October 17, 2023 • 24 mins
In this episode, Ryan and Kara dive deep into the world of RV living, sharing their personal experiences and the hidden costs they encountered on their journey. From unforeseen expenses to essential items often overlooked in budgets, they discuss it all. Plus, they reveal their top recommendation for saving money on diesel. If you're an RV enthusiast or planning to hit the road, this episode is a must-listen. Don't forget to stay connected with the hosts on their social media platforms and catch them live on Tiktok every Thursday at 8pm CT.
Join Kara and Ryan as we share their insights and experiences to help you make the most of your next camping adventure. Plus, don't miss the Pick of the Week, where we reveal how to secure the perfect campsite at any campground.
If you have a topic you'd like us to cover in a future episode, give us a follow and share your suggestions in the chat!
Join the community by checking out beacons.ai/wanderingrvbabe and follow us on Tiktok @WanderingRVBabe, Instagram @WanderingRVBabe, YouTube @WanderingRVBabe, or Facebook Wandering RV Babe
Join Kara and Ryan as we share their insights and experiences to help you make the most of your next camping adventure. Plus, don't miss the Pick of the Week, where we reveal how to secure the perfect campsite at any campground.
If you have a topic you'd like us to cover in a future episode, give us a follow and share your suggestions in the chat!
Join the community by checking out beacons.ai/wanderingrvbabe and follow us on Tiktok @WanderingRVBabe, Instagram @WanderingRVBabe, YouTube @WanderingRVBabe, or Facebook Wandering RV Babe
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So guys, you if you're interestedin living in an RV or just traveling
in an RV for any amount oftime, whatever your plans are, you
need to buy your RV now,because I'm not kidding. Every dealership is
overstalked right now. Everything's unclearance andthey've got to make room for the new
twenty twenty four models. Oh yeah, they rolled out with the twenty twenty
four models and a lot of themhad them at the Hershey show in in
(00:24):
Indiana. But on top of that, this year, RV sales are down
like fifty percent, so there's somuch inventory and they are totally priced to
sell. Welcome to the Wandering RVShow. Your source for our stories,
(00:48):
our screw ups, and our successis living the full time RV life.
I'm Kara, the Wandering RV Babe, and this is my driver Ryan.
How did folks? It's time totalk about RV life. It's time to
talk about RV life. I agree, So tonight we're going to be talking
about you just got your RV,now what do you need? I said
it during the pre show. Pricesare down, it's time to buy that
RV. But we want to prepyou for some of the unexpected costs,
(01:12):
the things that you might not realizeyou need to buy, including some that
we knew but still didn't budget for. Yeah, we screwed up, and
we'll tell you about our screw upso that you don't make the same mistake.
But we're also going to give ourrecommendation for how to save money on
diesel fuel if your toe vehicle isa diesel so that'll be super fun as
(01:33):
well. We'll do that during thepick of the week. But first we
want to honor shout out last week'stop gifters. And I love how You're
like, we want to honor ourtop gifters, and I'm like, let's
give them just a shout out.You're so much more sophisticated about it than
that I try. I'd just liketo honor people. You do you do
all right, I'm gonna try toget all of your names correct. But
these were our top gifters from thispast week. Just like Ryan said,
(02:00):
we've got Lamy Grace nine seven toeight, gave O Malaney Creek Farm,
nikiator Erica zero three two nine,David Grittman, Earl de Maria. Part
of this is like a game ofcan I pronounce your name correctly, Odin's
(02:20):
Monster. That's a pretty awesome username. Uh Eat Local New York,
Juice five eight eleven, d People'stwenty one, twenty one, country Boy
ten eighty one, Ganell Goodson.Hopefully I pronounce your name correctly. Sires
nineteen sixty nine, Mike OK's twoforty five, and Sun Top twenty two.
(02:43):
Thanks guys for giving us gifts lastweek. We so appreciate it.
We'll do shout outs every week forour top gifters of the previous week.
