RV Spending - August 2019

One of the first things I researched when considering this lifestyle is “How much does it cost?” I found everything from $1k a month to $10k a month, and a lot of the things I read didnt really have a lot of details. So I resolved that when we hit the road, we would keep track of everything so that if anyone else came across this and was interested, maybe they’d have a better idea of what it can cost.

August

August sucked. Even though we had completely renovated Sunbadges on the inside and spent five figures on her maintenance at a shop, there were still a ton of unanticipated costs. The water wouldnt work, we werent sure if the fridge was working (it smelled like death which normally indicated a propane issue caused by an unlevel RV), our solar solution wasn’t being a viable solution, etc etc etc. A lot of these things are very costly to fix up front, but shouldnt need to be replaced for a while once everything is fixed. We know that something is always going to be broken (I’m looking at you, dashboard), but we needed to make sure we could at least get the necessities.

Food

Since our fridge was being weird and we were having problems with our grill initially, we did a lot more eating out than I’m proud of. Our goal is to have one regional meal wherever we stop, but some days we really went above and beyond. I’m expecting once we get all the cooking set up, the groceries will go up, and the eating up will go down.

Groceries: $664

Eating Out: $500

Gas

We definitely were in a bit of a rush to get from Point A to Point B. Part of that was intentional - we weren’t really psyched to stay long in South Dakota and Wyoming when we could just be where our hearts are in Colorado. I project that this also will be much higher than a few months time.

Gas: $733

Entertainment

While our goal isnt to do all the touristy things, we still want to be able to have fun. National park entry cost us a bit, as did our new Sturgis mugs (which seriously are amazing and we pretty much exclusively drink cold drinks out of them). We also went to the movies twice, both times at discount theatres. If you havent seen Ready or Not yet, make time for it.

Entertainment: $100

RV Repairs

Holy crap I could not have anticipated how much this cost. We had problem after problem, and nothing in an RV is cheap to replace (just cheap to begin with - heyo!). This ranged from extra batteries to a new water pump to a mobile RV tech coming out to take a look at the issues we had. I can only hope this isnt normal.

RV Repairs: $1,435

RV Parks

This one is a little skewy because I am a planner, so not all of these park stays are for the month of August. In fact, most are for September. But I also paid for some August stays in July, so it is what it is. We want to do more boondocking but until we get the solar up to par, sometimes you just need to pay to stay. We stayed in RV parks 10 days this month with an average of $58/site.

RV Parks: $854

Propane

We were empty for both our RV and gas grill before we took off, so once again the initial cost is probably higher than it will be in future months. We also spent two weeks in the cold, cold mountains and had to use the propane heat to keep the RV at a balmy 60 degrees minimum a night. While nobody froze to death, cats included, we definitely had to wear layers.

Propane: $65

Grand total for August: $4,351