Full time RVers answer top 7 MOST asked questions about RV life

Hey everyone, I'm Hillary. And I'm Chris and we're with Fuel Your Wander. Today we're going to be doing a full in-depth dive into the seven most commonly asked questions that we get about living and traveling full-time in an RV. So we've been traveling in our RV for the past three years now but we've been living full-time in our motorhome for the past two years and over the past couple years we've gotten a lot of questions whether it be in comments, direct messages, emails, etc. I think people are just really curious about this lifestyle and how we're able to make it work so we'll be addressing the seven most commonly asked questions. Yeah the seven most out of all of the questions we've gotten. And why seven? Because seven is my favorite number. It's a great number. Exactly. All right and so these are going to be ranked in order of the most common so we'll save the best for last which is the number one most commonly asked question. So reverse order. We're doing reverse order. Let's start with question number seven. How do we decide our route and how do we find places to stay in our RV? Well that one's easy. That's simple. Hillary makes the decisions on where we're gonna go and I drive. I do all the planning and Chris does all the driving. No, all kidding aside, we basically try to decide where we want to go and because we live in an RV we like to chase the good weather. So as an example, last summer we knew that we wanted to go the Pacific Northwest so we wanted to stay in Oregon and Washington. We were starting in North Carolina. So basically I just plan our route out using something like Google Maps where I can figure out how we can go from North Carolina all the way to the West Coast in the time that we want to go and make sure we're stopping at some of the main places that we wanted to visit. Like we knew we wanted to visit a couple national parks and some of the big cities like Portland and Seattle so we kind of just made that work and figured out the path that we could take and then I go and find RV parks on Google Maps that are in the area of places that we want to stay. Sometimes we have a lot of options on where we can stay and I'll do a lot of research to see what would be the best place. Other times we don't have a lot of options because of the size of our RV. There's just not many places to stay in the area so it really just kind of depends on where we're going, when we're going, etc. But typically we do try to book our trips about 9 to 12 months in advance because the high priority places in the high season book up really fast. Yeah I mean I give Hillary a lot of credit here. I like to think that we can just hop in the RV and go anywhere we want to go but it takes a huge amount of planning and a huge amount of thought to make sure that we're in the right place at the right time and you know not trying to drive a thousand miles in a single day. Yeah so number six what are the average monthly costs living full-time in an RV? Yeah I mean the average monthly costs for us are similar to what you might have if you had a house. Our average costs are quite variable depending on how much we drive. It's probably one of our biggest variable costs is the fuel price. So if we're not driving a lot our average cost per month is going to go down. But a lot of the other costs that we have are nightly costs in RV parks and again fuel and food and different things that you might have if you were living in a house or you weren't in an RV. But certainly we have quite a bit of variable costs. On average we typically spend about a hundred dollars per night on RV stays so that equates to about three thousand dollars a month. Some months we spend a lot less than that. Sometimes we'll stay in state parks and it's like 30 bucks a night. Other times like we're going to the keys in a couple weeks you know we'll spend a lot more than a hundred dollars a night for some of the really you know high priority high in demand places that we go. But on average it's about three thousand dollars a month for RV stays and that includes all the utilities. So it includes water, electric, sewer. The only utility we're really having to pay for is internet and our cell phone bill. So you know you can think about it you save a good bit of money because we're not having to pay for things like an HOA, property taxes, landscaping and lawn care and house renovations and those types of things. Yeah true and we do like to stay at nicer places so we probably spend a little bit more on average. I mean I'm getting a little older I like to have things a little bit more comfortable so. Yeah you can definitely find places that are a lot more affordable if you're looking for them. Number five how do we get along that well living in such a small space? That's a great question but it's a really hard one to answer honestly. I mean Hillary and I just get along extremely well. I don't have a great answer for that other than we like the same things. We like to do similar things. There are times that we may want a little bit of distance. She can go to the front of the coach, I can go to the back of the coach or I can go outside or she could go outside but we really don't spend more than five minutes a day apart from each other I don't think. Yeah when we used to live in a house we had a house that was almost 2,000 square feet and we were almost always in the same room so to us it didn't feel strange to be in a small space and I've said this before and I'll say it again like if you and your partner or whoever you're traveling with don't get along that well moving into an RV is not going to help. Like it is going to amplify the problems good and bad but it can be really challenging to live in such a confined space so you have to really really enjoy the person that you're traveling with. Yeah it's a magnifying glass right so it's going to magnify the good things and it's going to magnify the bad things so you have to make sure there's a lot of good things. Okay question number four I'm going to let you answer this one. Why do we flat tow our vehicle instead of using a trailer? This is probably the most controversial topic that we get in our videos. One word simplicity. That's the primary reason that we do it. If you have a trailer you have to manage the trailer. You have to hook up the trailer, you have to hook up the car, load the trailer. Then when you get to a park you have to find a place to unload the trailer. Then you have to find a place to park the trailer and manage the trailer, store the trailer, all of those things. It's so easy with the flat tow. All we do is hook it up once, tow it wherever we want to go, unhook it and we're good to go. A lot of times when we're in an RV park there isn't enough room for a trailer. There is only enough room for the RV and our additional vehicle. You know our jeep that we tow, don't quote me, is about 18 feet long, 20 feet long. If you were to put that on a trailer now you need a 25, 27, 30 foot trailer. So you're adding additional length also. So you just don't have enough space for a trailer. Yeah and most RV parks don't have spots that are that big. A lot of times the max space they'll have is like 50 feet. So our motorhome just fits. So having a trailer would be really difficult and it kind of limits where you