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Joe has handed the January 2016 expenses reporting duties to me and I’m very happy to say that this year is off to a good start. I think we’ve really gotten a good feel for RVing full time and found our groove. For those of you who have been following our reports since we started full timing know that we have been under budget every month. This month is no different and that includes a two day trip to Walt Disney World and a four night stay at Fort Wilderness, which cost us $742! That was the main highlight for January and you’ll notice that we started paying for health insurance which will be a recurring fixed cost at $462.
To view all reports, RV Living Costs: Full Time in a Motorhome for One Year.
Full Time RVing Costs: Motorhome Edition – January 2016:
Total Expenses: $2,856
Cost Per Day: $92.13
Total Miles Driven: 1,204
Generator Hours: 6
Jeep MPG: 17
RV MPG: 6.5
Nights At RV Parks / Family Farm: 19
Nights Spent Dry Camping: 12
Meals Eaten Out: 9
Expenses:
This month our expenses went up slightly, spending a total of $2,856 compared to $2,829 last month.
Here are a few notes about our expenses this month compared to previous months:
Food costs continue to decrease. We spent $366 total on groceries, eating out, coffee and alcohol. This is the lowest food cost we’ve reported since hitting the road in September. Most of our meals were made at home because we love to cook. Out of the nine meals we ate out, two of those meals were a treat from our family (Thank You!). We did eat our way through the Thai food market twice and feasted on the best Cuban sandwich and potato ball in Tampa, FL.
Fewest miles traveled in one month. January was the first month we stayed in one state for an entire month and traveled a short distance when we did move. As a result we spent $188 on gas compared to $353 last month and $907 in September 2015. It also helped that gas prices stayed low. We did see a decrease in MPG as a result of doing more driving on surface streets.
Miles on the RV: 506 – avg mpg 6.5
Miles on the Jeep: 698 – avg mpg 17
Below is the breakdown of fixed and variable costs. We reorganized the chart to show the fixed costs at the top and variable costs at the bottom.
Lessons Learned:
Some things we learned this month that we’d like to pass along.
Check the weather more frequently in Florida. We use Wunderground weather app and find it to be fairly accurate and up to date. Instead of checking it once a day, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking it two or three times a day especially if there is a possible storm rolling in. A sunny forecast in the morning can quickly change to thunderstorms in the afternoon and tornado warnings in the middle of the night as we experienced during the Tampa RV Show aka Florida RV SuperShow.
10G data plan was not enough. We upgraded our AT&T family plan to 15G in January. This has allowed us to upload more videos from home instead of driving to a coffee shop. Most of our videos come in around 500mb and some coffee shops have slow upload speeds, which means we can be there for 3 hours to upload a 5 minute video. Wifi access at RV parks have been non existent this month and we’ve relied heavily on our phones. By no means is 15G enough for us to freely use our phones, but it’s a significant improvement from the 10G plan we had.
To view all reports, RV Living Costs: Full Time in a Motorhome for One Year.
Hey guys! Could you show your expanded budget to include even more tiny details such as the coffee budget, car repairs, etc? I’m sure there are more areas in the budget including some savings/emergency fund, etc. Thanks for all the info, keep it up! 🙂 My husband and I are starting our 5 year plan this week!
Hey Wendy – We talked about doing something more detailed but realized that we’d just start going down the rabbit hole until we simply published each individual item (ie how much did we spend at Starbucks vs buying coffee for the RV) – hence we have chosen to bucket things because otherwise it’d just take too long to put these out. This is meant to give people a general idea of how much it costs us to live on the road, and not how much we spend on individual items. That said, everything we spend with the exception of business expenses (cards, camera equipment, etc) is included in these reports. We do have savings/emergency funds but don’t have any plans to disclose how much we have set aside. For us that is very personal and everyone is going to have a different amount they are comfortable with in order to live this life.
Awesome, makes sense thanks 🙂
I find your cost posts very helpful. On your RV Parks entry you have full hookup nights and free. Are the Free nights included in the hookup nights? In Jan you have 19 and 15. Do I read this as you paid for 4 of the 19 nights? I think it would be useful to see boondocking nights vs campground nights.
Mike – You read it correctly. We spent 19 nights at a park or on our family farm and paid for 4 of those nights, which were at Fort Wilderness. The other 12 nights in January were spent dry camping.
And after posting my comment I saw that you split out dry camping vs RV parks…
I have seen other RVers use Karma. Here is the website: https://yourkarma.com/how-it-works
Thanks for the suggestion Dave! We will look into Karma if our upgrade to 15G/month doesn’t work out.
Love that u r sharing budget info!!!!