I have a question for all the full timers out there. What is your avg fuel costs per month? ???
Fuel costs as much or as little as you want. I lived full time in a sticks and staples RV for several years. The RV only moved once or twice a year to relocate to the next work site. It cost about $25 per month for fuel when averaged out over the course of a few years.
Some fulltimers try to see every tourist attraction from coast to coast. It is possible to burn $1000 every week doing that.
The only thing worse than spending too much on fuel is staying parked in one spot forever because filling up costs too much. Set a monthly budget for fuel. It needs to be an ammount you can afford to pay every month for as long as you own the RV. If the expense is planned and spread over a few weeks or months, filling up the RV won't hurt quite as much.
How many miles per month do you anticipate?
Figure 5.5 to 6.5 mpg x $4.00 per gallon
Miles per month
______________X $4
5.5 to 6.5
In my case, I am NOT a full timer & do not expect to ever be. But I figure about $.50 per mile at abut 8 mpg & $4.00 gal, actually I only drive about 10,000 miles per year. The coach & toad are 35,650 lb, with the ISM500 Cummins, so not a big concern.
Dave M
All of those are good answers! Usually we sit in Yuma during the winters for 6-7 months so don't use any fuel. Traveling during the summer i use Dave's figures for fuel cost but just round it up to a dollar a mile to also cover food and rv park costs. I figure a 1500 mile trip to Wa. or Mt. is going to run me about $1500, although usually it is several hundred dollars less than that depending on if it is a fast short trip or if we take our time and make a lot of stops.
Isn't there a saying if you have to ask, you probably cannot afford it?
Owning a bus is not for the faint of heart. The damn things are expensive. Some are bought cheap and then require a lot of expense trying to make them reliable and livable, some are in great shape but are expensive. The cost of tires, insurance, batteries, and routine maintenance will take a person's breath away. Those are expenses that are always ticking away even if the coach is sitting. At a minimum of a couple of thousand dollars per year they make that first driven mile damn expensive.
As the miles increase they become smaller parts of the cost per mile equation, but they never go away.
I think most realize however if you own a coach the best thing you can do for it is to drive it. Sitting is bad for the tires. They need exercise to release the compounds that resist cracking and dry rot. Frequent use of the coach is the best antidote for algae in the fuel. The cost of fuel is high. When I started with our first bus diesel was available for around $.60. Now I spend about that per mile just for fuel.
If I ever let fuel become the deciding factor in whether I use my bus or not, it is time to buy a park model trailer, pull the wheels off and sell the bus.
My theory is it is cheaper per mile to full time than go back and forth home. If you are full timing you will always be going to some place you want to be. If you have to return home very time, that is wasting half your fuel. That last 300 miles home is an absolute waste, been there and done that so many times there isn't anything there to stop for. So you wasted $600 on fuel for 300 miles you just covered twice more.
Cary
^ Good point. If you are evaluating full timing VS living in a brick and mortar, then would you not also have to factor in the cost of home ownership. I do not want to think about what my actual daily cost is to live in a fixed address home, it will probably give me a heart attack. The only solstice I can rely on is that a brick and mortar actually appreciates, most likely for my kids, but ....
If you drove your coach in 2008 you probably can afford at least a few more years before the cost of diesel becomes beyond reach...that's my thought.
Having said that we have traveled and parked since 2004, in that time I'd guess probably 80,000 miles have gone under the wheels.
So 80K miles/ 6.1 mpg =13114 gallons/120 months = 109 gpm X $3.78 pg average = $412.00 per month.
Remember too that we do stop and live a little. so lets just say that we are parked 1/2 the time...so in driving average I'm going to say that you'd need at least $1000.00 for diesel during any not parked month.
And I (the bus) pull a trailer so dear wife drives the Tahoe, add that in too.
I have driven the coach home twice, just because the road choices are different. But you want to have heart failure start buying diesel in Yukon and NW Territory or western Alaska.
I am 62.8% certain the bus will never see Alaska again.(ok maybe 79.3% sure.)
Speaking of cost to own and first driven mile costs...imagine buying a $900.00 dream fly rod and NEVER catching a fish...did you buy the rig to catch fish or because you enjoy fishing ?
(Remember I still own a large home in Alaska.) the coach, from my point of view is cheap living/fun, based on a 10 year ownership and cost per month of enjoyment.....I could walk out the door and leave the title on the dash. That's how much enjoyment and freedom to gypsy it has afforded me.
PS there are some who would say that a 900$ fishing pole was entry level and others would think you were crazy...kinda like Conversion Coaches....:)
Glad we have choices, me, not ever selling the home as we enjoy having a home to return to.
I have met full timers who retired, sold the family home, used the money to buy an over priced RV or bus conversion, were big time full timers right up to the point the DW says she had enough of the road living like gypsies and wants to go home. OPPS! no home to go to, their RV is worth 35% what they paid for it and wind up renting an apartment, all the family heirlooms are gone, nothing feels right and they are young, but too old to hold a meaningful job.
No thanks for that way to end up.
The DW & I have spent our life trying to make good choices and the home is off linits, the coach is a play house, if it were to burn down, get totaled, or get stolen and loose our butt, it would not change anything except missing my man cave.
We all have choices & we are very happy.
Dave M
We've been full time in our bus conversion for almost 3 years now, and like others said - it really depends on your pace of travel.
This year, we'll probably average out at about $300/month, last year it was $355. We vary up the pace of travel between being in lots of motion, and then staying put for a month or two at a time. It's better for the budget, as it is for our mental sanity and staying on top of our work related projects. We usually cross the country at least once (if not twice), and do one north/west crossing each year.
