'll find today's episode to be really useful to you because I can bring you a perspective that very few people can.
00:02:14.800 | Many, much of the time when I interview people who've traveled and I've interviewed a lot throughout the annals of Radical Personal Finance, when I interview people who have traveled, usually they are experienced travelers.
00:02:24.440 | And if they are still on the road, they have worked out many of the bugs.
00:02:28.760 | Or if they're not on the road, a lot of their memory of the hard things has faded.
00:02:33.240 | Well, we are not experienced travelers of this kind of traveling.
00:02:36.880 | My wife and I, we are newbies just wrapping.
00:02:39.840 | We just finished our first month on the road.
00:02:42.040 | And so we're still new enough that we can understand the transition, which is challenging.
00:02:46.440 | Now, I fully expect that six months from now, if I'm interviewing myself on this topic, then I won't remember many of the things I'm going to share with you today.
00:02:54.920 | And that's the challenge, which is why I'm recording this show, which I hope it will help you and serve you.
00:03:00.040 | And I'll share with you a little bit about the details of it.
00:03:03.280 | One of the things that I have often wondered is if I, as an individual, or if I, as a family, if we would be able to live on the road full time and be content and to be happy, and could it work?
00:03:17.160 | There are a lot of people who do it and there are a lot of people who are interested in doing it.
00:03:21.240 | But of course, the challenge is, can it work?
00:03:24.040 | Can it actually function?
00:03:25.720 | And I'll start with just giving you a resounding yes.
00:03:29.120 | Absolutely, it can work.
00:03:31.320 | If you've had any idea of wanting to travel, then I would thoroughly commend to you RVing.
00:03:40.720 | It's a really wonderful lifestyle.
00:03:44.000 | It's really, we've enjoyed it.
00:03:45.280 | We've really enjoyed the travel and it's very feasible.
00:03:48.680 | The stress, the decisions can seem overwhelming at the beginning, but it's very, very feasible, very doable, a lot easier than many other lifestyles.
00:03:57.520 | And including from the financial perspective, I have sought to prove to myself and to you that you don't need to buy, you know, million dollar RVs.
00:04:07.680 | You don't need to spend six figure, multiple six figures a year to be on the road and to enjoy a wonderful lifestyle.
00:04:15.360 | I'll share with you a little bit about budgets in today's episode, just because I want to encourage you that this stuff is really doable.
00:04:22.600 | One of the things that I have been impressed with being out on the road, being in campgrounds, being in rest areas, kind of interacting with people way outside of my normal social sphere is how many weird, crazy people there are out there living in weird, crazy ways.
00:04:37.480 | And we've only been doing this a month and already I could tell you story after story after story of people that I have talked to.
00:04:44.760 | And there are so many people who are just pursuing unique things.
00:04:50.240 | Just last night, my wife and I had over to our camper for a bowl of ice cream, this weird musician guy that we met, he was just standing outside of his car playing music in a little park that we were parked in.
00:05:03.960 | And we stopped for a couple of nights and he was living in his Ford Escape, which is not a big car to live in.
00:05:12.560 | And it's stocked full of all of his guitar stuff.
00:05:15.560 | And he's just randomly moving around playing gigs.
00:05:19.680 | Now, in all of the stories that I tell you, by the way, you need to don't think that just because somebody else is doing something that's different than what you would do, don't feel intimidated by that.
00:05:30.560 | Just make your own decisions.
00:05:31.600 | I wouldn't live how he's living, but I certainly enjoyed interacting with him and talking with him in that context.
00:05:38.560 | I've talked to people living in big million dollar coaches who are doing all kinds of interesting things.
00:05:44.400 | And I've talked to people like that guy last night, living in his Ford Escape mini SUV on the road full time as a random musician.
00:05:52.560 | And there are people who are doing things.
00:05:56.440 | Last month on the road has absolutely further cemented my own opinion that one of the most important things to be committed to is just doing, being a doer.
00:06:09.320 | Somebody who, if you have a goal, just go for it because you can figure out everything as you start going forward.
00:06:16.200 | You can figure out your rig.
00:06:17.480 | You can figure out your location.
00:06:18.680 | You can figure out your route.
00:06:19.680 | You can figure out all of those things as you go forward.
00:06:22.720 | But if you just sit at home and try to figure it out from there with your own little tiny bit of experience, then it often you may just psych yourself out of it.
00:06:32.520 | And I've seen that.
00:06:34.240 | There's something about doing it that brings a little bit more confidence.
00:06:40.120 | Let me give you just two simple examples that I've experienced over the last month.
00:06:46.160 | One of the things that I've wondered about is, OK, what do you do if you're out on the road having an adventure and all of a sudden your RV falls apart, your car breaks down?
00:06:57.000 | Obviously this stuff happens when you're dealing with mechanical objects.
00:07:00.720 | Well, the reality is you just fix it.
00:07:04.840 | Cruising down the highway and all of a sudden I'm looking in the side mirror and I notice that the aluminum paneling on the side of my RV is coming off and it's starting to delay on it.
00:07:18.360 | I go back and I put tape on it, try to duct tape it.
00:07:20.800 | I got a few more miles down the road.
00:07:22.320 | That doesn't work.
00:07:23.120 | So I try to tape it more and that doesn't work.
00:07:25.400 | And so finally I just kind of limp into a Home Depot and buy a can of sealant stuff and read the backs of the labels of caulking and figure out, OK, this will work with aluminum and rubber and plastic.
00:07:40.080 | And then we go to a little local park.
00:07:42.040 | I set my family up, turn the generator on, turn the air conditioning on.
00:07:45.000 | They go in for lunch and I fix the RV.
00:07:47.680 | Now, I share that with you.
00:07:50.360 | For some listeners, that wouldn't be at all impressive.
00:07:54.200 | But for me, one of the things I always worry about, not worry about, but one of the things I often struggle with is can I actually fix the stuff that I need to have fixed or do I always have to find somebody to do it?
00:08:04.520 | Well, when time comes, you just have to fix it.
00:08:07.920 | And I felt, obviously, that's one of the downsides of having an older RV where stuff breaks and you wind up fixing it.
