How much $$

I assume you will be spending those winter months in Arizona, Texas, or Florida. The key will probably be where can you stay for much of the winter where the monthly site fees won't kill your budget? Or have you considered a part time work camp position somewhere warm during the winter months?

Where will you stay? RV parks about $35 to $60 a night
How far will you drive? gas $3 gal
How much do you eat? Costs us about $400 month
Add the rest of the basic monthly bills and you'll have a good idea of cost.

imouthere56 wrote:
We are going to start traveling in the winter months nov-april but my wife is nervous about $$. We are both 60 we have no pensions but about xxxk in savings. I will work 6 months when we return each year, we have about 1500 month in payments, car, MH and HOA fees. is this possible to do?

Our monthly bills are a few hundred less. But we try and travel as much as we can. Don't have a real pension just what we saved for retirement. Like you xxxK. We arch what we spend. Biggest expense is fuel and of course CC. We use good Sam, passport, koa discounts as much as we can. As well as extended stays to pick up free days. Don't really eat out a lot when traveling.
If you are working 6 months a year. Plan and budget for your trips. Look at different ways to invest your savings to get the most consistentcy on your return.
We only been at it for 2 years, but so far so good.

Just love it when the responses to a post are about it being a personal choice, open question, or "you should just do what makes you happy". I kinda get the feeling that the OP would just like to hear how others do it (how much - for what lifestyle), even though the question came out a bit odd.

Most of us don't react well to change in life and a change in lifestyle is one of the hardest to make successfully. That's why many will try to adjust their lifestyle into RV mode while they're still working doing a "test run" of retirement mode. If that's not possible then the next best thing is to do a worst case analysis of your financial situation by charting out your actual expenses over the past couple of years. Assuming no change in spending habits this will give you a pretty good idea of what it costs to continue living the way you have been.

Other things to look at are which expenses will be reduced realistically and which ones will increase with the lifestyle change. Commuting expenses and work lunches for instance should go down if you're no longer driving to/from work and eating lunch out. But on the other side your mileage expenses will probably go up for the RV along with campsite fees, etc.

I switched to my expected retirement mode lifestyle about 10 years before retiring, paid off my mortgage and car loans, purchased and paid for my retirement toys (RV, etc) and tracked my actual expenses for those 10 years. When I got to retirement there wasn't much of a change that I had to make and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my actual expenses were running below what I'd been spending while still working.

Hope this helps, and good luck on your new career!

Do you have an RV or will you be buying one? What are you thinking of getting?
Is that going to be another payment?
How much of your $18,000 annual nut will you make in 6 months?

With no idea how much you make or what you have in savings...can't really say.

What does the budget work out to when you plug in all the numbers...you do have a written budget...right....

What is your RV and what condition is it in? What is your DIY abilities?

Can you really count on a job 6 months out of the year? Your skills won't go stale will they? If it involves manual labor, what happens if you lose the physical ability to do the work?

Why too many unknowns to say if you can do it.

We spend about $2500/month and could take that down to $2000/month without really crimping our style much but we are debt free with no house (though we do have a boat we split time on...actually two until we get the old one sold. But that is probably significantly less than what a house would cost on an annual basis.)

much to open of a question. will you be traveling? staying in one place? where will you be? will you be eating out a lot? things like these need to be considered. what are your daily expense now for food/entertainment? and then add a few thousand for rv parks and fuel.

example: right now we are traveling Alaska and we figure the cost will be $10K for the 3 months. that doesn't include our general expenses of insurance and other ongoing expenses.

We don't have a lot of money but we don't have a lot of bills ether.

I think RVing is like eating in a restaurant with no prices on the menu. Only you know what you can afford and you should order accordingly.

Look into workamping....volunteer for 12-20 hrs a week for a free campsite and other perks...can save lots of money. Just consider you will always have a cell phone bill, health ins., vehicle ins., food, entertainment no matter where or what you do...