Spending All of Our Monies!

Blog Post #5 - Written May 3, 2025




Spending All Our Monies!


When you buy an RV, or a travel trailer, what they don’t tell you is all the extra stuff you need to actually use it. After you’ve signed on the dotted line and taken your money, they then hand you a long checklist (which is just the bare minimum, not everything you could need) of “RV Basic Necessities”.


You then get to spend hours and hours researching the different weight distributions and sway control hitches, sewer hoses, power cords, water filters, surge protectors, storage systems, black and grey water tank deodorizers, water pressure regulators, chocks, wheel blocks, coupler locks, special quick-disintegrating toilet paper, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  And again, those are just the basics to survive. If you want to actually have fun and enjoy your trip around the country, you’ll also need a whole host of other things like bikes, bike rack, kayaks, camp chairs, truck bed cover, porch mats, park passes, zoo passes, museum passes, etc.

I almost forgot the boring “adulting” things like mail-forwarding and residency services, finding new health insurance since I’m not a FT employee anymore, switching auto insurance to FL (since we are now FL residents), mobile hotspots for internet (we decided to use Calyx Institute), and the actual campgrounds you have to find for each and every night (Harvest Hosts, Passport America, Escapees, etc).


We have historically been very frugal and don’t spend much of our money (we don’t have cable, or even home internet, no Netflix, no Amazon Prime, don’t eat out much, and bought most of our clothes/furniture at Savers/Goodwill or garage sales). So this was quite a change of pace for us haha!


Our naiveté was still intact when we bought the trailer, thinking we could just up and go!  My first wake up call was spending $700 on a hitch.  Yeah.  That was only the beginning.  Amazon gave us our free trial of Prime and we went ham!  Haha every day we’d realize something else we needed and make another order.  If you foolishly follow in our footsteps, I would budget spending another $5-10k (beyond the cost of the trailer and truck) on all the other SHTUFF you’ll need.

Comments

  1. Richy RichMay 14, 2025 at 9:11 PM

    Just think, all those luxuries you went without for years and years are paying for the shtuff you're buying now... So basically it's all free! #savermath

    ReplyDelete

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