00:08:18.400 | But one of the upsides of my having chosen to purchase an older RV is that when stuff breaks, you don't feel bad about fixing it because you can't wreck the value.
00:08:26.440 | It's not like a brand new one where if you smudge a little bit of caulking in the wrong way, then all of a sudden that drops $10,000 off of your resale price.
00:08:34.360 | I'd have to do a lot to wreck the value of the trailer that we have right now.
00:08:41.120 | The other example would just be this.
00:08:44.960 | We were driving through Georgia and while I'm driving through Georgia, I noticed that one of my tires is wearing horribly.
00:08:53.480 | And I kept an eye on it, but they were all brand new tires before I left.
00:08:57.720 | And this one tire was worn down in 600 miles, way worse than it should have been.
00:09:02.360 | And so I started looking around to find somebody who could take a look at it and try to figure out.
00:09:07.840 | I wound up at this great trailer shop in rural Georgia where the guys are able to figure out that one of my axles was bent.
00:09:18.440 | And long story short, we wound up camping in their trailer shop for a night.
00:09:24.880 | All the family sleeping and the kids all taking their naps inside the trailer, inside the shop, while the guys are taking the axles off the trailer and wound up replacing the axles on the trailer.
00:09:36.600 | Now, certainly I didn't want to pay the bill for that, but all things considered, it's not that big of a deal.
00:09:42.720 | And one of the great things about RV travel is when those things come along, you can adjust your budget to meet it.
00:09:50.200 | So I'm definitely persuaded more than I ever was that these types of things are very doable.
00:09:56.280 | The other big lesson that I have learned is that I'm fully persuaded of is there are different people.
00:10:03.960 | No matter the circumstance you're in, you can find something that will work really well for you.
00:10:08.320 | And let me talk about full-time retirees.
00:10:11.480 | And here I'm thinking of just traditional older people who are traditional retirees, which certainly there are many, many, many of them out on the road.
00:10:22.160 | There are not a huge number of young families, although there's some out there, and there's certainly not that many full-time young families like my own.
00:10:30.800 | But there are a lot of retirees out there.
00:10:32.760 | And here's what I've observed.
00:10:34.840 | You don't need to have a certain size or of rig or a certain amount of money in order to be able to fulfill that retirement dream of going out and traveling.
00:10:47.360 | And in fact, if you will think about your circumstances, you can find all kinds of ways to live your ideal plan independent of the financial cost of it.
00:11:03.560 | My wife and I really enjoyed meeting one couple, and this couple was from Minnesota.
00:11:10.000 | And they were wealthy, independent retirees.
00:11:14.680 | The husband was an engineer and an independent business owner.
00:11:18.360 | The wife was a retired college professor.
00:11:21.720 | Neither of them, they didn't have children.
00:11:24.760 | They obviously had plenty of money, but they were out traveling and living full-time.
00:11:30.800 | They had no fixed real estate residence, living full-time in a pop-up truck camper on a short bed pickup truck.
00:11:38.320 | Not the smallest that would be possible to have, the smallest meaning something like a Toyota Tacoma.
00:11:43.280 | This was a GM short bed truck, but they were out living full-time in this pop-up truck camper.
00:11:50.720 | And when I started interacting with them and talking with them, and if you're not familiar, a truck camper is the type of thing that goes into the bed of a pickup truck.
00:11:59.240 | Usually it'll have the bed, the part that goes over the cab of the truck where there's a bed inside.
00:12:05.000 | And then in the back, there'll be a little table and different facilities.
00:12:08.360 | That's a truck camper.
00:12:09.440 | And then a pop-up truck camper is one where instead of it being a big, super high top, where it's three or four feet above the roof line of the cab of the pickup truck, rather they're low.
00:12:21.440 | They're about a foot or a foot and a half there.
00:12:23.200 | And then when you get to where you're going, then the top pops up and there are canvas sides all around.
00:12:28.360 | So pop-up truck campers are very popular among people who want to have a low profile, easy to drive truck camper, especially for the benefit of going on a four wheel drive truck so that it can be driven down more difficult roads or out into the actual back country.
00:12:43.720 | Because the trucks campers, the pop-up truck campers have a lower roof line, they're lighter weight.
00:12:50.040 | They have a lower roof line, which lowers the center of gravity, and it helps the vehicle itself to maintain more of its four wheel drive capability.
00:12:57.560 | But very few people would choose to live full time in a pop-up truck camper.
00:13:02.760 | For most people, it just wouldn't be enough space.
00:13:05.800 | You don't have an easy chair that you can sit down and recline in like you can if you have a larger camper.
00:13:13.760 | You don't have a huge amount of space to spread out or you can't flick on a fireplace.
00:13:18.640 | It's a very simple thing to sit.
00:13:21.400 | You have a dinette, benches and a little table.
00:13:24.320 | You lie down, you have a bed and then you have a little galley that you can cook in.
00:13:27.800 | But this couple had been living full time in their truck camper for the last three years, and they did it for two years while maintaining their big five acre, big, big home in their home place while they were while they were seeing if they really liked it.
00:13:43.000 | But the point is their rig didn't cost them all that much.
00:13:47.760 | They bought it new.
00:13:48.640 | And I guess that's a relative term.
00:13:50.680 | They bought it new, paid about $30,000 for the truck camper and they bought a new truck to put underneath it.
00:13:55.800 | But that truck camper can last for easily a decade or a couple of decades if they care for it.
00:14:00.880 | And the truck can come and go.
00:14:01.840 | You can swap the truck out underneath it and still and change your drivetrain if you need to.
00:14:06.280 | So they certainly had, you know, $60,000 into the thing.
00:14:10.560 | But they didn't need.
00:14:13.400 | But in this grand scheme of RVs, that's not all that much money.
00:14:18.120 | And they didn't need a lot of money into their their living.
00:14:21.840 | The thing they liked about the truck camper was the places that allowed them to go.
00:14:26.040 | So they spend the majority of their time out on federal land, BLM land, national forest land, out in the middle of the boonies, just cruising around, not paying anything for their for their for where they are.
00:14:39.960 | And because they chose a light, nimble four-wheel drive truck as their rig, they can go out into some very desolate places, which is what they really liked.
