Not for us

Rice wrote:

mtrumpet wrote:
It seems that you dove into full timing right off the bat. Many here that eventually went full time were first weekend warriors (for lack of a better term) for many years prior to going full time.

Not us! Almost 20 years ago, we decided to start traveling fulltime, put our houses up for sale, and flew halfway across the country to pick up and drive home our first (and still only) RV--a 40-foot motorhome.

But 20 years ago, you had to come up with the idea yourself, and figure out how to get information about the nuts and bolts. Forums like this were invaluable, and there weren't bloggers and youtubers who had a financial interest in promoting the lifestyle.

And by the time that year was over, we'd put together a massive amount of knowledge. It was kind of like going to a library and researching compared to looking at a newsfeed.

These days people just kind of fall into the lifestyle--certainly the idea and very much the execution as well. Back then you had to really want it because figuring out how to make it happen was a lot of work. Nowadays there are very few barriers to entry, which can have bad results.

Plus, there's the terminology issue. Especially after the big recession, a lot of people moved into RVs as a (hopefully) cheaper alternative to a house or apartment, and called it fulltiming. Because they live fulltime in an RV.

And that's what the OP ended up doing--he said he'd paid his site rent through November, with options for two more years. I'd say (and I know people will push back) that that's not fulltiming as most people traditionally understood it.

But it gets lumped in with the fulltime travel lifestyle, when it might more appropriate to be lumped in with living in a trailer park or mobile home park lifestyle--small dwellings that don't move and are cheaper than a house or apartment. And people who aren't steeped in knowledge don't necessarily know the difference.

That's not to say that people who started fulltiming in 2003 didn't get it wrong. But I think a lot more people these days are getting it wrong because they didn't have to put in a lot of work to understand exactly what it is, and to let it marinate in their brains.