Uh So, definitely join us onThursdays for that. And we reached over
ten thousand followers on TikTok, whichis super super that's awesome. So we
decided to give our first giveaway ever, which is a guest spot on an
(03:05):
upcoming Tuesday night live that we'll bedoing. And I'm super excited to announce
that Randy Flanagan won that guest spot. So we're going to reach out to
you, Randy after the show.We'll send you a video letting you know
that you're the winner if you're noton our live right now, and then
we'll coordinate at time and have youjoin us for a thirty minute guest spot
(03:27):
on a Tuesday Live. So therewe go. Up. If you have
a recommendation, So we're talking aboutunexpected costs of our v life. But
if you have a recommendation our topicyou really want us to cover, definitely
give us a follow, send usa DM, and let us know what
topic you want us to cover andwe'll try to work it in in future
weeks. Okay, on to themain topic. So fun story first to
(03:51):
lead into the topic. When wesold our home to go full time,
we made a little bit of aprofit, good enough profit to kind of
help propel us into this. Thatwas part of why we did it,
and we kind of had a quickturnaround on a lot of stuff, and
so I had to budget out,Okay, I need this much money to
put down his deposit on the RV, I need this much money to put
(04:11):
down his deposit on the truck.I need this much money to go ahead
and pay off some of our debt. And that was it, And like,
those are the three things I wasgoing through. I was like trying
to get everything ready, to havesome money for a few startup costs and
everything, trying to divvy it allout real quickly in a matter of like
a day or two. Well,got the RV, got moved in the
truck, took a little while,and so we had to wait on that
(04:34):
one. But in the meantime,I wanted a special kind of hitch.
It's an automatic sliding hitch, andit's a lot more expensive than your standard
every day fifth will hitch. Andso we ended up not budgeting prepping for
that, and it was a Ithink it's like three thousand plus dollars and
(04:56):
we had to in the last youknow, kind of find how we were
going to cover that at the lastsecond without like going into debt over stuff
that we didn't need to, andso we didn't plan for it. Yeah,
it was funny, so that thehitch itself is an absolute game changer.
We absolutely love it. We've hadit for two years. It's been
(05:16):
amazing. I saw it in chatsomebody crawled out that we have a Sandpiper
RV. We love our Sandpiper aswell, But guys, it is a
big ass fifth wheel. So it'sforty foot fifth wheel and we have a
single wheel thirty five hundred truck.We did that on purpose. We didn't
want to duly because it's our onlyvehicle, and so it's also our around
(05:38):
the town vehicle, just like ourtow vehicle. And having the slide the
automatic sliding hitch, because they alsomake sliding hitches that are manual that are
cheaper, but you have to getout and go manually slide it. So
having the automatic sliding hitch, Ithink it gives us what eighteen inches of
clearance yep, so we can dolike full on ninety degree turns even in
a short bed. It's amazing.It's great, but it's a little on
(06:01):
the costly side. And we haveprepit as part of our budget, Like
we had all these startup cost thingswe were prepped for. You know,
obviously anytime you buy an RV,you you know, you have sewer hookups,
you have water hookups, you haveelectrical look, it's all these things
that you have to buy to getyou up and going, and we prepped
for all that. We were readyto buy all those things, We got
(06:21):
them, we were good to go. But the actual fifth wool receiver is
just it was a it was acost I didn't plan for, and we
wanted to prep you for that.So that's our main topic this week is
talking about the different items that youmay not actually think about you need to
buy to get into our V life. Yeah, so I mean, first
(06:45):
and foremost, number one hitch,higher quality hitch. So a lot of
times you can get some pretty cheaphitches. It's really not that big of
a deal. But there's people thatwill get kind of a starter hitch.
They figure out how they want totravel, what works for them, and
then they'll upgrade later, which isgreat exactly. And so a higher quality
hitch like a sliding hitch, orif you have a pull behind like a
weight distribution hitch, those are goingto be more expensive. You also have
(07:09):
hitch adapters, so like if yourtruck's a little tall, depending on what
your your setup is, you mayneed adapters or step downs. Depending on
how big your RV is, youmight need stabilizers. And if your truck
didn't come pre wired for it,then you need the seven pin wiring.
Yeah, so that's all stuff toconsider that you might not normally think about
(07:30):
as a as a cost associated withgetting your RV. The second thing is
new tires, and it really doesn'tmatter if you're getting a new RV or
a used RV. Those RVs justsit. They'll sit on the lot,
or they'll sit in somebody storage unitor something like that. You can actually
look at the dot date that thetire was produced. It will tell you.
