Preparing Our Budget for Full-Timing & Launching Open Road Chronicles

Preparing Our Budget for Full-Timing & Launching Open Road Chronicles

Living in an RV requires a lot of planning, especially if you want to be able to enjoy all of the activities surrounding you. In this post Justin explains how he’s putting together a budget so that we can live a stress-free life.

Preparing Our Budget for Full-Timing & Launching Open Road Chronicles

Over the last few months, I’ve been preparing our budget for the journey ahead of us. Thankfully, it’s been a lot easier than I thought it would be. Here’s a look at our larger expenses so far. I’ve excluded diesel, propane, food and things we’ve already owned like the motorcycle.

  • Truck – $17,500 (loan)
  • Insurance – $130 (per month)
  • Travel Trailer – $5,500 (paid in cash)
  • Renovations – $600
  • Parking – $350

Setting money aside for the future.

That’s a total of $6,450 out of pocket and $17,500 owed on the truck (with $329 loan payments and $130/mo insurance payments). I set aside money until August for truck payments, insurance and diesel. Now I’m working on getting money for food and resort fees. My hopes are to pull together everything needed for the next 3-5 months within the next 4 weeks. I know that sounds fast, but I’ve done it before thanks to being a website developer and I know I can do it again. Once this is figured out we can focus on our journey and careers.

Florida, here we come!

Joelle and I have come to the conclusion that our first stop will be somewhere in Florida, as of right now we’re thinking Tampa. It’s important to us that we find a place where businesses are growing and events are booming. This way I can attend local business meetings and Joelle can find meetups for makeup artists/photographers.

Once we find the right location, we’re going to stay there for about 3 months. Our end goal will be to challenge ourselves to get all of our work scheduled within those 3 months, that way when we move onto the next city we’ll be ready to focus our attention there.

The finishing touches.

Before we do any of this however, we need to finish up the interior of the RV. We’ve got about a month now to meet our goal (originally it was March 15th, but we’ve changed that to the beginning of April) to leave Virginia and head South!

We have run into a few delays though… one being the weather.

It’s way too cold outside to test the water systems and we need to get the water heater working, which again relies on the weather being warm enough. Since this is our first experience, we want to do it right and don’t want to risk anything. After that we’ll need to finish up the trim for the flooring and then figure out how to attach the furniture to the floor for once we start traveling.

Our new social media & we’re gaining lots of followers, fast!

While doing all of this, I’ve also been working on setting up the website, Instagram, YouTube channel, Facebook page and Pinterest account so that we can document everything.

To both of our amazement, we’ve gained over 300 fans in the last few days, 100 followers on Instagram and our website has had over 4,000 visits this week from people all around the world!

Preparing Our Budget for Full-Timing & Launching Open Road Chronicles

It’s great to see that people are actually interested in what we have to say (especially Joelle’s posts) and are sharing our story with their friends and families.


Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.