today's video is sponsored by safety Wing Nomad insurance
this one shocked me at how low it was yeah I was expecting that we were
gonna have to pay a lot more money for this our heater broke our awning broke
I lost my wedding ring most people at some time in their life have considered selling all their
possessions buying a van or an RV and traveling the world while saving money a common belief is
that living in an RV is much cheaper than renting an apartment or a home for the last two months
we've been trying to do RV life as cheap as possible and today we're going to share with
you the monthly cost of living in an RV to see if it's actually a more affordable way of living
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for almost two months but we just completed our first full month of living in the RV which was
the month of May and we decided we would write down and record everything we spent money on for
the whole month just to give us an idea of how much we're spending and whether or not like this
actually is more affordable we should probably be doing this all the time because it's the first
time I've really been able to see like every cent we've really spent yeah and it's been a lot easier
to budget doing it this way so we'll start it off with the probably the biggest expense for
us which is food our food bill for the month now all of this um I'm going to be reading out in US
Dollars I'm also going to put the Canadian dollars and Australian dollars down below
we just had to pick a currency and because most of you watching uh American like 30 I think yeah the
biggest number is the US so and we're in the US we're going to use US dollars but in US Dollars we
spent 760 on groceries for the whole month of May it's pretty good I think that's pretty good like
you definitely spend a lot more if you're going out to eat obviously in America one thing look I
don't want to go without is nice food yeah like I don't want to be living in an RV camping and then
like eating shitty food as well yeah yeah we cook breakfast lunch and dinner we very rarely will go
out while we're in the RV while we're traveling overseas is different story but while we're in the
RV we like to cook flat out so we spend a lot of money on groceries which could be more than other
people um but definitely something to keep in mind as well as that you do have to go to the grocery
store more often because you can't hold as much stuff in there which might make it a little bit
more expensive because you can't really buy in bulk so that's something to keep in mind yeah we
probably go like every four days yeah yeah it's actually really annoying we get about four days
worth of groceries and then we have to go back just to get a few things and we end up getting
more yeah it definitely makes you more mindful of like what you're buying and not wasting food
um but yeah it's definitely our biggest expense yeah I really don't like throwing out food ever
but especially in the RV I just really notice like when we have some food I want to use it up so we
don't have to replace it with something else but we cooked for ourselves every day I'd say except
for maybe three days we went out three meals meals yeah which we didn't include like the extra stuff
because we know obviously everyone has a different sort of routine and what they like doing and what
you like to spend money on we're going to try and just give you the information that's relevant to
the RV yeah this is like bare minimum like what do you need to get by yeah yeah so 760 on groceries
that's for the two of us and our dog bear as well yeah and cookies to feed him every meal so
I think that's pretty good we've tried going to like more affordable like Walmart for groceries
um WinCo is another one that seems to be really affordable it looks really good too yeah we like
WinCo um we yeah we've just been trying to do more affordable ways of doing things you can obviously
spend more if you're going to like Whole Foods that type thing but you guys know that already
so the next expense which is our second biggest cost uh while we're in the RV and this came as
a bit of surprise to me is camping when we first moved into the RV I'm not gonna lie I was a bit
worried because we're looking up camp spots we couldn't find much that was like free or cheap
and I started thinking [ __ ] are we gonna have to pay like 50 60 70 a night just to camp in
this thing which kind of defeats the purpose of living in it yeah if if you only go off of like
Google and searching for a campground um like the most expensive ones come up first there is
a lot of digging that you have to do in order to find like affordable places to camp or free
um but oftentimes the free and cheap places you don't get a good sleep or it's just not
as comfortable to be there as it would be in a you know a state park or an RV park whatever you
decide on so yeah we've definitely had to spend more on camping than we originally thought we
would have to yeah so we've spent for the month of my seven hundred dollars on camping us and we've
slept in car Parks quite a bit and free camping as well um yeah I think we slept that's the like
smallest we could get it to which is pretty good I slept at Walmart twice Cracker Barrel twice
um and then a couple of other free Camp spots we found like there's a
you're either got a cheap campsite with no hookups it's like twenty dollars which we really love yeah
but sometimes they don't have like anywhere for like beer to run around or for us to like hang
out outside like they're not very good um and then like a standard price for an RV park is at least
sixty dollars yeah I didn't think it'd be that much I was pretty surprised of that yeah it's
like at the end of it you're pretty much paying the same amount for like a hotel because you know
you've got to pay for your fuel and everything on top of it in the RV maintaining the RV and
then you got to pay for the campsite on top of it so yeah that's a little bit disappointing
that's probably been the most disappointing part that's the absolute minimum like if you're in a
