Annual costs of wild camping ?

i think the £15k figure was the minimum agreed income said to be required to live full time in a motorhome in another thread :confused:
 
The Real Cost is the Price of Ultimate Freedom!

Ultimate Freedom... that is the way all of our friends and family describe it, and it is priceless.

Though if you were to put a cost on it we would be the ones to audit. We are one of the few Americans who have transplanted our love of the Full Time RV lifestyle directly into your back yard. (Your Cities and Villages, Beaches, Countryside's, Lakes, Mountains, Resorts, Aires and Sporting Venues)

In 2001 we came over to Dusseldorf (The Caravan Salon) and landed firmly into a brand new N+B Flair. $45,000 paid cash, no debt overhead! It could be amortized to about $ 1,800/Yr. and getting better the longer we factor in our years over here in the same van!

From there we fully expected to continue the type of spending budget we were accustomed to in the USA except one thing Wildcamping? we never "boondocked" in the US but fully budgeted $ 15 - 30 / nt. for setting up on a pitch - In the EU we have probably stayed on a pitch only ten to twenty nights mostly when having visiting guests or trying to get in close to a large city. But that's it - 10 to 20 nights in Eleven Years! Camping and overnight costs > $ 50/Yr.

Fuel (15,000 miles avg./yr) $3,100 - OK, in Europe it has really equaled out; We got 12-15mpg in USA, Here we get 11 liters/100km at 1.20 Euros/Lt. and we are only travelling about 15,000Km's/Yr. so it all evens out to about the same $0.10 /Km - or 3,000 Euros/Yr.

The rest is easy; Food $3,000/yr., Alcohol (for human consumption only) $3,000, Entertainment $3,000 and Maintenance $ 1,500.

There are other extraneous costs like returning to the US for the occasional Holiday visit and such, but Europeans would not factor that into their budgets.

Herein lies the segway to the only rant we have about our mostly lovely neighbors; Don't hold up to your expectations of the luxury you practised as a static home dweller, you have got to give quite a bit in many of your daily habits, but your benefit will yield greater freedoms that you have never contemplated before. On the other hand PLEASE stop comparing how much more cheaply you are doing it than the other guy pitched next to you on that wild (read:FREE) beachfront site! It only leads to unsanitary habits that we all find disgusting. And remember too, the community you are sharing has footed the bill in many ways to provide you that wild site so give back as much as you can comfortably afford. That means buy a beer or wine at that economical bodega/VRAC/or cafe once in a while and buy your groceries locally; stop picking through the skips for the tossed veggies after the market it just makes us all look bad, we're not the only ones watching.

So the REAL cost? Priceless any way you do the math. Hope this helps you figure the worth of your life and not your lifestyle! It's all up to you.
 
£15 TO £18 thousand a year sounds frightening .Has anbody ever broken down the cost of fulltiming?
 
its a bit difficult,because you call it fulltiming but when you're doing it its just living.you buy a bottle of gas but you'd do that in the house,or food or clothes,so you'd have to break it down to what things are peculiar to fulltiming,compared to a house.i can only think of the vehicle overheads,and you'd be paying them anyway.be easier to say how much cheaper it would be by deducting the cost of running a house,but would you factor in money from a house you own and rent out,which is common. i think its a bit of a pointless question with different answers to suit different people and circumstances. a more pertinent question might be, have you got the right mindset to do it all the time?
 
jackslad said:
£15 TO £18 thousand a year sounds frightening .Has anbody ever broken down the cost of fulltiming?
Click to expand...

I have spreadsheets for the last two years of fulltiming (now in our third year) and with a budget figure for everything. I am not able at this time to get at that data as it is on another laptop, but on some items we were close to budget, but others we were well wide of the actual expenditure even in our second year.

Last year our maintenance budget got shot down in flames. I budgeted £1500 and acutally spent nearer £5,000. This year in two months Jan & Feb we were again hit with repairs costing over £2,000 for repairs to our generator and a heater. These are not luxury items when full timing in winter. In adition while travelling to Italy to get the generator repaired at the factory, (our option to take it, rather than send it by courier) we had to replace the alternator regulator and vehicle battery. This cost about another £400.

It was using these Spreadsheets, that I was able to quote the £15,000 and £18,000 figures.

On Motorhome365 this topic has been discussed at length and the figures verified by the experiences of others.

Some claim to live very cheaply on the road, but when you get into it they are existing at what would be considered as poverty levels. They are using candles to light the van and parking on streets in towns, so that they can exist as skip rats.

The figures I quoted are to live at the same levels as we did in a house, but have the freedom to go where and when we want, in our home. We use CLs/CSs and wildpark in suitable places from time to time.

John
 
A bit late posting as I've been busy with Cheltenham, but, to those asking, all I was doing was quoting figures I read on here sometime.

I think John Thompson has provided some detailed accounts that can be something to think about. Most of us tend to under-estimate costs, imo.
 
This post seems to have drifted from the OPs question of "How much does it cost to Wildcamp in a Motorhome". To how much does it cost to live fulltime in a Motorhome.

All I can add is, it can cost slightly less to wildcamp than it does to stay on a CL/CS site. We have estimated the cost of running our generator and having to travel to get water or dump waste is about the same as paying for a site with hookup. If you are moving every day the later costs can be almost eliminated.

With solar it must be cheaper wildcamping in the summer than paying for an unmetered site.

John
 
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John Thompson said:
This post seems to have drifted from the OPs question of "How much does it cost to Wildcamp in a Motorhome". To how much does it cost to live fulltime in a Motorhome.

All I can add is, it can cost slightly less to wildcamp than it does to stay on a CL/CS site. We have estimated the cost of running our generator and having to travel to get water or dump waste is about the same as paying for a site with hookup. If you are moving every day the later costs can be almost eliminated.

With solar it must be cheaper wildcamping in the summer than paying for an unmetered site.

John
Click to expand...

We had 85 nights away in the van last year and over half were on C & CC Temporary Holiday Sites. When I did the maths, I found it to be more cost efficient because my mileage was reduced a fair bit. A THS is around £6 per night and many of them are in excellent spots for us (due to us having the dogs). £6 is also equivalent to 1 gallon of diesel which equals about 23 miles of travel. My total mileage for the year was just over 3,000 miles as opposed to 4,800 the year before. We hopefully will do more miles this year but I am trying to incorporate some more THS into long trips. I have a very large van and not all of the POI's are suitable for it. With a 90 watt solar panel and a small wind turbine, we can manage without hookup for an indefinite period.
 
I think around £12000 to £15000 a year is do-able. I'm hoping to get most of this by renting the house out and maybe do some contract work in the winter if I ever leave my full time job.
 
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