Vanlife & Going Full Time

#Vanlife is becoming quite a normal thing to want to do these days. The cost of living in a bricks and sticks home rising. Taking those 2 weeks vacation once a year to see the exotic places you wish you could live; it's no wonder that people want to have more freedom and the ability to travel to more places.

We started our journey back in 2016 when we bought our very first Caravan or "travel trailer" as they're called in the America. Before I get onto the details of that here is a bit of background to our reasons to taking to the road. Both Wendy, my wife, and I (Steve) had been looking after Wendy's elderly parents since about 2011 when we regularly visited them two or three times a week to make sure they were OK.

Like many people, and as Wendy's parents became less able to take care of themselves we stepped in to help. Following Wendy's fathers death from a recurrence of lymphoma in 2014, we became full time carers for Wendy's mum until hear passing in January 2016.

Deciding on a Caravan or a Motorhome (RV)

For the last part of 2015 we'd been enviously looking at a VW Campervan that was parked just around the corner from where we lived in Hove, East Sussex. Sure it looked rusty and somewhat battered but the emotion that seeing it created was a feeling of "joyful escape" and thoughts of just jumping in and driving off to a place for a few nights. You see we'd become quite "compressed" having to carry on the full time care of mum for a couple of years. Mum now couldn't walk, dress herself, and had signs of dementia ; she lived with us and often needed attending in the night so neither Wendy nor I could fully relax.

The thoughts of that VW remained with us into 2016 and after a few months of soul searching, budgeting, and much "to and fro" about Caravan or Motorhome, we decided that our best option was to go for a Caravan. Our budget was limited to about £20,000 and we had to buy a car to tow it within that budget too.

We found a caravan for about £7,000 and a car for £9,000. This was a couple of months after mum had died on 3rd January 2016.

We decided that we needed some time to recouperate from the last five years of looking after parents and so we set off on our tour of the UK.

We’d set ourselves a one year timeframe and had thought that we would manage financially before returning to work in 2017.

What a wonderful year we had in our old caravan finding beautiful new places to visit and wonderful views to take in. Such good memories of that initial year.

Our unexpected love for travel lead us to have a radical rethink of our lives and future. Did we really want to go back to the “rat race”, back to the daily grind of Wendy working as a pharmacy assistant and me restarting a business from scratch at the age of almost 60 years.

What were our options, could we manage on our savings until various pensions became available?

Initially we settled on a bit of a half way point between going back to our previous lives and fully retiring and living a fugal existence until proper retirement age and state pensions started. As we had stayed in many caravan sites and seen a good number of camp site warden jobs being advised, we decided that maybe a part time or seasonal job as a warden couple would be the thing for us.

After a few months of looking and assessing various positions we decided to take up an offer at an independent camp site in the North West of England near to the historic city of Chester.

The job was part time for three days a week looking after the site, cleaning, checking in and checking out visitors and generally making sure everything ran smoothly and that customers were happy.

Now based full time in the North West and with the retirement flat in Hove empty and unoccupied we made the huge decision to sell up and so remove the anxiety of owning a retirement property that we could not rent out and that was costing us almost £600 a month in service charges.

Following the complete redecoration, recarpeting and clearance of the flat, it went on the market and eventually silt for very close to the asking price.

Free of the “burden”of a property and feeling strangely tied to the job we had taken on, we decided to buy a motorhome to replace the caravan we lived full time in.

A big part of that decision was the fact that we had set up an awning on the caravan which over a few weeks of being in the job had become a full living space with tables chairs and a comprehensive kitchen arrangement.

This set up completely stopped up from travelling in the caravan as it would mean that we would have to take down the awning and store it’s contents for a few days each week while we got away for those days. The difference with the motorhome arrangement is that we could have what is known as a “Drive-Away” awning which could be left in place while we travelled in the motorhome.

Remembering the thoughts of a MotorHome and doing more research on the type, size, and make of MotorHome we wanted we decided that the Berstner brand was probably a good quality way to go. A few months of visiting dealerships and MotorHome shows around the UK and we had settled on a 7.5 metre long van with a large storage space or garage as they’re known. A forcourt demo model came available at a dealer near Bury in the north of England. At £63,000 it was, we thought everything we wanted in a full time living MotorHome.

For a number of reasons, not least of which that the dealer was very condescending, we decided and were recommended to go and see a Hymer dealer in Telford. Hymer Erwin Group are the company that own and manufacture Burster and several other brands of MotorHome.