(07:55):
It's like a four digit date that'son the tire. The first two
digits are the week of the yearthat that tire was produced, and then
the second to the last two digitsof that year are the actual year that
the tire was produced. So ifit says zero five twenty two, that
means it was produced in the fifthweek of twenty twenty two. Those tires
(08:16):
can be old. They also arenot usually super great tires that come on
their Yeah, when you buy anew RV, there's no guarantee you're gonna
get good tires. In the caseof ours, we got good tires,
but they were like two years oldby the time we actually bought it and
took it home, So like itwas, they were already old tires at
(08:37):
that point until they need to bereplaced. Our truck tires actually another big
point, our truck tires. Itwas a used truck, but our truck
tires actually need to be replaced withinI think it was maybe like four months
of us hitting the road. Wehad to go ahead and get new tires,
and so that was another big cost, and they're expensive, especially good
quality RV tires. Depending on howbig your camper is, you're gonna spend
(09:00):
a pretty penny on it. Sothat's something you got a budget for.
Number Next, fuel, which isa pretty standard thing you know you're gonna
have. You're gonna your fuel costsare gonna go up when you're traveling.
When you're towing, you're gonna usemore fuel. But pro paane refills and
I know most people think about it, they're like, yeah, I need
propane. Of course I'm gonna likehave propane costs. The problem is if
(09:22):
you've never done it before, youmay not realize how much that can cost
and the different ways that places willcharge you for it. Yeah, yeah,
killed killer like you're using it.You were talking about the tires and
you said, yeah, you're you'relucky they lasted that long. We are
very lucky that they lasted that long. I know, I'm going backtracking,
but it was on topic, soyou're getting a shout out. But yeah,
(09:43):
propane could definitely be pretty costly dependingon your use case scenario. Well,
and different different places charge different waysfor it. So some will charge
you by the pounds, some willcharge you by the gallon, and some
will just charge you the full tankcosts no matter what, and you just
you're out. You have to payfor it, whether it's halfway empty or
completely empty, and those are reallythat really sucks. Mark calls out a
(10:07):
spare tire. If your vy didn'tcome with a spare tire, definitely like
check into that. Make sure youhave a spare tire for sure. Yeah,
if you're having to replace all ofyour tires and you have four tires
on your RV, just get five. They have one as a spare tire.
Number four. Electricity cost at monthlyand even some weekly sites, so
(10:28):
you most of the time, ifyou're at a daily site or in most
cases at a weekly site, yourelectricity is covered. However, if you
start staying longer or you end upat one of those places that does have
a weekly cost for electricity, thenthat's gonna be something that you have to
account for and you got to payfor every month that you're there, every
week that's they're there. Yeah,totally totally agree. It really comes into
(10:52):
play a lot when you get monthlysites. So if you're planning on doing
the RB lifestyle and you're being you'regoing to be stationary or you're going to
stay places a really long time.That's really when you got to look out
for them charging you for electricity andnot just including it in your campsite.
Feet and kill also brings up anotherwonderful point, like being prepared for repairs,
(11:13):
because like roofs can get damage reallyeasily on RVs, you can have
other damage you get like in thecase of us, we had a blown
out tire, and so sometimes youjust got to be prepared for those damages
that just are going to become inyour way. Yeah, I mean that
also really segues very nicely into annualmaintenance costs, tank treatments, ceilings,
(11:37):
things like that, the rubber conditionerthat goes around your slides, if you
have slides. All of those thingsare things that are small, but they
do add up. You got tohave slide grease if you have slides,
you gotta have lock tight if youhave slides, you need tools for changing
a tire for all of the differentscrews to kind of like make sure that
(11:58):
those are are screwed in nicely onyour camper. And they're not always a
Phillip's head or a flat heead screwdriver. So those are some of the extra
like little costs that they seem small, but they can add up really really
quickly, for sure. Another oneis bottled water. So water filters are
great, and we have one waterfilter outside of the RV. We have
another water filter inside the RV forthe water that we drink, but honestly,
(12:22):
there's some places where that's not enough, and yeah, you're gonna need
to buy bottled water when you're atthose places and be prepared for it until
you're ready to move on from thatsite, just by like the gallon side
water bottles. But the price ofbottled water has been going up. Yeah,
so that's really been one of thosethings of like that was a big
part while we were like big onusing the filters, but then someplaces we
(12:45):
got to and I was like,yeah, this still tastes and smells funny.