00:14:48.680 | So they'll go out, they'll do a week-long circuit all around the desert or all around the mountains.
00:14:53.360 | They'll spend a week out there, they come back for a week into civilization.
00:14:59.040 | And that was how they were enjoying their retirement years.
00:15:01.440 | I have not yet met a more enthusiastic, just energetic couple than that couple.
00:15:09.360 | Both of them thin, strong.
00:15:11.320 | They were out, they were in their mid seventies.
00:15:13.800 | They were out hiking every day.
00:15:15.760 | They would hike eight miles up a mountain.
00:15:17.360 | My wife and I, after visiting with them, we walked back and I said to her, I said, I want to be like that when I'm 75 years old, just filled with vigor, filled with enthusiasm, filled with vitality.
00:15:28.600 | And there's just one more piece of evidence that you can, you can, you can do it.
00:15:36.800 | You don't need huge amounts.
00:15:39.200 | Now I emphasize that not to discount the value of a big motor coach, if that's what you want.
00:15:44.680 | I think those things are so cool.
00:15:46.760 | I'd love to have a big motor coach.
00:15:48.520 | I think it would be so fun, but you don't have to wait.
00:15:51.960 | Now that couple was wealthy, but I've met all kinds of people who either weren't wealthy, but wise in their spending or just chose a different path.
00:16:01.600 | Your ability to control your, your emotions and your desires really will make a big difference.
00:16:08.760 | So, and financially, RVing is very, very doable.
00:16:13.080 | My wife and I have a running bet going.
00:16:14.960 | She thinks that our, us being on the road will cost a lot more than our expenses and our budget when we were at home.
00:16:21.960 | I predicted to her that it wouldn't.
00:16:24.320 | Now, the problem is that you, you have to look at different categories.
00:16:28.360 | You wind up spending money on different things and time will tell.
00:16:31.400 | I'm not ready to do a complete analysis of everything because we're still getting things worked out.
00:16:36.600 | But we'll see.
00:16:37.400 | So far, I think I'm winning that we're actually spending less money on the road than we were in a stationary stationary environment.
00:16:45.800 | But that's a little bit hard to, to predict, especially when you start bringing in activities and kind of neat experiences that you wind up doing more of.
00:16:54.040 | And I don't, I'm not committed to spending less money, but I do say to you this.
00:16:57.960 | I want to do a series of shows in the future on basically having a backup plan in case your life falls apart.
00:17:06.000 | And I, one of the things I love about having an RV, and I don't think you have to have an RV, I'll tell you how to do it without.
00:17:13.120 | But one of the things I love about having an RV is you always have a low cost backup plan that you can turn back to and have reasonable, very reasonable comfort in terms of your living expenses.
00:17:25.440 | I think it's wonderful.
00:17:26.560 | So more on budgets in just a moment.
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00:20:23.800 | Now, let's talk about I think we'll talk just a little bit about finances and then I'll talk about gear and give you some specific things that have gone well and some specific suggestions that I hope will help you.
00:20:37.960 | So, first of all, one of the neat things that I have proved in the last month about finances of RV is if you can deal with the finances of the purchase, all the stuff that I talked about, like buying buying an RV, keeping it on the road, all that stuff,
00:20:52.520 | which is not easy, then once you're actually on the road, the finances can be very controllable, which is really satisfying, at least to me.
00:20:59.960 | Now, the hard part is figuring out how to buy an RV and to buy it and own it at a decent price.
00:21:07.880 | I have struggled and struggled to figure out whether I think it's a good idea to buy new RVs or used RVs.
00:21:13.680 | And it's not a simple and easy question.
00:21:16.120 | It's it's really I'm unpersuaded one way or the other.
00:21:20.360 | One of the things that is great, of course, about finding getting a new RV is you get something that's going to have its maximum useful lifespan.
00:21:29.000 | And if you know you're going to have it for a long time, I think that's well worth your pursuing.
00:21:33.720 | Buying RVs is very difficult to do well, especially if you're not familiar with them.
00:21:38.800 | Buying used RVs is difficult.
00:21:40.480 | All the systems are different.
00:21:41.480 | I'm a lot more confident today than I was five years ago.
00:21:44.480 | I've messed with enough things that I'm much more confident.
00:21:47.720 | But five years ago, I didn't have a clue.
00:21:49.800 | And so I've learned a lot.
00:21:51.080 | And you can really get burned on buying a used RV if the little systems don't work.
00:21:56.280 | If your refrigerator doesn't work, if your converter doesn't work, if your toilet doesn't work, you might think you got a deal, but it costs you so much to swap all that stuff out.
00:22:05.400 | That really wasn't worth it.
00:22:07.760 | The problem is in buying a new RV, most new RVs are junk, even though they're new.
00:22:13.920 | I have kept a running research project going where I talk to people at campgrounds, especially those who have brand new RVs.
00:22:21.000 | And I ask them about all the things that are breaking on them.
00:22:23.400 | And they basically all have tons of stories of stuff that's breaking on them.
00:22:28.000 | So you can't buy a new RV and expect it to not break.
00:22:32.160 | The problem of what's happening right now in 2018, as I record this, is people are buying RVs faster than ever before.
00:22:39.440 | The RV industry, I think, is selling over half a million RVs a year.
00:22:43.360 | If you do the math on that, it's a lot.
00:22:46.520 | Over half a million a year.
00:22:48.760 | And basically any company, if they can put something out and sell it, I mean, they're going fast.
00:22:54.960 | And so they're building them as fast as they can.
00:22:57.280 | And the quality control is not good.
00:23:00.120 | It's really not.
00:23:01.920 | That means that people wind up with stuff being broken.
00:23:07.240 | I talked to a Canadian guy who had bought a brand new one, came down to the States to buy an RV because he saved 15 grand from not buying it in Canada.
00:23:15.640 | And all these problems, I don't need to go into all the details, but I'm unpersuaded that it's best to buy a new RV.
00:23:23.440 | But I'm also unpersuaded it's best to buy a used RV.
00:23:26.000 | I think your goal is just to buy something that is good.
00:23:28.400 | Now, how to find good is tough.
