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We were doing so well with our expenses and then August happened. If you watched our drive to Flagstaff video, you know that we completely blew our August budget. Our RVing expenses this month ended up being the highest one so far! It even surpassed our expenses in May when we paid over $800 for the RV windshield replacement. The reason for the spike is the amount of money we spent on gas at the end of the month. Subtract the outrageous gas cost and our RVing expenses would fall into the normal range.
To view all reports, RV Living Costs: Full Time in a Motorhome for One Year.
Full Time RVing Costs: Motorhome Edition – August 2016:
Expenses:
Total Expenses: $3,249
Cost Per Day: $104.81
Total Miles Driven: 3,404
Generator Hours: 1
Jeep MPG: 17.5
RV MPG: 7
Nights At RV Parks: 21
Nights Spent Dry Camping: 10
Meals Eaten Out: 9
August 2016 expenses were $686 more compared to last month. A normal range for our RVing expenses is $2,500-2,700.
Here are a few notes about our expenses this month compared to previous months:
Food costs decreased nearly $174. The decrease in food costs can be attributed to a few things. We were treated to three delicious meals by our YouTube subscribers this month. Spending time at our cousin’s house also meant several home cooked meals. A Costco run at the end of July helped offset our August food costs.
RV park costs were $260. Being in the Midwest has us tied to electric hookups so we can run the AC for our Siberian Husky. We did get to dry camp for a portion of the month. Two of the campgrounds we stayed at were Kenisee Lake Campground and Clay’s Park in Ohio.
Dog costs increased. We stocked up on Leo’s flea/tick treatment which will last six months.
We drove A LOT – 3,404 miles to be exact! Most of our time was spent in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. On August 29th, we started a long road trip from Ohio to California, which resulted in 2,660 miles on our gas coach. The Jeep Wrangler had over 744 miles put on it, 460 fewer compared to July. We also noticed a slight increased in fuel economy. Jeep increased from 17mpg to 17.5mpg. RV increased from 6.5mpg to 7mpg.
Miles on the RV: 2,660 – avg mpg 7
Miles on the Jeep: 744 – avg mpg 17.5
Below is the breakdown of fixed and variable costs.
Lessons Learned:
Some things we learned this month that we’d like to pass along.
Stay clear of popular campgrounds on weekends. Watch our video on campground etiquette to find out what promoted this lesson. One neighbor called security on us.
Have a plan in case of emergencies or family matters. When we found out we needed to be in California for a family matter, we went through our options and settled on driving to California together. Other options we considered were 1) store the motorhome and drive the Jeep Wrangler to California. 2) one of us fly, the other drive the motorhome and tow car to California. You never know when something can pop up so it’s good to have a plan ahead of time.
To view all reports, RV Living Costs: Full Time in a Motorhome for One Year.
I’m curious about the almost non-use of your generator. Owning a couple of older RV’s during the past dozen years, I know from experience (and big Onan repair bills ) that it is good for a generator to be run under load than not run at all. The warranty on your new generator most likely has something in there about voiding the warranty if you don’t run it so many hours a month. We run ours a lot, with all the hot weather this summer, when we pull into a Walmart lot the first thing we do after cranking up the TV antenna is to fire-up the generator to run the AC. Both of our televisions and Blu-Ray players are on 12 volts using small inverters, and that works great and does cut down on generator usage, compared to our previous motorhomes.
As a new owner of your recommended Renogy Solar system, I’m curious if you’ve been using yours on a regular basis. We really haven’t had a chance to give ours a good try, looking forward to doing so.
In the past year, we’ve put about 330 hrs on the generator which quite a bit in the year we’ve had it – so no concern about voiding any warranties. We’ve been at campgrounds most of July and August so we haven’t needed to use it but good reminder on running it to keep things fresh even if we’re at the campgrounds.
With regards to the Renogy Solar panels, again we haven’t had much use for them since we’ve been at so many campgrounds but we recently used them for our time in Flagstaff and are going to be publishing a video review of it soon.