Yeah, Yeah, when we werethere was one place that we went
to and the water was legit slimyand it was gross. It felt ross,
and we use like a three filtersystem and so even filtering it three
(13:05):
times now, we didn't use thenew filters that we have now. But
regardless, you're gonna have to payfor water filters and those costs can add
up as well. And al thanksfor the roses. Oh yeah, Spencer,
we are drinking. I like that. Accidental mimosas killer Killer brings up
(13:26):
a great point. Keep fuses withyou. Oh yeah, fuses are great
to help with you need spares,TPMs systems. Those are great to keep
an eye on your tires so youknow if there's gonna be issues before the
blowout occurs. These are all kindof things that you just kind of want
to keep around and other great thingsto help with it. But yeah,
(13:46):
those are for sure some like extracosts and things that you should be where
you should be putting your money exactly, I mean and true they can fail,
so the TPMs systems can fail.You do stuf have to keep an
eye on your tires when you're drivingdown the road, but you absolutely need
to make sure again back to ourprevious point, you have good tires that
are new or newer on your RV. Another cost that might come up is
(14:09):
you're probably going to have to replacesome of your kitchen ware to get more
RV safe kitchenware. Yeah, orat least get if you're not full time,
make sure you have duplicates of thingsfor your camper, like kitchenware.
But you don't want to be carryingaround dishes that are breakable in your RV
(14:30):
because as soon as you drive downthe road, your RV is going through
an earthquake on the road as you'retraveling. So you want dishware that is
durable, that is microwaves safe,that can be cleaned easily, things like
that. So those are some considerationsas well. And if you're going to
be camping during the winter, youmight want to get yourself a heated water
(14:50):
hose. Oh yeah, absolutely.Another thing that I think is really critical,
especially if you have pets, isa temperature monitoring system. What it'll
do is it'll actually monitor the temperature. It actually monitor the power that's coming
into your RV and the temperature rangein your RV to make sure that it's
(15:11):
a comfortable temperature. A lot oftimes, with those temperature monitoring services,
including the one that we have,you can set whatever that comfortable range is
on the app and it'll continue tomonitor it. It'll send you text messages,
it'll continue to monitor the humidity,inside your camper, because humidity in
a camper is deathly It's terrible forthe camper itself. And that's a good
(15:33):
point, like getting a dehumidifier,yeah, to help with that humidity,
because once it starts getting humid,you need that de human reifier. Now,
I will say for us majority ofthe year, with the way we
travel, we don't run into thatvery often. No, but we're in
Florida right now, so guess whatit is an issue right now. And
so yeah, definitely something to consider. You can you can get just a
(15:54):
plain humidifier, those are great.You can also get the damp rid balls
that will just absorb the water orChemco now has like a version of the
damp red balls that like are refillableso you can just dump the balls out
and pour more in. And sothat's really so that's kind of what we
use. We don't actually have adehumidifier. We use those little damp red
balls. Yeah. Thanks Maloney CreekFarm for the roses. I saw somebody
(16:18):
ask where do you buy I don'tknow which one you were asking about.
He I think answered the question onthe dehumidifier. But if you're asking about
the temperature monitoring service. We actuallyuse a system called Marcel. It's m
A R C ELLL. We absolutelylove it and we partnered with them.
They were kind enough to share outthrough us a twenty five dollars discount code
(16:44):
for anybody who clicks on our linkin our website and goes and makes a
purchase to buy their product. Butthey'll send you text messages if the power
goes out, if the humidity getsbeyond a certain range that you set,
and if the temperature gets beyond acertain range that you set. It's come
in handy more times than not.Because we were just out and about,
we were exploring, our pup washome in our camper and all of a
(17:07):
sudden we lost power because there wasa storm that happened and where our camper
was not we were and we wereable to get home and take care of
her. So it's been really nicefor us. It's super critical to have
that if you have pets. Ifyou don't have pets, probably don't have
to worry about it as much.But it's kind of a nice to have.
Got a couple of bonus nice tohave. I mean, some of
(17:29):
these are going to be things thatyou're just going to want to upgrade down
the road, so you might wantto save up for them there. You
may not need them right when youbuy your RV, but they're really nice.
Some of them you might really wantimmediately. I will say. One
of them, like somebody brought upalready, was the TPMs. We have
not had a TPMs system the entiretime we've been traveling down the road.
We just manually check. We justmanually check check it. Manually check it.
(17:53):
Yes, But a few other thingsare like you might want to upgrade.
You probably want to upgrade at somepoint. Your RV locks. Yeah,
So it's pretty well known that mostRVs will come with just a standard
RV lock on them, and thatis your RV lock for your doors to
gain entry into your camper. WhenI say standard, I mean standard.