town or a city and you want to see that City and you want to stay in an RV park you're probably
paying 80 90 to stay in that Park per night yeah that's just not really what we plan on doing no
no we've definitely not been able to hang out in cities much as we thought at the beginning
of this that's when a van probably would have been better because parking's been an issue and
um yeah basically just parking's been the biggest issue you can't park in cities we've got a few
things working against us with cities like we can't park this thing anywhere it's really
expensive to stay in RV parks and we have bear we can't like just leave him in the RV when it's hot
yeah um so we've been spending most of our time at state parks and national parks because they're
a bit cheaper around 30 bucks a night is pretty standard yeah and um they're actually really nice
yeah I highly recommend them problem is they're all booked out on weekends like year round yeah
that's been the other thing a lot a lot of time we float around and do things a lot more like
day to day so we can't really plan as far ahead as everyone else but people tend to yeah because
they're just coming out on the weekends they book out the weekend and then we end up camping in
Walmart or Cracker Barrel on the weekend because there's everywhere good is booked out and yeah we
don't want to pay the money for a crap campsite I'd rather but then you get no sleep so it's kind
of like catch 22. our routine at the moments pretty much get to a campsite on a Sunday or a
Monday where it's where everyone's leaving and we stay there for a few days and then as it's booked
out on the weekend we'll go travel or black stay at a Walmart or Cracker Barrel or something yeah
which is okay we only want to do that for like one or two nights a week because it's just not great
no it definitely gets you behind in sleep and just like feeling healthy and having a routine so yeah
yeah all right so this expense like we can't really go without and it's not too
big which is insurance uh it's actually really cheap to ensure an RV yeah I was
price what we're paying we paid so for full comprehensive insurance on this RV it's about
72 dollars a month which is like nothing that covers Us full comprehensive like
theft collision and third-party liability I think there's about a 500 excess on that
which is okay like that's pretty good uh yeah but that's like to cover the RV which
I don't know yet if we're covered but we just lost our awning on the highway in Wyoming
yeah I doubt let's go over there no um so that just covers Us for the RV like if we get into an
accident if it gets stolen or anything like that but obviously I'm from Australia Mandy's from
Canada so we still have travel insurance while we travel and that's pretty much covers Us for
like any health issues that come up while we're in America and that's pretty important because I
know I've heard that American medical bills can go through the roof yeah nightmare so we pay a little
bit extra for that and that's 86 dollars per person per month but that gives us like complete
peace of mind that if anything happens one of us gets sick or into an accident like that we're
covered yeah and that brings us to today's sponsor which is safetyween all right guys we're just
going to give a quick shout out to safety wing for sponsoring today's video as well as our entire
trip throughout Canada and the United States thank you guys so much for supporting our Channel safe
viewing Nomad insurance is a global travel medical insurance that covers people from all over the
world while outside the Home Country including covid-19 coverage it can be purchased while
you're abroad it covers home trip visits and it can be purchased just like a monthly subscription
it's literally as easy as signing up to an like subscription we think that 99 of Travelers would
agree that purchasing health insurance while you're traveling overseas is probably the most
important purchase you can make especially if you're going for a long time we've been insured
by safety Wings since the day we left Australia in 2021 and we would not go another day without
them it's given us the freedom and peace of mind knowing that if anything goes wrong we're covered
and thankfully we have been covered because on more than one occasion safety Wing has got us
out of some pretty sticky situations where we had to go to hospitals and visit doctors surgeries
while we were overseas and we had no idea if we were going to get refunded or compensated for all
the bills that we had to pay luckily safety Wing had our backs and since then we haven't looked
back but not only do they cover us for medical bills including covid-19 but we're also cover
and even things like natural disasters and personal liability with coverage starting at
as low as 45 a month it's a no-brainer for anyone traveling overseas for an extended period of time
and probably the best part about safetying nobone insurance is that there's no locking
contracts so you can cancel it at any time with just a click of a button we'll leave the link
to safety Wing in the description alright now back to the video [Music] all right so the next
big expense which is pretty obvious is fuel this thing is a guzzler but we've managed to like keep
it pretty low just by not like traveling too fast when we first drove this thing
from where we bought it up to Whistler Mountain I was pretty worried because I was like wow it's
really expensive on fuel and we wanted to go to all these different places like how much we're
going to be spending on fuel is this even going to be worth it but we only really do a big drive
like once a week yeah so it's like one tank of gas a week and we've spent 630 on fuel for the
month of May which isn't that bad no I thought the fuel would definitely be more expensive than the
camping right but like we've made it a point to not use too much fuel like once we go to
campsite we stay there yeah and we purposefully like only drive in the direction that we want to
head but it feels a lot cheaper in the US than it is in Canada which surprised me yeah I was really
