Full timers (?)

We sold everything except 5 plastic bins of old photos and stuff. They are stored in daughter's garage. We travel 8-10 months each year and return to home base for doctors appointments and Thanksgiving and Christmas. We have been full timers for almost 6 years and love it. Have no desire to get another house. We have put over 100,000 miles on our rig in 9 years and still have places to visit on our bucket list. We have mixed emotions when we hit the FL state line. Happy that we will see family, sad that we'll be sitting for 2 months. During that time we start planning our next trip! It's not for everyone so I think you're smart to say we'll try it for a year. Both of you need to be happy with the lifestyle.

Thanks for your replies and input. We are encouraged by your comments and will continue to read about the challenges of this lifestyle. We are not limiting our adventure to one year, we are setting one year to see how it will fit with us. We look forward to this adventure!

Sounds like a fine plan.
We planned on traveling full time for a year or two, to see the country and 5 years later we are still at it, and we don't stop for months at a time- we are almost always on the move.
If you get addicted to the lifestyle you can always sell the house later if you want.

Sue

My advice is to read, read, read. There are many full-timing posts on this forum and other sites such as iRV2 and Escapees.

I would not advise to set a one-year deadline for quitting. You may really like it as we did. We continued for 16 years and moved around constantly. It really is a wonderful carefree lifestyle and we've met so many permanent friends through the Escapee RV Club. We also use the club as our mail forwarding service with no problems.

We also volunteered for national and state parks and loved it. Getting to actually live in those beautiful places is really a great perk. Plus, we knew that we were really helping out at preserving those parks and letting others enjoy it.

We had no 'exit plan' as some folks think you need. We sold the house and everything in it and just took off. As it turned out we settled in an altogether different place than we would have ever dreamed. We have absolutely no regrets. Good luck to you!

You will find that everyone does it a little differently. For us, our goal is to see as much of the U.S. as possible.

We don't travel 12 months out of the year because we need to spend 2 or 3 months camped in our original northern home area for visiting kids/grandkids, plus we always spend 4 or 4.5 winter months in SW Florida. But we can travel and see a lot in the 6 months or so that we do travel.

I have heard many say that you can't live that much cheaper full timing in an RV. I think much of that depends of what your original house expenses were and what your income is. We went from adding very little to our savings account to putting about 30% - 40% away each month.

Without breaking costs down too much, because everyone is so different, I can tell you that we are averaging just under $800 per month for CG fees. When we are in our home area for part of the summer we have a large site with all hook-ups for $325 a month. We use more high end resorts in SW Florida that are within a mile or two of the beach and that really drives the average up.

The rest of our expenses are about the same. We still have Direct-TV and those charges did not change, we have a side-by-side washer/dryer so there is no expense there. We don't eat out more often so those expenses stayed the same. We pay a lot less to insure a 5th wheel and three vehicles compared to what we used to pay to insure a house and two vehicles.

We love this lifestyle and wish we could have started earlier!

Many have done just what you have posted. Some stay on the road and within a couple of years sell the houses others stay on the road for a couple of years and go back to the live in the house. It's really a life choice based upon what happens and how you feel after being on the road for a period of time.

Here's a good website with lots of information from a couple that have been on the road almost 10 years but originally thought they would last about 5 years.
www.rv-dreams.com
They post their monthly expenses so you can see what their costs have been since they began. Look through the journal entries for answers you may have.