(18:15):
People can just like it's the samelock, it's the same keys. If
you buy an RV and somebody elsebuys an RV, they all have the
same locks on them. Your keyswill work on their RV and their keys
will work on your RV. Andcrazy you can buy replacements I think on
Amazon for just a couple of bucks. So if a thief really wants to
(18:37):
break into your camper. It's notsuper difficult if they just buy a set
of RV locks. So getting aseparate RV lock system and installing that is
going to be much safer, andit's probably something that you want to upgrade
to, if not right away,at least down the road. Yeah,
And another couple of things are youmight want to have, Like you might
(19:00):
need a specific set of sheets foryour RV, So you might have we
have a full size queen, butsome RVs will come with what's called an
RV king, and so you mightneed to have specific sheets that you buy
just for that mattress because it's nota standard size, right, and a
lot of RVs will have they callit an RV king or an RV queen.
(19:22):
Those are not standard sizes. They'renot the same as a residential queen
or residential king. Now, thankfullyfor us, we actually our camper came
with a RV king, but thematt underneath it was big enough and long
enough that we were able to replaceit, and we replaced it with a
full residential size queen mattress that welove. We got a purple mattress,
(19:45):
which is great because it breathes reallywell, but it's really nice to have
separate sheets, separate towels, separateyou know, just stocked supplies in your
RV so that if you want totake a trip really quickly, or you
need to bug out because there's badweather coming or something, or you know
something's going on, then your RVis fully stocked. So it's just another
(20:08):
nice to have. And then extrakitchen items things like that that you are
gonna have to lug back and forthfrom your house to your RV if you're
not full time. Just being ableover time to stock your RV full of
all of those things so you're nothaving to carry all of them back and
forth every time you want to takea camping trip is going to be another
(20:30):
really nice to have thing. Yeah, and Dwight Vials brings up first aid
kit. Oh, one hundred percentfirst aid kit. We actually have two.
We have one inside the camper andwe have one inside the truck as
well. So if for some reasonwe're driving down the road, we're either
not towing, we're not hooked upto the camper, or we are and
it's just an emergency that we needto bust out the first aid kit.
(20:52):
We have one in the truck andone in the camper. That's a great
call out for sure. And Ithink that's that's the on the ones that
I can think of right now.We'll keep an eye on Chat and if
Chat brings up to anything great,we'll toss it in. But I think
it's time for our pick of theweek, yep. And this week,
since we're talking about costs, weare talking about costs. This has been
(21:14):
a lifesaver for us in saving costs. So maybe if you get into rby
life and you hit an unexpected costthat we didn't think about, that we
didn't cover, this might help offsetit if you use this service. Yes,
so it's called open Roads. Weare not sponsored by them, we're
not affiliated with them. We justheard about it like so many other people
did. If you've got a dieseltruck or a diesel motor home, then
(21:40):
what it allows you to do isto get the discounted prices at truck dealerships
or not truck dealerships, at truckstops, at fuel stops, fuel stops,
so that way, and it's discounted. So like there'll be a number
posted at the fuel stop that's theregular rate in the app, you can
actual look and see, oh heyhere it's cheaper, and you'll get a
(22:03):
discount and they apply that discount.The biggest thing I've heard from a lot
of people that aren't happy about itis that it does have to hook up
to your bank system. So Iknow that that can be a little unnerving
at times, but it is agreat way to save money. And I
mean the costs are sometimes as muchas a dollar a gallon. Yeah,
(22:23):
most of the time we see coststhirty to forty cents discounted from what's posted,
but sometimes way way more than that. So yeah, it's definitely a
cost saving especially if you're going todo a lot of travel in your RV
and you have a diesel. Andagain it's called open Roads. I believe
good Sam has one as well.They partnered with Pilot and Flying j.
