I’ve been living in a motor home for five years. It’s pretty good for me, I work from home and have spent a good long time at dozens of national parks and other awesome places.
Also boring places. Moving all the time and fixing broken things can be stressful and staying in nice places can be expensive. But overall it’s been way better for me than sitting in a house and staring at the walls.
Terrible as I only find joy in a few things and the van life makes almost all of them impossible. I guess that’s the difference between choosing the van life, and the van life choosing you.
What is life worth if you cannot do what is most important to you?
Absolutely nothing. Less then nothing. Negative Nothing (sweet band name)
I move around every 4 months in the US. I stay in long-term Airbnbs (min 1 month stay). I work remote; so, the issue I mostly deal with is my working setup. No standing desk, comfortable chair, multi-monitor setup (using portable external monitor), etc.
Otherwise, the surroundings of the place I stay at is always a gamble. You never know if its a loud or safe neighborhood just by looking at the posting or street view on google maps. Sometimes there could be construction going on next door.
Eating around and exploring the country is the best part.
Hardest thing for me has been finding actual remote work. Look on any job board these days and everyone’s claiming “remote*” when they’re nothing of the sort.
I move every 2 weeks in an RV. So I roughly wake up in 26 different places over the year.
Internet is rough. But has gotten better over the years since I started.
I could imagine that socially it might be difficult for some.
But largely my routine is similar to if I were in a house/apartment:
Weekdays: work, cook/eat, walk/hike/explore, games, sleep. Weekends: groceries, cook/eat, chores/maintenance, relocate if needed, walk/hike/explore, games, sleep.
Oh - I usually remind people they’re giving up a dishwasher and laundry machines unless they’re going pretty big on their RV purchase.
Recently I’ve been parking during the summer and flying to different countries. It’s more or less the same - solid internet is a challenge and you get to work on a potential language barrier.
StarLink has been a game changer for me. Expensive as frick but so worth not having to find cell towers or monitor data caps anymore.
How do you deal with permanent addresses? I know like some jobs want you to have a permanent address and bank accounts want you to have a permanent address.
My residence is registered at my parents house. I’m fortunate for that – not sure what I’ll do when they pass.
The companies I work for are typically smaller - my bosses and teams usually know I’m a bit of a vagrant. When I get acquired by larger companies I’m a little more tight lipped and vigilant with VPN use.
There are mailbox services, you get a permanent address, they can email you your mail.
Banks are more sticky, they don’t just want a permanent address, they want your place of residence. If you’re always on the move, you can have an intended place of residence… They may not accept the commercial mailbox service addresses, and in that case most people use a friend or a relative as their official banking location, but use the mailbox service for all of the mail. I live here, but I get mail there. That works for most people
Okay, that’s good to know. Until we can ditch the entire banking system for crypto wallets on our phone, that bank account issue is going to be a bit of a noose around people’s necks.
As long as it’s one of the actually efficient cryptos.
Monero ftw
