Good evening and welcome to the tiny house Halloween special
Today we will be discussing something very, very. I don't know what accent I'm doing.
This week I'm going to discuss the costs of living in a tiny house.
I'm gonna try to do this whole video with this pumpkin on my head. What do you - what do you think? You think it'll work?
So this video is about what it costs to live in a tiny house per month. Oh my god, that didn't last long!
So, so many people ask me how I'm able to travel the world.
This year I visited Taiwan Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, and I'm going to Colombia in two weeks
So how am I able to pay for all this travel and support myself with only a part-time job as a blogger?
Well the big reason is I live in a tiny house. I have very little expenses
I'm gonna tell you my monthly expenses
And you can decide
Whether the lifestyle is right for you. So first of all, I have no mortgage payment. Boom, right off the bat
That's how I save a lot of money. If you want to know what my tiny house costs to build and what the most
Expensive things are inside of my tiny house you should watch "My Cost of Building a Tiny House" video.
Parking is gonna be different for everybody.
Some people have a piece of property that they park on, or they park in somebody's backyard and they pay them rent.
Or if you're traveling around with your tiny house you might be paying a campground fee.
So the RV Resort that I'm parked at is called Mount Hood Village.
They have an area just for tiny houses, so that's the tiny house village and for my parking spot,
which I think is a pretty cool parking spot, It would cost about 400 to 500 dollars a month.
Actually
Secret here: I have a sweet deal with a company, I do a little bit of a work exchange,
and I'm able to actually live here without paying rent.
So expenses wise,
zero again for my parking spot.
Parking is probably the biggest question mark about how much it's gonna cost to live month a month in a tiny house.
I think that about
450 to 500, 600 is average for a monthly
Charge for a space in an RV park. You can find cheaper. I've seen RV parks only charging
$200 a month. Now they're in very rural areas. You might be back to back with other RVs.
So you kind of get what you pay for there. I've actually seen parking spots go for up to
$1,000 a month in RV parks, which is just crazy. I would never pay that, but some people really want that
awesome spot that's right next to the mountain with epic views, and you get a lot of space, you get all the amenities. I
Get it.
I just can't afford it, and that's not why I went tiny. I did park in somebody's backyard for about eight months.
And it was a really nice spot.
And I found them on Craigslist, and I was paying $500 a month for that backyard spot. Now
it was walking distance to the gondola in Breckenridge, Colorado.
So I was willing to pay a little bit more.
I would probably not normally pay that much but really it varies depending
on where you're parked. So if you're in Half Moon Bay in California
you might be paying $500 a month. If you're near New York City you might be paying more.
I would try to find a situation
where you can do a work exchange, sort of like what I have going on here. if you can do something that
they feel that you're a value that is equal to or more than what they normally charge
then it's a win-win for everybody involved. I do have insurance for my tiny house.
I've gone through a couple different agencies, and I figured out what works for me.
It covers a lot of things like wildfires, emergencies, if somebody hurts themselves while staying in my tiny house, because I do rent it out
occasionally. So I do pay a little less than $900 a year
for my tiny house insurance. I pay it all in one lump sum to save a little bit of money.
So if you break it down per month, I'm spending just a little over $70 on tiny house insurance.
So now let's talk utilities. So one of the benefits of parking in an RV park is that you get a lot more
amenities than you might if you're parked in somebody's backyard.
You don't have to be off-grid; you have the sewer there, you have
the power, you have the electricity, you got cable if you want it.
With my parking spot, water and trash is included, so I don't have to worry about that.
Electricity does charge. I don't have to pay for it, because of the deal that I have with the company.
But normally you would be paying electricity here as well.
I can't tell you how much a normal electrical bill would be.
But I wouldn't think it was much, at least not for my tiny house, because it was built to be off-grid. I have all LED
lighting and a lot of propane appliances; my electrical bill
I would assume would be very small. Because I have a propane stove,
I have a propane water heater, every three months is how often I have to do a tank exchange for my 15 pound
propane tank. It cost about $30 every three months, so that's $10 a month.
Sometimes though, I just go and get that propane tank filled instead of doing it in exchange.
I sort of switch off
Depending on what I feel like and how much time I want to spend. But if I just do a fill it cost me around
$11. Propane fluctuates. So I save about $20 if I fill instead of doing exchange.
But sometimes I like to get a new tank just peace of mind that I have a new tank every once in a while. So
let's say on average my gas bill
per month is about seven dollars.
I think that's fair to say. Something that was important to me is Wi-Fi.
I pay about $55 a month
for Internet. Some people here do choose to also put cable television on their parking spot.
There's a couple other tiny houses here where that's important to them, so they pay for that.
I don't know how much it costs, but probably what a regular cable television provider would charge.
What else do I spend money on? It's kinda hard to think, because I really don't have that many expenses that are
tiny house related anymore. My expenses are like regular people's expenses, car,
health insurance, things like that. So what we're looking at for me personally, the expenses that I have here is my insurance,
about $70, a little over a month,
my internet, which is
$55 a month, and my gas bill which is $7 a month.
So that's my home expenses for living in a tiny house.
Now when I was traveling with my tiny house there were different expenses that I was
experiencing. Because I had to pay for gas to tow this thing around, I was getting about eight miles per gallon. I was spending about
$700 a month just on gas.
I also was paying about $300 a month in campground fees, because I was staying overnight in different locations.
I was also parking in locations that didn't charge me to camp so like BLM campgrounds, Walmart parking lots,
people's driveways. But I had to have the capability to be off-grid, so I had my own solar generator,
and I had a lot of things going on in here that allowed me-- like a water tank--
allowed me to park off-grid in those locations. So traveling around was already a lot more expensive than staying put.
Makes sense. I also had my truck payment, and I had truck insurance.
So those costs a significant amount of money.
I also needed Internet while I was on the road, so I had to up my cell phone plan
to be able to do a high-speed Wi-Fi that I could tether to my computer. I was paying for a 30 gig plan
through Verizon at the time.
I didn't have their unlimited
option like they have now. And it was costing me about $130
a month for that plan, and I was blowing through it every month. 30 gigs was not enough, and I wasn't even watching
Netflix. It was just me doing my internet things, uploading videos for you guys. Maintenance-
wise, yes, I have spent some money on the tiny house. Every year I have to winterize, some things have broke over the years,
I've had to replace a couple hoses, a couple sewer lines.
I have had to replace the tires, all four tires have been replaced,
but that is because I traveled 25,000 miles with this tiny house, so that more pertains to the traveling aspect of
tiny house living. So really if you park your tiny house in one location
assuming that your parking isn't really expensive, you can live a very affordable
lifestyle. And that is how I'm able to travel for 3 months out of the year. I also travel very budget-friendly.
I must say I'm not staying in resorts. I'm staying in hostels. I'm camping. I'm backpacking
I'm doing AirBnb, and I'm finding affordable flights.
I'm really being economical about my travels as well,
which allows me to travel more frequently and for longer periods of time. Everybody's always asking
what do you do with your dog when you travel? I have friends that watch her or I
have a trusted pet sitter that I pay to watch her. And
she has, basically, her own little vacation when I'm gone for 3 or 4 weeks at a time.
It's actually harder for me to leave her than I think it is for her to be left.
So I hope this explains a little bit more of what tiny houses cost per month.
I would love to hear from all of you about what you pay per month to live in your tiny houses or what you would
expect to pay if you lived in a tiny house. If you enjoyed this video or learned something make sure to give it a thumbs
up and subscribe for more videos.
Bye, bye. Say bye. Can you give them a kiss? Give them kisses. This is what we do. This is like typical Friday night.
It's not so glamorous.