On visiting the dealership, we found an exact replica of the Burstner we had seen only this one had a slightly higher specification, was Hymer branded but exactly the same price of £63,000.

It seemed this was meant to be and so we paid the deposit and collected it a month later. With all the additional things we asked to be added the total price was £70,000.

Problems With Our First Van

This “MotorHome of our dreams” turned out to be the van of nightmares with several problems which when listed out for the dealer went on for almost two A4 pages.

The MotorHome that we expected to be very high quality was not living up to expectation and after a contentious battle with the dealer, they agreed to take it back for a week at least so that all of the issues could be repaired to our satisfaction.

The problem with that was that we lived full time in the MotorHome and we would need a replacement or loan MotorHome to live in while they repaired ours. The dealer agreed and arranged for one of their part exchange vehicles to be delivered to us. The AutoTrail Comanche arrived with us on 19th January 2018 and by the end of the next day we had negotiated a deal to swap the Comanche for our Hymer T678CL Golden Limited Edition.

Two years on and we are still very happy with Nikita Chloe, as we have named her. We have travelled over 20,000 miles and been to eight countries on our travels.

Living On The Road

Having no fixed base can be a challenge and it has certainly caused us some concerns at times. In today’s “normal society” if you don’t have a house or apartment in a street then you probably just don’t fit in or at least that is how “normal people” will see you. Most people we meet fall into a few categories.

- The “I need a house to go back to”

- The “Ooh you are living the dream, we so jealous“

- The “Yes we live full time too”

Whichever group people are in the conversation usually includes the question of post / letters, medical treatment and GP, and registering to vote.

The amount of letter and junk mail we used to get when we lived in our bricks and sticks home and that continued for a while after we sold up. This is something we have now got to grips with by asking the various “official” institutions to stop any paper corespondents and make sure that it’s all online. Things like banks and the Government Tax etc. This of course does not stop the junk mail which will always be there.

We now use a mail address service called BoatMail who provide us with a mail to email service so that people can send letters to a street address which will be opened, scanned, and emailed to us.

registering with a GP can be a challenge but the rules in the UK are that you can register with a GP if you “live” in the area even if you have no address. Without an address near your GP of choice they’ll have difficulty in understanding that you can register with them but polite insistence and directing them to the relevant Government / NHS web pages gets over that. In fact it’s fine to use the GP surgery as your address in this case.

Similar to the GP registration, you can register to vote by using your town hall as your address, and again polite insistence and pointing to the relevant advice and guidance online helps the people understand.

Living Expenses And Making Ends Meet

Deciding to “retire” without a pension or give up working for a living is a very scary thing to do and one that requires you to have savings in the bank to live on. At first it seemed to us that the money we had accumulated from various sources would probably be enough to live on in our now downsized lifestyle. After all, many of the expenses that we had while working and living a “normal” life would no longer be needed. Things like council tax, home contents insurance, gas and electricity bill, home maintenance and the list goes on.

A few of those items are of course replaced by expenses that are generated by the MotorHome lifestyle. For example, when living full time in a MotorHome, the vehicle insurance rockets from an average of £350 per year to a whopping £1250 per year! Then there is vehicle maintenance, service, MOT, and repairs that eats into the cash you have. All of these things were manageable for us but there was something else that I had not accounted for.

Its all very well giving up work when you are 59 years old and then filling your days with travel, sightseeing, eating local foods etc but like most situations in life one needs a purpose; something that drives us to get out of bed in the morning. I found that although our money would last us through to when our pension kicked in, I was missing that purpose.

Now I’m almost 63 years old and for the last few years I’ve tried to shoehorn my mind into fully retired mode but have simply failed to manage that. We’ve travelled a lot and been to many beautiful places and captured some super memories, mentally, in photos, and in video format. In fact one of the things that does keep my mind occupied to some degree is the daily vlog we create on Youtube. Still that seems to be somehow not enough and my need to create more value for people in a more business sense keeps coming to the front of my mind.

Creating value is a big driver for me and one of the reasons I have started to write and share other content on vocal.media . I’ve also started to create some video training on “how to make vlogs” on YouTube and will be sharing that during 2020.

All in all, the decisions we have made over the last few years have turned out to be the right ones and we certainly live a better more relaxed and less stressful live in our MotorHome. We don’t see that changing any time soon.