00:23:30.560 | Get an inspection, etc.
00:23:32.440 | But once you get that dealt with, then actually being on the road is really satisfyingly controllable.
00:23:40.240 | I have been impressed, especially out here in the western United States, of how many places there are that you can be for free, which is really cool.
00:23:48.920 | Out here in the western United States, there are actually tons of local campgrounds where they're cared for by the city.
00:23:55.160 | They usually don't provide electricity and water, which is why you need to be prepared to handle those things yourself.
00:24:01.960 | But they'll give you a nice spot, a nice grassy spot, nice place to stay for several days.
00:24:07.560 | Some of the parks that we've stayed in have limits up to 14 days in town parks out here in the western United States.
00:24:13.560 | The western United States, in my opinion, is probably the best place to RV because of the there's so many more options.
00:24:20.760 | But that's coming from someone who hasn't spent a lot of time on the East Coast.
00:24:25.120 | I don't have much desire to spend much time on the East Coast, but I haven't spent much time there in an RV.
00:24:30.520 | But in the western United States, tons of options, tons of places to stay for free, tons of places to stay for $10 a night, tons of places even to stay for $10 to $20 to $30 a night, including your electric and water consumption, which is really cool.
00:24:46.760 | So if you think about your current expenses and you think that we stayed at one place that was $20 a night, included electric and water, and it was right in a town, it was in Colorado.
00:24:57.840 | If you think about being able to stay somewhere $20 a night and include that includes your place to be, your electric bill, your water bill, that's a pretty decent savings.
00:25:08.720 | Now, of course, you're living in a little trailer.
00:25:11.960 | Let's be realistic.
00:25:13.120 | You're not living in a mansion, but that's pretty cool from the perspective of money saving.
00:25:19.680 | The neat thing about it is you can control your expenses essentially on a daily basis.
00:25:27.360 | So what I try to do in order to maintain a sense of the budget is to figure out, are we going to spend money today on fuel?
00:25:33.080 | Are we going to spend money on lodging or are we going to spend money on food and entertainment?
00:25:37.760 | And basically try to pick one.
00:25:40.120 | Let me explain what I mean.
00:25:41.080 | My rig, a diesel pickup truck and a 10,000 pound travel trailer gets about 10 miles per gallon.
00:25:46.800 | So that means that every 100 miles with diesel prices, they are right now, every 100 miles costs about $30 to $35.
00:25:54.880 | And so if you just mentally know that 100 miles is $35 of fuel, then you can budget accordingly.
00:26:00.960 | How many miles do you want to go?
00:26:02.320 | Of course, I've got small children.
00:26:04.320 | We don't want to do that many miles, although I did admit that we've done 4,500 miles in the last month.
00:26:13.400 | So that's a lot.
00:26:15.360 | But the point is, you can, that sounds like such a lie to say don't drive that much and then to actually do the math on how many miles that is.
00:26:26.000 | It's a lot of miles.
00:26:26.760 | You can predict that.
00:26:30.000 | And if you plan out 100 miles in a day, you can figure out, okay, I've got $35.
00:26:34.560 | You wanted to 200 miles, there's $70.
00:26:36.560 | Now you can also then factor that into your campsite.
00:26:41.200 | Now I don't do this exactly, but here's just one way that it could be done.
00:26:45.480 | 100 miles is $35.
00:26:47.040 | Plan on a night of camping, usually being about $30, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what kind of place you're at.
00:26:54.040 | So what you really can do is if you're having a driving day, then stay for free somewhere.
00:26:59.600 | So we've stayed at a number of rest areas, which it works out really well.
00:27:03.080 | There's some awesome rest areas, especially ones off the beaten track where there's just beautiful rest areas.
00:27:07.840 | We stayed at one rest area in Kansas that was absolutely gorgeous.
00:27:11.640 | We had a little private loop with a manicured grass lawn in front of us.
00:27:16.520 | We were quite a ways away from the highway and there were two other RVs there that showed up later after we'd gone to bed and we had no cost.
00:27:24.360 | And there in Kansas, they had dump stations at all the rest areas, et cetera.
00:27:27.680 | So you can just make, okay, tonight we're staying at a rest area.
00:27:30.960 | And this is one thing we've kind of done.
00:27:32.960 | If we're going to have a long travel day, then let's not try to be at a campground where I actually want to be.
00:27:37.880 | Let's try to just stay at a rest area.
00:27:39.720 | And so that works out well.
00:27:41.040 | You can balance that.
00:27:42.040 | Then the third thing, of course, that you can balance is food.
00:27:44.400 | So if you were trying to keep to a strict budget, you just choose.
00:27:48.640 | Is today are we going to do food and entertainment?
00:27:50.800 | Today, are we going to stay at a great campground or today are we going to travel?
00:27:55.000 | And you can balance those costs out, which is pretty cool.
00:27:58.240 | Now, in order to do that, what you need to do is you need to be able to to be comfortable without hookups.
00:28:03.000 | And I think that is the key thing.
00:28:05.640 | Now, in this world, you can spend as much money as you want to be as comfortable as you possibly can.
00:28:11.600 | But what I've tried to do is try to figure out what's a sensible way to figure out how to be comfortable.
00:28:17.680 | Now, being from the South and knowing that it'd be RVing in the South, I consider air conditioning mandatory, especially with young children.
00:28:25.040 | Myself, the humidity of the South, traveling, got to have air conditioning, which means you need a generator.
00:28:29.800 | And what I chose to do was to get a an inexpensive Champion generator.
00:28:36.040 | If you do research on generators, you'll quickly find that, of course, a Honda and a Yamaha are really great.
00:28:43.040 | All RVs usually come with an Onan, which is great.
00:28:45.680 | And there are a bunch of other ones.
00:28:47.000 | But the deal that I came found decided was the best for this type of application was to get a dual fuel generator from Champion.
00:28:55.600 | Champion is a pretty good generator company that sells the generators a number of places, but they sell them through Costco.
00:29:03.160 | And the reason I wanted them was because the built in dual fuel capability.
00:29:07.240 | You can take other brands of generators, for example, probably the best generator out there would be a Honda 2000 or Honda 3000 watt generator.