can go. The one thing that I will say though, a trailer in this current situation we're in would have saved us. Some of you may have seen but our brand new 2023 Jeep Grand Cherokee recently broke down on us when we were in Arizona. And unfortunately the air suspension went out in the rear and we had to leave it in Arizona as we continued back east in the RV without our car. That was a really big downside to not having a trailer. If we had a trailer we could have just put the car on the trailer and trailered it to the next place that we were going to. Because we didn't have that we had to leave it in Arizona and now we're still waiting for it to get repaired and we're trying to figure out how we're going to get it. Yeah that's a good point. Number three, why don't we just stay in hotels or rental? Again another great question for us. I'd say the primary reason is that we have our house with us at all times. So we love to travel. I mean that is our channel and that is what we do right? Fuel our wander. So we're always trying to travel but we want to have our things with us. We don't want to sleep in a different hotel room every night. We don't have to want to sleep in a bed that a thousand other people have slept in. Plus we've got the dog right? We couldn't have the dog if we were traveling all over the place. We don't have to deal with airlines and air you know security checkpoints and all those things. We don't have security in the RV. We just kind of walk in and walk out at any time. Yeah and I think that's what most people don't realize is it's fun to travel. Chris and I have both flown extensively all over the world. We've stayed in some amazing hotels and resorts in different places and we still do that on occasion. That's not permanent. Like you can't do that all the time. It's very expensive. It's very ineffective. It's hard to see family. It's hard with our dog. You know we've got different factors and I think just being an RV kind of helps bring the best of two worlds together. You still get to travel full time but you get to have your home and all your things and what's important to you with you. Question number two kind of similar to the last question but why not just buy a house? Again I think that's a function of financial freedom honestly. If we had unlimited funds and we could afford to we might have 20 houses across the United States or 50 houses across the world if we win the lottery. There you go. But for us this allows us to travel have our home with us at all times and still continue again to fuel our wander. The whole concept here is that we're traveling and we both love to travel. Yeah and we've both owned a lot of houses in the past so both of us have owned houses before we met. We also owned a house together and owning a house can be a great investment. It's a great way to diversify your investments. Real estate you know you can make a lot of money with so we certainly aren't trying to discourage people from buying a because I think buying a house is a great idea. At this point in our lives though we just don't want to live in a house. We don't want the constraints of it. We want the freedom and a lot of people will ask like well are you going to go back to living in a house and the reality is probably at some point. I'm sure that we will. I can't imagine we'll live in an RV forever but right now we're just really enjoying the freedom and we're not thinking of the RV as a financial investment at all. It's an investment in experiences. Yeah definitely not a financial investment. Not a positive financial investment. Okay so the number one most commonly asked question that we get hands down out of all the questions and comments that we get is how do you afford to live full-time in an RV and I think the reality is people probably think Chris and I maybe are a little bit younger than we actually are but we're older than a lot of people would think. We're in our late 20s. Not quite but we wish but we've worked for a long time. We've made good investments over the years but one of the keys to being able to live full-time in an RV is the fact that we still work and we still bring in an income. Chris works full-time for a fortune 500 company. I used to work full-time in corporate marketing and I recently quit that job a little over a year ago now to actually pursue content creation full-time so I'm now able to bring in an income by creating videos and sharing content and doing things about our journeys. Yeah I mean one of the things that's important to recognize is that it doesn't cost more to live in an RV so we do get that question a lot about how you how do you afford it but it's no different from an expense perspective and in fact it's actually a little bit less expensive on a monthly basis on an average monthly basis to live in an RV versus a house. Like we mentioned earlier we tend to stay at nicer RV parks. You can definitely do this on a much less budget than we do like if you're looking to save money and live in an RV to reduce your expenses you definitely can. There's a lot of ways you can boondock a lot of places completely free. You can get memberships to different RV parks and campgrounds that can save you a lot of money for longer term stays. There's lots of options to save a lot more money so it really just depends on what your income is what your interests are and how you want to live. And the other thing too is we're incredibly grateful to have the ability to work remote. I think that was something the pandemic really shifted for a lot of people is being able to work fully remote so that is amazing. There's tons of remote jobs out there if you're looking for remote work but there's also things you can do in the RV world too like work camping so you can go work at different RV parks and campgrounds and you can stay for free and make an income. You can do content creation you know there's lots of opportunities out there and so there's ways that you can offset the costs of living this lifestyle. Yeah that's a great point there are lots of enablers if you will financial enablers as you're traveling. All right well thank you everyone so much for watching be sure to hit that subscribe button so you can stay up to date on all the latest videos and if you have other questions we would love love love to answer them so please drop us a comment with any questions that you might have. One of the ways that we got into this lifestyle was watching other channels and other YouTube videos so we really want to pay that forward and help inspire others to get into this lifestyle if it's something that you're interested in and we always really try to be transparent and honest about the pros and cons. We don't want to sugarcoat it this lifestyle is not for everyone and we certainly recognize that but for us it has truly been the experience of a lifetime. We love the comments so as Hilary mentioned just drop us a comment I tend to respond to as many of them as I can I certainly don't hit them all though we'll get as many of them as I can. We call Chris our CCO which is our Chief Commenting Officer he deals with most of the comments that we get usually if there's hate or something I can't deal with the hate so he'll filter it for me but he does a great job answering a lot of the questions and comments that we get in. All right everybody thanks for watching.