really surprised by that how much cheaper was it it probably cost around 200 U.S to fill up
um in Canada but in the US it's probably like 170 dollars
something like that it's pretty good yeah and that gets us about 600 kilometers which isn't
much but when you're in a place like this 600 kilometers actually gets you like pretty far
like we can drive to Vegas from here yeah that's the one thing we've loved about being in the US is
like every state that you go to is like going to another country so we're seeing so much different
stuff when you're not even traveling that far yeah you don't need to travel that far to see
different things yeah we were just in Yellowstone a couple days ago and it was like snow-capped
mountains thick Lush trees and now we like feel like we're in the desert at Salt Lake City and
it's completely different and then so cool we're just like a four hour drive from Las Vegas which
is not even a full tank of gas so so the next cost that you'll have if you're living in an
gray or black tanks for us a lot of the campgrounds that we've stayed at have had
dumping we don't usually pay for full hookups we've only done that a handful of times but a
lot of the campgrounds will have a dumping station that's included if you're already staying there
and then if you're not staying it's like five or ten dollars like that but um sometimes at
the beginning when we weren't planning it very well we had to pay a couple times at petrol
stations and that was about ten dollars each time so we've spent about twenty dollars for the month
on dumping which is pretty good you don't really have to worry about it if you plan it in advance
you can do it at free places and you don't have to pay for it if we ever stay at a campground
like this one we'll always dump before we leave so that we can just get it out the way and then
if we're on the road for a few days and we don't have a dumping station we don't have to pay for
one but we have had a couple of times where we run into problems and it was full and we had to pay
yeah we were still learning we're getting better at it this one shocked me at how low it was yeah
I was expecting that we were going to have to pay a lot more money for this yeah we've spent thirty
dollars on propane gas which keeps our fridge running we cook on it our water heater when we
want to have a hot shower which isn't very often and also our heater which doesn't work anymore
yeah that's probably why it's so cheap yeah speaking of things not working this brings
us to our last thing which we didn't really put an amount on this because it's going to
be different for each individual person but like Lloyd mentioned our awning got destroyed
so that's an unexpected expense that we weren't planning on having to pay a new awning is going
to be around a thousand dollars we've seen without labor we aren't really sure how much
it's going to cost for somebody to install it for us so the thing about RV life that you just
can't really put a number on is the things that are going to break and that you're going to have
to fix Lloyd put it into a great way for me was that these things are designed for people
to use them on weekends and very infrequently not exactly live in them so especially for us
and the old ones things get run down you're using them a lot more than they were designed
to be used for so things just break that's just how it works yeah I mean like it doesn't might
not seem like it this is a vintage RV it's 25 years old yeah but it's it's great to us but
the break that you're going to you're gonna figure out how to fix and pay for the bigger
your rig the more expensive your rig is you know tires get more expensive that type of thing
um so the unexpected expenses are heater broke our awning broke um those are the things that
definitely make it not cheaper than an apartment but that being said Apartments have issues that
happen and come up as well so well in the month of May we had our hater stopped working which
was actually a good timing because it was warm uh the awning broke the camera yeah that broke
and when I was on top of the roof in 100 mile an hour winds cutting the awning from its cylinder I
lost my wedding ring so we need to buy a new one of them too luckily it was cheap though
yeah brought it in Mexico for like 50 bucks yeah because we knew something like this would happen
I'll probably have like 10 of them over the years okay so without all the extra added expenses that
you can't really account for we spent about two thousand four hundred dollars U.S without all
the extra things that went wrong so if we were to suggest that's a pretty good budget twenty
four hundred dollars U.S we suggest maybe adding 500 to a thousand dollars for a wiggle room for
things to go wrong and to break just over three thousand dollars would be really safe I reckon
including maintenance stuff like we're gonna have to put new tires on this get an oil change
done probably fix a couple of things like just over three thousand dollars that's plenty yeah I
for two people like that's not much no no it's like all of our expenses really like there's a few
things we didn't include like going and getting coffee or having a beer at the pub or whatever
but yeah living expenses yeah so depending on what your budget is living in an apartment or at a home
this is what it's cost us to live frugally in an RV but get to see a lot of America and Canada it's
been incredible a really big learning experience we've been uncomfortable quite a bit but also have
I've just gained a lot from it I feel like yeah do you think that's too much we're spending too
much in the RV or is that really cheap let us know what you think down in the comments below and if
you have any tips for us or other RV lifers let us know in the comments as well hope this video
has been helpful let us know if you're going to start your RV life Journey soon we are also doing
a group trip to Vietnam in November if you're interested in joining us we'll leave the link
down in the description as well thanks so much for watching we'll see you guys in the next one bye
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