January 2020 Expense Report – Fulltime RV Living

One of the most common questions we get asked is “What does it cost to live and travel in an RV Fulltime?” This is such a variable thing that it can be a hard question to find an answer to, and sometimes hard to answer as well. In order to give you a better idea, we decided to share our trackable RV living expenses for 2020. Each month, we’ll share a report with the details of what our expenses were.

What won’t be included – For the sake of simplicity and privacy, we’ll keep these reports focused on our RV living and general travel expenses. For transparency, We do have a storage unit and an RV site that we pay for at our home base. We have our motorhome and a small trailer (lives in storage) and both are paid in full. We debated sharing RV & Auto Insurance costs, but this is too variable by person/rig/coverage, etc.

We also won’t include personal expenses like gifts, haircuts, clothing, medical expenses or health insurance–things that really aren’t a function of our RV lifestyle. Those types of expenses can vary wildly from person to person, so we won’t include them in this monthly report.

Miles Traveled by RV – 1599 miles
Miles Traveled by Car – 3200 miles

Fuel Cost
Total – $1,000
RV – $470
Honda Pilot – $530.
This included a round trip to Denver, CO as well as 1 round trip to Rapid City, SD and several round trips to Scottsbluff, NE.

Camping Fees
Total – $770
Electric at CA RV Park (1.5 months) – $118.27
RV parks nightly costs en route – $166.71
Monthly @ Work Location (Mid Jan-Mid Feb) – $485.00

Propane
Total $68.00
We only use propane for supplemental heat from our furnace when our 2 space heaters need a little help. We had not filled propane since before Thanksgiving.

RV/Auto Maintenance & Repairs
Total: $477
Whew, what a month! This is definitely not our norm, thankfully.
Here’s the breakdown:
Oil & Filters for an oil change – $63.57
Tire repair – $78.40
Skirting – $85.06
Chains for RV Tires – $163.88
Tire sockets & Extension, Bottle Jack – $85.94

It is the first time we have skirted our RV. We used foam insulation board and tape from Home Depot. It was pretty straightforward and took a few hours of one afternoon.

We did end up returning the RV Tire chains, tire sockets, extension & bottle jack as we wound up not needing them. We will likely repurchase a few of these things in the future but wanted to do some research, specifically on tire chains.

Attraction Fees
Total – $0
We used our National Park Pass to see Mesa Verde National Park.

Souvenirs
Total – $10.30
We purchased a patch, magnet and small token at MVNP.

Groceries & Eating Out
Total – $1600
This is pretty misleading. We will figure out how to better track going forward. We decided to include this figure anyway and we’ll compare how accurate it was in future months.

Some notes for January grocery expenses:
– We focus on clean, good quality food including grass-fed and grass-finished beef and organic of the most important things. We also are sugar-free, gluten-free and low carb – virtually no processed or foods with artificial ingredients. We aren’t perfect, and our grocery budget is higher than some, but we feel better when we eat better.

– Thrive Market Annual Fee – We use this frequently to order some of our harder to find items at great prices.

– We ate most meals at home with the exception of 3 dinners while on day-trips. We did purchase Dairy Queen for Super Bowl Sunday, and twice we got our favorite Pizza to bring home and bake.

– The first 1/2 of January was spent in CA where grocery prices are much higher than typical. We stocked up on several specialty items that are harder to find before we left CA. We used Instacart delivery because traffic even just to the grocery store was a nightmare.

– We meal prepped a month of dinners for Travis and since he has not been working away from home, those are still frozen and ready to go. We also meal prepped breakfast & many lunches for a month for all 5 of us.

– We did 2 big Sam’s Club grocery hauls, stocking up on items we knew would be harder to find in a small city, which will carry us into mid-February.

WiFi
Total $90
We have 2 grandfathered unlimited lines with Verizon.
One is a phone hotspot and one is a jetpack.

Streaming Entertainment
Total $40
We cut the cable cord long before we went fulltime and have several streaming accounts including Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, Sling TV, & CBS. We watch more TV when we are in cold winter locations.

January 2020 Total Fulltime Expenses: $4,055.30

It’ll definitely be interesting to see how February compares!
If you travel fulltime, do you keep track of your monthly expenses?