00:29:18.720 | They're wonderful.
00:29:20.000 | And they cost a thousand bucks for the 2001 and 2000 bucks for the 3000.
00:29:24.080 | You can take them and you can modify them.
00:29:26.240 | And so that they'll perform on multiple fuels, you can actually do a tri fuel modification on a Honda 2000.
00:29:32.280 | And the Honda so it'll run on natural gas and on propane.
00:29:35.560 | And I recommend that to you.
00:29:37.040 | It's a it's an awesome thing to do.
00:29:38.920 | The Honda 2000 is awesome.
00:29:40.600 | It's quiet, it's efficient, it'll last for decades.
00:29:43.880 | It's just a tremendous generator.
00:29:45.680 | And if you do the multi fuel conversion, that can give you a huge number of options for your generator.
00:29:51.560 | The if you can, if you can run it on natural gas, and you have natural gas piped into your home, that means you have a tremendous backup system for your home power needs to charge a battery bank or to charge, keep your refrigerator going, etc.
00:30:04.120 | You're not going to run your whole house on a Honda 2000.
00:30:06.120 | But you could put a couple of them together and do pretty well.
00:30:09.200 | But and then with the propane, it gives you the ability to easily store fuel for the long term.
00:30:14.200 | And propane is a really useful fuel because it's so easily storable without modification.
00:30:20.800 | If you're going to keep gas on hand for your generator use, you need to treat the gas if you're going to use it in anything more than a month or so.
00:30:28.120 | That's the problem with gasoline, it breaks down quickly.
00:30:30.760 | But propane is very, very stable.
00:30:32.800 | And so you can just set aside half a dozen or a dozen home 20 pound propane cylinders in your house.
00:30:38.480 | And that'll give you a huge amount of fuel available to run a generator if and you don't have to touch it, you can just sit there for five years until you need it.
00:30:45.680 | If you have a generator that will run on it.
00:30:48.840 | Problem is, if you go with a fancy generator, like a Honda or like a Yamaha, you have a great asset, which will always keep its value, it'll last a long time, you can't buy a used one of those things for less than 800 bucks, 700 bucks.
00:31:01.440 | But but you have to pay 1000 bucks to get it and you have to then pay a few hundred bucks for the conversion kit, you have to cut all the cut it all apart to do it.
00:31:11.200 | Well, Champion sells a bunch of dual fuel generators, where they come from the factory, ready to go, you just plug a propane hose into it, or you pour gasoline into it.
00:31:20.040 | And I decided I didn't want to carry gasoline, I wanted to carry propane.
00:31:23.000 | Propane is easier to carry.
00:31:24.840 | It's not smelly.
00:31:26.360 | And the big thing that I like about propane is it doesn't varnish in the carburetor of the generator like gasoline does.
00:31:32.800 | If you've ever maintained small engines, you know that if you leave gasoline in the carburetor, next time you go to start it, it won't start.
00:31:40.200 | Now, of course, we all should use fuel with stabilizers, and we all should keep our stuff going.
00:31:45.600 | But the reality is it's a pain.
00:31:46.800 | But if you use propane, you don't have to do that.
00:31:49.440 | It just works because it all burns out when you're done.
00:31:52.960 | So I bought that now where I bought it, I would commend to do a great job was a website called super gen products.com.
00:32:01.560 | And what super gen products.com is, it's a champion refurbisher, where they refurbish generators, which I think they're primarily coming in from Costco.
00:32:10.960 | Now, of course, they can't put it on their website.
00:32:12.720 | But Costco sells generators, they sell a ton of champion generators.
00:32:16.880 | So you can get a great deal on a champion generator and other brands as well, but on a champion generator from Costco.
00:32:23.360 | And Costco has a very, very liberal return policy on their generator.
00:32:29.360 | So a lot of people will buy them and then return them.
00:32:32.080 | Well, super gen products takes those returns in from Costco, they refurbish them, they check them out, make sure that everything's good on them.
00:32:39.400 | And they sell them as refurbished models.
00:32:41.280 | So I was able to get a champion 3000 watt dual fuel generator for 550 bucks, something like that.
00:32:49.040 | And it's been flawless.
00:32:50.680 | It's been absolutely exactly what I wanted.
00:32:53.560 | It's quiet, it's an inverter generator.
00:32:56.280 | So it adjusts really well.
00:32:57.360 | It's very quiet.
00:32:58.640 | It does a great job.
00:32:59.560 | It runs my air conditioning, it's very efficient, etc.
00:33:02.040 | So with the generator, then you have the ability to run an air conditioning.
00:33:05.400 | And I calculated out basically to run an AC overnight in the south cost about 15 bucks worth of propane.
00:33:10.960 | So it's not cheap to run that, but it's certainly very, very reasonable.
00:33:15.680 | And that allows you to stay if you need to at a rest area on the side of the road and be very comfortable.
00:33:20.320 | You set up the generator, turn on the propane and you're good to go.
00:33:24.480 | So that was a good gear move that worked really well.
00:33:29.080 | Another good gear move that I did was upgrade the batteries on my travel trailer.
00:33:34.240 | And here it's hard to figure out what you'll need.
00:33:36.920 | So I'll share with you what I did and what is working about it.
00:33:39.920 | Most travel trailers, the small ones, meaning cheap ones, usually they'll come with one deep cycle battery on the front end.
00:33:49.160 | And that's there in case you need to use it.
00:33:52.280 | If that's there to run the slide in and out if you need to.
00:33:55.520 | But there's not a huge amount of capacity there because most people who use travel trailers don't use them off grid.
00:34:01.200 | They usually will stay in a campground plugged in.
00:34:04.440 | And so they usually won't need the battery power.
00:34:06.600 | But if you want to be able to camp without hookups, then you're going to need some more battery power because there are a number of things that run with batteries.
00:34:13.720 | Of course, obvious is lights, but also your water pump to take water from your tank underneath to work, to flush the toilets, to use the sink, etc.
00:34:22.600 | Also your heater, if you're going to use your heater that has a fan that runs on 12 volt.
00:34:26.720 | So there are a number of these systems where you really need that 12 volt system to be there and you need electrical power and you don't want to be setting up your generator all the time.