(22:47):
I think that you can get adiscount. We haven't used that one personally,
so I can't speak to it.Open Roads has been great for this
and we've been using it for ayear and a half now and we couldn't
be happier. Yeah, we absolutelylove it. Hey, friends, thanks
for camping out with us tonight.We'd love to stay connected we are on
live on Thursday nights on TikTok ateight pm Central every Thursday. Like comment,
(23:12):
follow for more and check out ourwebsite at beacons dot Ai slash wandering
our Vbabe. That's b acns dotai slash wandering our vbab and we will
see you next time. Bye byebye. So I think we're up for
(23:33):
Q and A at this point.Have we talked through everything? I think
we have, But first little storytime. All right, So it's kind of
on the same topic this week,and it was really timely, so I
thought it was kind of a funnything. I was at the doctor earlier
this week and I don't know how, but we got on the topic of
his home internet service. And mindyou, he's not a full time our
(23:55):
Beer, but we told him aboutour situation and what we do in our
lifestyle of being full time our Beers, and so we got on the topic
and he started talking about his homeinternet service and how the cost has just
skyrocketed and it was super unexpected forhim. But he also started talking about
how terrible his internet service is forthe cost that he's now paying, and
(24:15):
I got to thinking about it andI was like, yeah, our Internet
was pretty shitty at our house too, and we were paying a lot of
money for it, and we actuallyhave better internet, better quality internet in
our RV than we did at ourhouse that we had before we sold it
and went full time two years ago
So guys, you if you're interestedin living in an RV or just traveling
in an RV for any amount oftime, whatever your plans are, you
need to buy your RV now,because I'm not kidding. Every dealership is
overstalked right now. Everything's unclearance andthey've got to make room for the new
twenty twenty four models. Oh yeah, they rolled out with the twenty twenty
four models and a lot of themhad them at the Hershey show in in
(00:24):
Indiana. But on top of that, this year, RV sales are down
like fifty percent, so there's somuch inventory and they are totally priced to
sell. Welcome to the Wandering RVShow. Your source for our stories,
(00:48):
our screw ups, and our successis living the full time RV life.
I'm Kara, the Wandering RV Babe, and this is my driver Ryan.
How did folks? It's time totalk about RV life. It's time to
talk about RV life. I agree, So tonight we're going to be talking
about you just got your RV,now what do you need? I said
it during the pre show. Pricesare down, it's time to buy that
RV. But we want to prepyou for some of the unexpected costs,
(01:12):
the things that you might not realizeyou need to buy, including some that
we knew but still didn't budget for. Yeah, we screwed up, and
we'll tell you about our screw upso that you don't make the same mistake.
But we're also going to give ourrecommendation for how to save money on
diesel fuel if your toe vehicle isa diesel so that'll be super fun as
(01:33):
well. We'll do that during thepick of the week. But first we
want to honor shout out last week'stop gifters. And I love how You're
like, we want to honor ourtop gifters, and I'm like, let's
give them just a shout out.You're so much more sophisticated about it than
that I try. I'd just liketo honor people. You do you do
all right, I'm gonna try toget all of your names correct. But
these were our top gifters from thispast week. Just like Ryan said,
(02:00):
we've got Lamy Grace nine seven toeight, gave O Malaney Creek Farm,
nikiator Erica zero three two nine,David Grittman, Earl de Maria. Part
of this is like a game ofcan I pronounce your name correctly, Odin's
(02:20):
Monster. That's a pretty awesome username. Uh Eat Local New York,
Juice five eight eleven, d People'stwenty one, twenty one, country Boy
ten eighty one, Ganell Goodson.Hopefully I pronounce your name correctly. Sires
nineteen sixty nine, Mike OK's twoforty five, and Sun Top twenty two.
(02:43):
Thanks guys for giving us gifts lastweek. We so appreciate it.
We'll do shout outs every week forour top gifters of the previous week.
Uh So, definitely join us onThursdays for that. And we reached over
ten thousand followers on TikTok, whichis super super that's awesome. So we
decided to give our first giveaway ever, which is a guest spot on an
(03:05):
upcoming Tuesday night live that we'll bedoing. And I'm super excited to announce
that Randy Flanagan won that guest spot. So we're going to reach out to
you, Randy after the show.We'll send you a video letting you know
that you're the winner if you're noton our live right now, and then
we'll coordinate at time and have youjoin us for a thirty minute guest spot
(03:27):
on a Tuesday Live. So therewe go. Up. If you have
a recommendation, So we're talking aboutunexpected costs of our v life. But
if you have a recommendation our topicyou really want us to cover, definitely
give us a follow, send usa DM, and let us know what
topic you want us to cover andwe'll try to work it in in future
weeks. Okay, on to themain topic. So fun story first to
(03:51):
lead into the topic. When wesold our home to go full time,
we made a little bit of aprofit, good enough profit to kind of
help propel us into this. Thatwas part of why we did it,
and we kind of had a quickturnaround on a lot of stuff, and
so I had to budget out,Okay, I need this much money to
put down his deposit on the RV, I need this much money to put
(04:11):
down his deposit on the truck.I need this much money to go ahead
and pay off some of our debt. And that was it, And like,
those are the three things I wasgoing through. I was like trying
to get everything ready, to havesome money for a few startup costs and
everything, trying to divvy it allout real quickly in a matter of like
a day or two. Well,got the RV, got moved in the
truck, took a little while,and so we had to wait on that
(04:34):
one. But in the meantime,I wanted a special kind of hitch.
