Have you ever thought about quitting the rat race, becoming free from rent or a mortgage, and hitting the open road?
Whatever your answer to that question, a lot of people do. For years, Instagram has showcased beautifully aesthetic versions of a more simple life on the road with the hashtag #vanlife, which is populated with nearly 18 million posts. And the subreddit r/VanLife has almost 300,000 members who discuss the ins and outs of their experience and share pictures of their setups and views.
After spending some time talking to vanlifers and lurking in vanlife spaces on the internet, the most important thing I’ve learned about vanlife is that there is no single version of vanlife. The moniker, I think, refers more to a state of mind that corresponds with a way of being—a freedom ontology that can be achieved through life on four wheels. Remove the tethers that bind you to a specific place (and the costs associated with them) and experience a more real autonomy and the ability to wander. There is no monolith, only your unique experience.
In many ways, it’s not surprising that this mode of existence exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic when lockdowns and remote work created competing senses of containment and openness. At the same time indoor experiences became less likely, a lot of work could be done from anywhere. For many, it became the right time to take to the road and experience the outdoors from a new, built-out, moveable home.
Philosophy and aesthetics aside, there are also more material considerations that drive some to consider vanlife. As Outside has reported on, the cost of living in mountain towns has steadily increased over the last several years, and American cities, broadly speaking, aren’t getting any cheaper.
Is #vanlife the answer?
I spoke to two vanlife pros at different points on the cost, build-out, and lifestyle spectrums to get a more thorough understanding of the expenses, benefits, and unexpected realities of living out of a van.
Bruce Dean, Ph.D., is a Wavefront Sensing Group Leader at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In that role, he helped develop one of the flight algorithms as a key component in aligning the James Webb Space Telescope’s mirrors. He’s a lifelong runner and endurance athlete, holds 14 U.S. patents, and currently lives in his van in Colorado. He’s been fulltime in his Mercedes Sprinter van since 2021. He also has a business founded on vanlife, build-outs, and life coaching called The Jedi Mind.
William Gayle spends summers working for the Parks Service in Yosemite, California, and the ski season in Mammoth Lakes, California. He has spent a number of his years in Mammoth living in a converted minivan that he built out with pull-out drawers and a platform bed.
The Realities of #Vanlife
Both Gayle and Dean offered me a window into their own unique vanlives.
The Cost of Insurance
For Gayle, the most terrifying moment of vanlife came when his van—with all of his earthly possessions inside it—was stolen. Though he insures the vehicle with homeowners insurance, Gayle says it didn’t really hit him that his van is a moveable and stealable container of his life until he was walking around with only the clothes on his back. Thankfully, it was recovered within 24 hours, but Gayle never shook the worry that it created.
Dean also mentioned insurance as one of his most significant expenses.
General Expenses
Gayle told me that the daily cost of dining out added up quickly. His minivan didn’t have kitchen facilities, so for at least one ski season, he ended up spending somewhere between $40 and $80 a day on food and drinks. Although Gayle only used his vans for winters in Mammoth, that daily food cost annualizes to somewhere upward of $15,000. For context, the financial website The Motley Fool estimates that the average American household spends around $9,985 per year on food.
Dean hasn’t paid an electrical bill since 2021. He also told me he pays very little for water, and most of the time can refill at campgrounds for free. Many gas-stations are OK with letting him fill his water tank if they happen to have a water tap outside. The only housing related bills that he has every month are for Starlink (mobile satellite internet, currently $165 per month), gas, and insurance. He told me gas costs can vary widely depending on if you travel a lot. He has a full kitchen and cooks every night. He also runs every day and installed a shower so he can shower every night.
Romantic Relationships
When I asked Gayle if there were any elements of vanlife that surprised him—and he’d want readers to know about—he mentioned relationships, specifically romantic ones. “It made romantic relationships hard,” he said. “People want to get out of their own house; they don’t necessarily want to come hang out in your van where you can’t even sit up.”
Builds and Fixes
Gayle said his build-out was relatively inexpensive. Modeling his design after truck-bed campers he’s seen, he completed his first version of a platform bed with underbed pull-out drawer storage in 2018 and modestly iterated from there, completing most of the work before the cost of lumber skyrocketed during COVID.
Dean is handy—and can do most repairs and improvements himself. “It pays to install the best components available, to help avoid problems later,” he said. “But these can be expensive, most notably, the batteries, solar panels, a refrigerator, and electrical components, these can really add up. That said, you would have anyway if you lived in a conventional home.”
Gas and Tolls
Dean told me that a surprising part of vanlife, at least the way he does, has been the sheer number of toll roads and pay-to-cross bridges. “They’re more inconvenient than costly,” he said.
Gayle used his van in Mammoth Lakes in winter, and he didn’t have heat. Driving around to heat up his vehicle ended up being a more significant expense than he expected.
How Does Vanlife Compare to the General Cost of Living in the U.S.?
To get a better understanding of renting in major cities and outdoor destinations, I used Forbes’s Cost of Living Calculator, and I picked a few desirable places to stack up against the average cost of vanlife that I discerned from the folks I interviewed for this story. There’s one important caveat I need to note about Forbes’s calculator when it comes to the cost of rent: the calculator uses the median of rent across all rental sizes, which means that it’s hard to say what square footage you’ll get for your buck using the calculator. I’d like to believe that any apartment is going to have more livable square footage than a van, but at one point my now-husband and I inhabited a 400-square-foot studio apartment in Los Angeles, California, so I don’t think I can comfortably make that claim.
Without further preamble, here are a few relevant rental scenarios:
Asheville, North Carolina: $1,554 median monthly rent
Denver, Colorado: $1,899 median monthly rent
Morgantown, West Virgina: $995 median monthly rent
Portland, Maine: $2,582 median monthly rent
St. George, Utah: $1,627 median monthly rent
The Forbes calculator summarizes other relevant cost of living expenses in the pages it creates for individual cities, but it was difficult to discern overall cost with a single number using its capabilities.
That said, it’s almost definitely cheaper to live in a van if you’re conscientious about the additional lifestyle costs you’ll need to consider. How will you eat? Kitchen or dining out? Where will you shower? What’s the plan for accessing water? Is your van paid off, or will you have a monthly payment? How much of a build-out do you really need?
Answer these questions, and you could be on your way. After all, as Dean told me, in a van, “you have the added benefit of waking up in a different location every day, and having coffee in the morning overlooking some truly great landscapes. In fact, when I wake up in the morning and drive away from some location, it feels like I got away with something!”
The post How Vanlife Compares to the General Cost of Living in the U.S. appeared first on Outside Online.