00:34:33.440 | You got to have the generator to run the the the trailer air conditioning, but it's a pain to set it up just to turn a light on.
00:34:41.560 | So I didn't know exactly how much battery capacity I would need.
00:34:45.280 | So I went ahead and I upgraded from one single deep cycle battery to a pair of six volt golf cart batteries wired together in series to bring them up to 12 volts.
00:34:55.680 | I was able to find a battery box online that just fit two six volt batteries perfectly.
00:35:01.040 | Bought a couple of six volt batteries at Costco, and that has been great.
00:35:04.280 | It's been perfect.
00:35:05.800 | It gives me at least three days of ability to dry camp without having to turn on the generator.
00:35:11.440 | It could probably push it farther if necessary, but I don't I want to be nice to my batteries.
00:35:16.000 | And so I haven't done that.
00:35:17.800 | But three days I consider to be very, very nice with, of course, power conservation.
00:35:23.960 | But that's been really good.
00:35:25.640 | So I feel like that's the that was the ideal balance.
00:35:27.760 | With regard to battery power, you can set up a rig with massive battery capacity.
00:35:32.960 | You really can't. It requires a little bit of wiring, but you can do it.
00:35:35.880 | You can set up a rig with you can buy some modern lithium batteries.
00:35:39.800 | If I were full timing, I would seriously I am full timing.
00:35:42.400 | If I were doing it for years and I felt I could recoup the investment, I would certainly consider swapping out the sealed lead acid batteries for lithium batteries and going with that instead, just because you get so much more capacity, so much more ability to run them down low.
00:35:58.720 | They're just really good, but they're hugely expensive.
00:36:02.160 | But a couple of golf cart batteries bought a huge amount of a huge amount of ability to dry camp, which which is really good.
00:36:10.480 | If you pair a generator like I described with batteries, we could we could well with regard to electrical power, we can go for a very, very long time on that minimal equipment.
00:36:22.200 | I'm currently carrying 220 pound propane cylinders in the bed of the truck, and then the trailer has 230 pound propane cylinders.
00:36:30.400 | So I could go at least a couple of months with electrical power just with that minimal setup that I described there.
00:36:37.680 | That's pretty cool.
00:36:39.080 | The big constraint, of course, usually is water.
00:36:41.040 | And before I go on to water, one more comment on batteries, etc.
00:36:47.760 | Obviously, solar panels are awesome.
00:36:50.520 | I have chosen not to add any solar capacity thus far just because I wanted to see what would what would work, etc.
00:36:58.400 | And the generator is much more useful to to run the air conditioning, which was my big thing.
00:37:03.200 | But solar panels, I think I'll probably add a couple of panels at some point in the future.
00:37:07.680 | You cannot beat the idea of of just while you're driving down the road, your batteries are staying topped up.
00:37:14.080 | That's it's awesome.
00:37:15.360 | And when you live in a house that is so designed for that, where everything is sized for it to run off the batteries, it's just a pretty cool way of being maintaining some energy independence.
00:37:25.880 | And I really like that.
00:37:26.760 | Which brings me to water.
00:37:28.160 | The big constraint usually for RVers is access to water.
00:37:33.640 | Our rig has a 51 gallon water tank, which is pretty decent.
00:37:37.840 | And we've been able to go up to a week, almost a week on 51 gallons.
00:37:44.440 | Now I do confess that my wife and I are both pretty decent at water conservation.
00:37:49.920 | She's pretty cool.
00:37:50.760 | Where instead of her griping about it, she's really good at watching it.
00:37:54.920 | I think most people would not be able to stretch 50 gallons of water that long, but that includes baths for the children, et cetera.
00:38:01.840 | And then of course baths for us every day.
00:38:04.280 | And just by being careful.
00:38:06.520 | The big thing that I, one of the things I found I really love about RVing is the energy efficiency of it.
00:38:12.560 | Just the ability to care for those resources.
00:38:15.360 | I really don't like how most of our modern houses are designed.
00:38:19.800 | They're really wasteful with regard to how we use, especially water, electricity.
00:38:24.880 | Yes, but especially water.
00:38:26.600 | We use so much water in the modern U.S.
00:38:29.080 | American context, and I feel like it's just wasted.
00:38:32.440 | It doesn't need to be used the way it is.
00:38:34.120 | We use huge, all the water we take is drinking water that comes either out of the ground or into our house from the municipal system.
00:38:41.560 | And we use it really wantonly.
00:38:44.800 | Even when we wash our hands, we run a lot of water.
00:38:47.840 | When we take a shower, we run a lot of water.
00:38:49.800 | When we wash dishes, we run a lot of water.
00:38:52.120 | And most of that water could be used several times, which is actually what we do in the camper.
00:38:56.680 | So when you wash your hands, I put a basin under it because I don't want it to fill up the gray water tank really fast.
00:39:00.720 | But I put a basin under my hands and I can use that several times to wash my hands in the sink.
00:39:09.160 | And then you could turn around and take that and use that to flush the toilet.
00:39:14.000 | I wish all of our modern houses were built like that, where it were easy to collect the gray water and then use the gray water to flush the toilet if you need it for black water.
00:39:23.000 | Or it's easy to use the gray water and divert it outside of the house.
00:39:26.680 | If I ever build a house, one of the things I really want to do is I want to build it with two separate water systems.
00:39:34.920 | I want to build it with a gray water recycling system where all of the gray water is dealt with on the property and is used to water the garden instead of just going down the drain and being mixed with a
00:39:43.840 | bunch of feces, which makes it polluted.
00:39:45.680 | There's no need for it.
00:39:47.680 | There's no reason for it whatsoever.
00:39:49.200 | And so I really take a lot of pleasure in that in the RV.
00:39:51.840 | We save all of the bath water, the dish bins, etc.
00:39:54.720 | Use all biodegradable soaps.
00:39:56.160 | And then I can take that water and instead of pouring it down the gray tank, which means I then have to go and dump the tank sooner, I can take it out and pour it on the lawn.
00:40:02.640 | And I take a lot of pleasure out of seeing the green grass and all of that.
00:40:07.480 | So I really like living in the RV just from the systems efficiency.