Here's our monthly travel cost log for the past several years: http://www.technomadia.com/costlog (http://www.technomadia.com/costlog)
Also, in an issue of BCM last year, we had published a version of our 'Full Timer's Perspective on Fuel Costs' article, which you can find here: http://www.technomadia.com/2012/09/a-full-time-rvers-perspective-on-fuel-costs/ (http://www.technomadia.com/2012/09/a-full-time-rvers-perspective-on-fuel-costs/)
Thank you so much for all the great responses. My wife and I are not yet Rv'rs, but just trying to get a feel for what to expect for when we do jump on the bus..LOL ;D
Thank you so much for all the great responses. My wife and I are not yet Rv'rs, but just trying to get a feel for what to expect for when we do jump on the bus..LOL ;D
Just fueled up 3 days ago and it was $248. Ran for one day and sat for two nites and am going to fuel up again tomorrow and it will probably be over $300 this time. One more travel day, (short run of 250 miles) and will sit for 3 nites and then another short run of 200 miles and will sit for a couple of weeks before buying fuel again and moving on.
Well I've been a pseudo full-timer for 2 months because I lost my home in a lawsuit, and I'm converting my "bus" to live in when they come to take the house.
Part of the transition is that I'm pretty much living in it to get some experience *before* I'm forced to hit the road, plus give my Great Dane time to adjust (he's never lived anywhere but in the house his entire life).
I closed my electric account and am fully off grid.
At my current rate (I love that pun), I am spending about $400/mo in generator fuel. I expect to cut that in half as I add to and tweak my battery/inverter system, and as money allows, add solar to reduce that further.
The reason I'm adding this to your thread is because I'm guessing "fuel costs" is part of you planning out the cost of traveling in a bus.
It is worth noting that fuel costs occur even when you are stopped unless replaced by hookup costs at an RV park.
Cheers!
Sean
.
We have found that if you have to run a generator for heat or air conditioning, it is cheaper to stay in an rv park. When boondocking, we are all electric, we try to keep the generator under two hours a day. We are energy hogs.
Don and Cary
uuum,
monthly fuel costs depend on more than the number of miles driven. You can make large differences in your traveling costs depending on (1) vehicle selection and (2) driving speed.
The examples above reflect the vehicle and driving speed for specific cases and generally for large (40+ feet) buses with automatic transmissions and a toad. At the other end of the spectrum, a GM PD-4104 with manual transmission driven at 55 mph on flat land can get over 13 miles per gallon BUT that drops a lot when you go faster or are driving with a lot of up and down. As the Bridgestone folks say when writing about the effect of tire choices, test results and other peoples experience are not good predictors.
edward
There are a lot of great little gems in this thread. We are on day 361 of fulltiming and have learned alot about what it takes to live on the road. I think most of the fuel costs questions have been covered to this point.
I think Jon made a good point earlier in the thread about repair costs. Buses are expensive. Just ask the Technomads as they recently had their engine rebuilt which was no small feat. The Technomads have great resources though for budgeting and set real world expectations for living full time. We ourselves just replaced a starter yesterday at 350.00 and that was doing the work myself. It would have easily been another 400$ or more for labor had a shop done the work. More than that if we didnt have a parts place down the road and needed to be towed. I think to realistically get a grasp of costs on fulltiming you need to look at more than just fuel.
Here are things we consider for budget
(mostly restated from previous posts)-
Miles per month - for fuel alone we factor a dollar per mile (we get 6-8mpg)
Generator run times (when boondocking) - 1-2 gallons per day. If its hot enough to need AC it could be more than that. We typically average 12$ a day to boondock.
Campgrounds - How long to stay? Ideally we would like to try and stay a month in each place to keep it cheap and not drive too far to the next place.
Food - This doesn't have to be but always seems to be our biggest expense.
Repairs - Looking over total costs of repairs for the last year this is just over 300 a month for us. Tire replacement at 500.00, Oil change at 180.00, Tie rod, tranny fluid and other work that needed to be done for about 1800. Starter at 350. This isnt everything and It adds up quick. Also think about generator upkeep as well as RV repairs - fridge, lights, toilet, electrical....etc.
Toad - fuel costs and repairs.
One last thing is lifestyle. We just boondocked (no hookups) in Yosemite for a week at the cost of 10$ a day plus generator (12$ day) if we stayed in a nearby campground it would have been 70 a day plus a whole lot of fuel to drive our giant toad into the park everyday.
So if you like being in a great location with full hookups, wifi that works, a swimming pool, all your cable channels and a nice paved pad each time you stop it might be a few dollars more than staying off the beaten path, stealth boondocking and overnighting in sub par campgrounds.
We have payed as much as 550$ for a week in an RV park and as much as 80$ to overnight in prime loacations. We have also gone months where our total costs for fuel is 0$ and our campground fees were 350.00. The most expensive places were because of lack of planning and being in California and the cheapest place was a planned stay in Texas. Slowing down and putting less miles on the road also spreads out the costs of repairs and fuel over time.
One last thing to mention is that compared to our 1800.00 a month mortgage payment and house repairs and land scaping and bills it is much cheaper to live on the road. It does have its tradeoffs but so far we will accept those challenges that we are faced with for the amazing experience that we have had over the past year.
-Sean
Fulltiming somewhere in the USA
1984 Eagle 10S
www.herdofturtles.org (http://www.herdofturtles.org)