Unknown: Horseback riding right along the Salt River in Arizona,
camping in Sedona, White Sands New Mexico, Glacier National Park
in Montana.
We've gone across country, how many times now?
It's been like seven or eight. Yeah.
Getting to travel the country and getting paid to do it is why I
wanted to become a travel nurse. As travel nurses, we most
certainly make more than staff nurses make. I think for the most
part, what you'll see is you're getting paid double. We actually
have been saving a lot of money doing van life.
I guess you could say because of the job we met. We both had
full-time positions at hospitals in Charleston, South Carolina at
different hospitals. And we were both working night shift. One
morning, we met on the beach after night shift. There were two
people on the beach wearing scrubs. You don't usually see that at
that time in the morning. So yeah, we just kind of hit it off.
We had done two assignments, and I told Ty that I feel like just
packing our things and moving every couple of months and
searching for housing - it was definitely the most stressful part
of travel nursing and I had been in love with van life for years
and years.
When we first got the van it was - I guess actually an old FedEx
van. Started insulating, put the walls up and our our sink and
fridge and building our bed frame, putting the bed in. We got a
guy that did our electrical work. Other than that, we built the
whole thing.
Put these on hinges, so it saves us space. When we aren't using
it, we just drop it down. Gives us easy entry to the outside. And
then when we need it, we just pop it right up. And then same with
the swivel seat. We can just swivel it around and then all the
way back to the front. And then it makes a nice little desk chair
or extra seating when we need a spot to eat. That's right.
It was kind of awkward when people would ask, like where do you
live? Or where are you staying? And I was like, how do I tell
people that I live in a van without sounding like a weirdo? I
would just kind of say in a generalized area. Now when people
ask, we just automatically say we live in a van. My paycheck as a
staff nurse was right around $1,400 every two weeks.
The range for the travel nursing pay - the lowest I would say
I've made is you know $1,100 a week. The highest that I've made
is what, somewhere -
We made like close to $3,000 a week and that was each of us. Th
most money that we've seen nurses making since the pandemi
started was $10,000 a week
We actually have been saving a lot of money doing van life.
ou're spending $400 a month on a car payment to the $1,400 a
onth you're spending on rent.
Typically, when you're traveling to a new assignment or you're
traveling in general, you have to rent hotels or Airbnbs and
having the van, we're able to check apps on our phone and find
free places to stay in the area.
Also, we save a lot of money in food. Before we had the van, when
we were traveling, we're always on the go and it was easier just
to pick up something. Whereas now we've got our full kitchen set
up, we're able to actually you know pull over anywhere on the
side of the road and cook a full dinner, lunch. For showering, we
have a Planet Fitness membership and it will get us anywhere in
the entire country for the both of us, for only $20 a month. For
a toilet, we just have a Cassette toilet - it's a cassette toilet
yeah. We do have - both have retirement funds set up and we have
money set up for that.
We first focused on kind of paying off our debt, working on
student loan payments, getting Ty's credit cards paid off and
have almost paid the van off as well.
Our major financial goal that we're working towards is just
banking as much money as possible so that we can buy a large
piece of land somewhere, build maybe a tiny home or multiple tiny
homes on our piece of land and you know, have passive income
through, you know, Airbnb or campsites.
When we started our travel nursing journey together in 2019, we
said that we would end up doing this for a year or two, and we
still have a list of places that we want to go and we just really
can't picture settling down or being in one place. But yeah, I
mean travel nursing I think especially after the pandemic - just,
it opened a lot of people's eyes to this profession. There's a
lot of possibility with it and a lot of flexibility.