00:40:11.480 | It's me, it's really feels really empowering to know exactly where all that stuff is coming from, to know where it's going to have control over it, have a sense of ownership over it.
00:40:20.120 | I've long thought that on a residential house, it would be really neat to own a lot of things instead of having to pay money for them on a regular basis.
00:40:30.360 | So why should I have to pay the water company in order for me to buy water from them when water just falls down on the roof of my house every day?
00:40:40.480 | Especially me living in Florida, there's so much water.
00:40:42.880 | If I could just collect that water and put it into nice big rainwater storage tanks, there's no reason whatsoever why I should be paying for water.
00:40:50.760 | But I do, right?
00:40:52.480 | Because our houses are built around living on the municipal grid.
00:40:54.840 | Well, that's stupid.
00:40:55.560 | Same thing with waste disposal.
00:40:58.040 | Why on earth should I pay the water company or the sewage company to take that sewage off of property when 80% of it is not at all hard to deal with?
00:41:09.640 | It's just water that can go in the flower beds.
00:41:12.120 | All houses should be designed with a gray water recycling system where all the water just flows right out into the flower beds and keeps the plants alive.
00:41:20.600 | It's stupid that we mingle it and send it down to the waste treatment plant.
00:41:23.960 | And then the same thing with human waste, with urine and feces, that's not that hard to deal with on a local basis.
00:41:33.040 | If I ever build a house, from the beginning, I really want to put in composting toilets, whether that's the primitive, just humanure out back, or whether it's the more modern composting toilets, just dealing with stuff on property.
00:41:45.320 | And if you do that, you can sever your connection to the water company.
00:41:49.480 | It's not that hard.
00:41:50.520 | It makes a lot of sense to me to purchase an asset, rainwater tanks and a pump and a filtering system to cleanse that water versus having an ongoing expense.
00:41:59.960 | I'd rather have an asset rather than an expense.
00:42:03.240 | And the same thing with electricity.
00:42:04.680 | Now, electricity is a little bit harder depending on the load that you're running.
00:42:07.440 | But I really love the idea of being able to own most of your electrical inputs.
00:42:14.280 | And I think it's really doable, especially as the price of photovoltaic solar panels has come down.
00:42:20.960 | And but even in this very limited state, I really enjoy having a little bit of control over the electricity and seeing how modest, how comfortable you can be with fairly modest electrical drains.
00:42:34.240 | I will share one failure.
00:42:36.520 | One of the things that I thought was going to work out really well was the Berkey water filter that we always use at home.
00:42:43.520 | There's a brand called a Berkey water filter.
00:42:46.680 | It's a very old brand, but it's a gravity fed filtration system.
00:42:51.000 | That just simply passes water through these carbon filled filters.
00:42:56.320 | And it's a really efficient system because it's gravity fed and it takes out all of the pollutants down to a very small level.
00:43:04.040 | And we've always used that at home for our drinking water, even coming from the tap.
00:43:10.320 | And one of the great things about it is you can purchase extra filters that will also remove fluoride and chlorine from your water as well.
00:43:18.680 | So that makes your city water really drinkable, it's just delicious.
00:43:22.240 | And you can be confident that it's really high quality.
00:43:25.000 | Well, my plan was that the Berkey was going to do exactly the same thing out camping, where all the water from the campground would just go right through the Berkey and that would give us all of our drinking water and it would be really low cost.
00:43:38.120 | The problem is I learned that the Berkey is not made for traveling.
00:43:42.240 | Basically, my Berkey fell over, I had taken it down and put it on the floor and kind of stuffed it while traveling, but it fell over on its side.
00:43:48.520 | And the way that the filter elements go inside of a Berkey water filter system, they're not designed for any kind of movement and they're not designed for the filter falling over on its side.
00:43:58.760 | Perfect system to sit on your home counter at home.
00:44:01.840 | But unfortunately, it just didn't work.
00:44:06.040 | Now, if I had it strapped to the wall permanently on the counter, maybe it would have worked in my rig.
00:44:11.640 | But the other thing that I found was actually I needed the space on the counter.
00:44:14.640 | So I switched to buying some, just buying filtered water cheap from the refilling in the grocery store.
00:44:22.040 | But I haven't found a new perfect solution for that.
00:44:25.120 | But that was a failure so far in terms of gear.
00:44:27.000 | The Berkey didn't work out well in the camper like I thought it was going to.
00:44:29.560 | Which leads me to the final thing that really hasn't worked well.
00:44:33.120 | And I'll wrap up with this.
00:44:34.960 | And that's working on the road.
00:44:36.320 | It has not worked well at all.
00:44:40.200 | I'm still solving the problems, but there are basically two problems.
00:44:44.520 | The first is a problem of my own making of simply moving too much.
00:44:49.080 | And that hopefully will be coming to an end here.
00:44:52.400 | But it takes a lot of work.
00:44:54.120 | There's certainly a lot of extra work involved with living in a vehicle versus living in a stationary environment.
00:45:01.080 | There's also a lot of work with everything being new.
00:45:03.360 | Everything is hard because when you're going to a new place, you've got to find everything.
00:45:07.400 | You've got to figure everything out.
00:45:08.400 | You've got to set up, tear down.
00:45:10.080 | And also when you're moving fast, you wind up doing that a lot more.
00:45:13.840 | And so I have found it challenging to figure out when to work and how to work.
00:45:18.560 | So that's part of it is moving too fast.
00:45:20.800 | We originally were planning to stay at least four days in every place.
00:45:25.840 | And now we haven't done that.
00:45:28.640 | But now even I'd like to stay at least five or six days, etc.
00:45:34.920 | But now that we're out of the heat and into a colder climates, then it's much more doable to be much more comfortable.
00:45:41.560 | So that I can solve.
00:45:43.080 | The second thing, though, that I haven't solved is where to work.
00:45:45.640 | And that is just having a controlled environment.
00:45:48.800 | I appreciate more than I ever have the value of a controlled environment, a controlled office environment where, you know, it's going to be quiet.
00:45:56.040 | It's going to be weather protected, etc.
00:45:57.840 | I didn't value that when I was younger.