It's an automatic sliding hitch, andit's a lot more expensive than your standard
every day fifth will hitch. Andso we ended up not budgeting prepping for
that, and it was a Ithink it's like three thousand plus dollars and
(04:56):
we had to in the last youknow, kind of find how we were
going to cover that at the lastsecond without like going into debt over stuff
that we didn't need to, andso we didn't plan for it. Yeah,
it was funny, so that thehitch itself is an absolute game changer.
We absolutely love it. We've hadit for two years. It's been
(05:16):
amazing. I saw it in chatsomebody crawled out that we have a Sandpiper
RV. We love our Sandpiper aswell, But guys, it is a
big ass fifth wheel. So it'sforty foot fifth wheel and we have a
single wheel thirty five hundred truck.We did that on purpose. We didn't
want to duly because it's our onlyvehicle, and so it's also our around
(05:38):
the town vehicle, just like ourtow vehicle. And having the slide the
automatic sliding hitch, because they alsomake sliding hitches that are manual that are
cheaper, but you have to getout and go manually slide it. So
having the automatic sliding hitch, Ithink it gives us what eighteen inches of
clearance yep, so we can dolike full on ninety degree turns even in
a short bed. It's amazing.It's great, but it's a little on
(06:01):
the costly side. And we haveprepit as part of our budget, Like
we had all these startup cost thingswe were prepped for. You know,
obviously anytime you buy an RV,you you know, you have sewer hookups,
you have water hookups, you haveelectrical look, it's all these things
that you have to buy to getyou up and going, and we prepped
for all that. We were readyto buy all those things, We got
(06:21):
them, we were good to go. But the actual fifth wool receiver is
just it was a it was acost I didn't plan for, and we
wanted to prep you for that.So that's our main topic this week is
talking about the different items that youmay not actually think about you need to
buy to get into our V life. Yeah, so I mean, first
(06:45):
and foremost, number one hitch,higher quality hitch. So a lot of
times you can get some pretty cheaphitches. It's really not that big of
a deal. But there's people thatwill get kind of a starter hitch.
They figure out how they want totravel, what works for them, and
then they'll upgrade later, which isgreat exactly. And so a higher quality
hitch like a sliding hitch, orif you have a pull behind like a
weight distribution hitch, those are goingto be more expensive. You also have
(07:09):
hitch adapters, so like if yourtruck's a little tall, depending on what
your your setup is, you mayneed adapters or step downs. Depending on
how big your RV is, youmight need stabilizers. And if your truck
didn't come pre wired for it,then you need the seven pin wiring.
Yeah, so that's all stuff toconsider that you might not normally think about
(07:30):
as a as a cost associated withgetting your RV. The second thing is
new tires, and it really doesn'tmatter if you're getting a new RV or
a used RV. Those RVs justsit. They'll sit on the lot,
or they'll sit in somebody storage unitor something like that. You can actually
look at the dot date that thetire was produced. It will tell you.
(07:55):
It's like a four digit date that'son the tire. The first two
digits are the week of the yearthat that tire was produced, and then
the second to the last two digitsof that year are the actual year that
the tire was produced. So ifit says zero five twenty two, that
means it was produced in the fifthweek of twenty twenty two. Those tires
(08:16):
can be old. They also arenot usually super great tires that come on
their Yeah, when you buy anew RV, there's no guarantee you're gonna
get good tires. In the caseof ours, we got good tires,
but they were like two years oldby the time we actually bought it and
took it home, So like itwas, they were already old tires at
(08:37):
that point until they need to bereplaced. Our truck tires actually another big
point, our truck tires. Itwas a used truck, but our truck
tires actually need to be replaced withinI think it was maybe like four months
of us hitting the road. Wehad to go ahead and get new tires,
and so that was another big cost, and they're expensive, especially good
quality RV tires. Depending on howbig your camper is, you're gonna spend
(09:00):
a pretty penny on it. Sothat's something you got a budget for.
Number Next, fuel, which isa pretty standard thing you know you're gonna
have. You're gonna your fuel costsare gonna go up when you're traveling.
