Why We Choose To Live In Our RV

Why would anyone choose to sell most of their belongings, pack up their family and live in a 35′ RV? To many it sounds like anything but the American Dream, but to us?

This IS our dream!

We are still young, both Sarge and I being in our early 30’s, but we’ve already done the big, beautiful, 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 3 car garage, house with a fenced yard in the suburbs. We had the 2 cars, the white (ok, it was actually blue) picket fence, 2 kids and a dog…We had a beautiful home, filled with STUFF. When we moved into that house, we thought we’d finally made it. We thought that we’d be happy and life would finally be amazing. And then… it wasn’t. We felt blessed to have what we had… but it just didn’t make us happy or satisfied. Instead, we were tired. So incredibly tired.

We thought this was our dream… 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 3 car garage. The day we walked away from this house was the most incredibly freeing day!!

Tired of being house poor.
Tired of the rat race.
Tired of living in debt.
Tired of keeping up with the Jones’.
Tired of never being home long enough to enjoy our home.
Tired of not being able to visit family.
Tired of never seeing any friends.
Tired of the endless cleaning, yard work and repairs.
Tired of the busy-ness that kept us exhausted.

Just SO tired.

I can’t answer for all the families out there that choose to live this lifestyle, but for us, we were craving simplicity. We wanted more time to spend together as a couple and with our kids. While we don’t desire to be filthy rich, we are so tired of throwing away money and living bound by debt. It wasn’t something that came to us overnight, but rather it’s something that we’ve spent the entire 7 years of our marriage thinking and dreaming about. We nearly purchased an RV a few months into our marriage, but having military orders to England at the time, we decided the timing wasn’t right – who wants to buy something just to put it into long term storage?! In hindsight, we know that the England orders got cancelled and we should have just gone for it way back then. Just in rent alone, we estimate that we have spent $72,350 in the 6.5 years we were married before we moved into the RV.  Given what we paid for our rig, we would still have $48,350 to our name had we made the purchase sooner.  C’est la vie!

2013-2014 were incredibly difficult years that included a tragic accident overseas which killed 4 men from my husband’s military unit and 2 subsequent deployments where Sarge came home recovering from major surgery and seriously injured. In October 2014, he made the decision to leave the military. The decision wasn’t easy — it was full of tears, unknowns, fears, and letting go of the dream he thought he had. Not just for his life, but for everything we had ever pictured for our family. The events of those two years changed us in ways we didn’t know possible. We had so many questions and our faith was strengthened as we turned to God, searching for answers. We knew there HAD to be something more out there for us and if we didn’t make a change, how could we ever expect to find what we were looking for?

Life isn’t perfect now. Sarge still goes to work most days. We still have time apart. We’re still working on debt. We still have bad days, and that silly laundry pile still has to get washed. We have more too…. more time together, more time to explore the world around us, more appreciation for the simple things in life. The big difference is that we choose to believe happiness is something WE create. We have created a life where LESS is more… more of what really matters. We have so much less stress than we ever did before. We have really discovered who we are and what we want our life story to be about and we are so much happier because of what we have chosen and created. It was a chance we had to take, and it’s changed our lives for the better.