00:45:59.320 | I always thought it was, I always was attracted to the allure of working from a coffee shop.
00:46:04.920 | Well, I don't like working from coffee shops.
00:46:09.560 | I like the other parts of life.
00:46:13.000 | And if I have to work from a coffee shop to have the rest of the life, I'll take it.
00:46:16.600 | I'll do it.
00:46:17.120 | But it's tough to be productive in such uncontrolled environments.
00:46:21.600 | You never know what you're going to get.
00:46:22.840 | And especially because so much of my work is audio based, just having a quiet place is important.
00:46:28.480 | And then dealing with the weather is also tough.
00:46:30.920 | I thought it would be easy to work outside and just, oh, I'll just sit at a picnic table.
00:46:34.760 | But a good example, perfect example.
00:46:36.920 | As I record this show, it's currently 830 in the evening and I am sitting at a little park in a little park at a playground 20 minutes away from where my family is.
00:46:49.880 | Because at this particular time, I needed to get to a cell phone signal tonight.
00:46:53.960 | But I tried to sit down and record the show earlier this afternoon.
00:46:57.240 | So I took my gear out and I've got a very streamlined office environment.
00:47:00.640 | I took my gear out and I set it up at a picnic table in a quiet little corner of the park.
00:47:04.800 | And I sit down and I did my intro for the show, you know, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.
00:47:08.840 | And I had just finished the music and the sprinklers in the park turned on right on me.
00:47:16.600 | And so here I am madly scrambling to flip my laptop screen closed and pack up my audio recorder and put away my $350 microphone.
00:47:27.040 | And so it doesn't get ruined by the water.
00:47:28.880 | And I mean, I've got $1,500 worth of, no, I've got $2,000 worth of electronic equipment sitting on the table in front of me.
00:47:38.480 | And here I am sitting under a sprinkler at a picnic table.
00:47:43.120 | I had to laugh at the absurdity of that particular thing.
00:47:48.920 | It's just utterly absurd that here I am.
00:47:51.320 | Well, you can fill in the blanks.
00:47:55.440 | So I haven't solved that yet.
00:47:57.000 | I need a more controlled environment.
00:47:58.840 | And so I'm thinking about getting a truck.
00:48:00.600 | The problem is I didn't want a bigger trailer, which would have more separation space.
00:48:05.360 | I'm thinking about getting a cheap truck camper, a pop-up camper to put on the back of my pickup truck and use that as an office.
00:48:11.440 | I may, I haven't decided yet.
00:48:14.400 | I'm not sure.
00:48:14.960 | But once I saw, I got to figure out how to solve that.
00:48:17.600 | And because I need to get more work done.
00:48:22.520 | And that's been really tough.
00:48:23.880 | I'm not being too hard on myself because it's just a pace of adjustment in a period of a month.
00:48:28.600 | But that has been a challenge.
00:48:32.640 | I got to figure out how to solve that.
00:48:33.920 | So in closing, I would say it's not all great.
00:48:36.400 | You're at the end of the day, you got to love the fact that at the end of the day, you got to reconcile the fact that you're living in a very small space.
00:48:45.080 | Patience is required.
00:48:46.880 | My patience is frequently tried and tested.
00:48:49.840 | My wife's patience is frequently tried and tested.
00:48:53.680 | But we're thankful for those opportunities to build our patience.
00:48:57.520 | But if you're not one who can handle that, I discourage it.
00:49:01.240 | And you got to want the stuff outside of the RV.
00:49:05.160 | I don't view RVing as awesome.
00:49:07.120 | I view the stuff you can do while RVing as awesome.
00:49:11.040 | Just the cool places you can go, the neat things you can do, and the way that you can do them on a pretty reasonable budget.
00:49:17.040 | I think many people would agree that is the cool things.
00:49:19.600 | And I'll close, I guess, with this.
00:49:21.560 | One of the biggest benefits that we really hoped we would get from this particular trip is being achieved.
00:49:27.000 | It's just a sense of disconnectedness.
00:49:29.360 | I have found myself, I may not have been able, I may not have been getting as much work done as I wanted to get done.
00:49:36.560 | My personal productivity was down, but I'm a lot more peaceful than I was a couple of months ago.
00:49:43.360 | A lot less connected than I was a couple of months ago.
00:49:47.960 | We've seen more sunsets in the last month than we have for a long time before.
00:49:53.240 | And so we're really enjoying those aspects of it as well.
00:49:56.760 | And as the work gets figured out so that it gets everything gets more streamlined, still got rid of more stuff to make things squared away, then it is working out to be a pretty cool experience.
00:50:08.440 | So I'll share more with you.
00:50:10.160 | It's not all fun and games.
00:50:12.920 | I'll try to share very honestly with you because I know you may have the same goal that I have and you're looking to try to figure things out.
00:50:19.320 | I mean, I used to scour the Internet to try to figure out what kind of mileage would I be able to get when towing different kinds of trailers?
00:50:25.760 | Well, if you tow a 10,000 pound travel trailer with a diesel pickup truck, you get about 10 miles a gallon.
00:50:30.000 | There's your answer.
00:50:30.680 | That seems to be pretty, pretty constant.
00:50:33.640 | No matter whether you have a brand new one or a 20 year old one, they seem to get about 10 miles a gallon.
00:50:39.760 | So I used to scour the Internet for these answers, try to figure out what to do.
00:50:43.160 | And at the end of the day, you got to just do it.
00:50:46.040 | But I will say that I'm satisfied with our approach so far.
00:50:50.440 | I don't regret a single thing.
00:50:52.640 | I think we made good decisions about trying to go inexpensively so that to spend enough money to get adequate equipment without getting excessively expensive equipment to make expensive mistakes.
00:51:06.360 | I'm satisfied with that.
00:51:08.760 | Everything is basically worked.
00:51:10.360 | So I commend it to you if you have any interest.
00:51:14.040 | If you have any specific questions, write to me or post them on the blog page for today.
00:51:19.400 | And I'll try to answer more specific questions in the future.
00:51:22.800 | But in the meantime, I will bid you all good night from the Rocky Mountains of the Western United States.
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00:52:02.600 | (upbeat music)