When you're towing, you're gonna usemore fuel. But pro paane refills and
I know most people think about it, they're like, yeah, I need
propane. Of course I'm gonna likehave propane costs. The problem is if
(09:22):
you've never done it before, youmay not realize how much that can cost
and the different ways that places willcharge you for it. Yeah, yeah,
killed killer like you're using it.You were talking about the tires and
you said, yeah, you're you'relucky they lasted that long. We are
very lucky that they lasted that long. I know, I'm going backtracking,
but it was on topic, soyou're getting a shout out. But yeah,
(09:43):
propane could definitely be pretty costly dependingon your use case scenario. Well,
and different different places charge different waysfor it. So some will charge
you by the pounds, some willcharge you by the gallon, and some
will just charge you the full tankcosts no matter what, and you just
you're out. You have to payfor it, whether it's halfway empty or
completely empty, and those are reallythat really sucks. Mark calls out a
(10:07):
spare tire. If your vy didn'tcome with a spare tire, definitely like
check into that. Make sure youhave a spare tire for sure. Yeah,
if you're having to replace all ofyour tires and you have four tires
on your RV, just get five. They have one as a spare tire.
Number four. Electricity cost at monthlyand even some weekly sites, so
(10:28):
you most of the time, ifyou're at a daily site or in most
cases at a weekly site, yourelectricity is covered. However, if you
start staying longer or you end upat one of those places that does have
a weekly cost for electricity, thenthat's gonna be something that you have to
account for and you got to payfor every month that you're there, every
week that's they're there. Yeah,totally totally agree. It really comes into
(10:52):
play a lot when you get monthlysites. So if you're planning on doing
the RB lifestyle and you're being you'regoing to be stationary or you're going to
stay places a really long time.That's really when you got to look out
for them charging you for electricity andnot just including it in your campsite.
Feet and kill also brings up anotherwonderful point, like being prepared for repairs,
(11:13):
because like roofs can get damage reallyeasily on RVs, you can have
other damage you get like in thecase of us, we had a blown
out tire, and so sometimes youjust got to be prepared for those damages
that just are going to become inyour way. Yeah, I mean that
also really segues very nicely into annualmaintenance costs, tank treatments, ceilings,
(11:37):
things like that, the rubber conditionerthat goes around your slides, if you
have slides. All of those thingsare things that are small, but they
do add up. You got tohave slide grease if you have slides,
you gotta have lock tight if youhave slides, you need tools for changing
a tire for all of the differentscrews to kind of like make sure that
(11:58):
those are are screwed in nicely onyour camper. And they're not always a
Phillip's head or a flat heead screwdriver. So those are some of the extra
like little costs that they seem small, but they can add up really really
quickly, for sure. Another oneis bottled water. So water filters are
great, and we have one waterfilter outside of the RV. We have
another water filter inside the RV forthe water that we drink, but honestly,
(12:22):
there's some places where that's not enough, and yeah, you're gonna need
to buy bottled water when you're atthose places and be prepared for it until
you're ready to move on from thatsite, just by like the gallon side
water bottles. But the price ofbottled water has been going up. Yeah,
so that's really been one of thosethings of like that was a big
part while we were like big onusing the filters, but then someplaces we
(12:45):
got to and I was like,yeah, this still tastes and smells funny.
Yeah, Yeah, when we werethere was one place that we went
to and the water was legit slimyand it was gross. It felt ross,
and we use like a three filtersystem and so even filtering it three
(13:05):
times now, we didn't use thenew filters that we have now. But
regardless, you're gonna have to payfor water filters and those costs can add
up as well. And al thanksfor the roses. Oh yeah, Spencer,
we are drinking. I like that. Accidental mimosas killer Killer brings up
(13:26):
a great point. Keep fuses withyou. Oh yeah, fuses are great
to help with you need spares,TPMs systems. Those are great to keep
an eye on your tires so youknow if there's gonna be issues before the
blowout occurs. These are all kindof things that you just kind of want
to keep around and other great thingsto help with it. But yeah,
(13:46):
those are for sure some like extracosts and things that you should be where
you should be putting your money exactly, I mean and true they can fail,
so the TPMs systems can fail.You do stuf have to keep an
eye on your tires when you're drivingdown the road, but you absolutely need
to make sure again back to ourprevious point, you have good tires that
are new or newer on your RV. Another cost that might come up is
(14:09):
you're probably going to have to replacesome of your kitchen ware to get more
RV safe kitchenware. Yeah, orat least get if you're not full time,
make sure you have duplicates of thingsfor your camper, like kitchenware.
But you don't want to be carryingaround dishes that are breakable in your RV
(14:30):
because as soon as you drive downthe road, your RV is going through
an earthquake on the road as you'retraveling. So you want dishware that is
durable, that is microwaves safe,that can be cleaned easily, things like
that. So those are some considerationsas well. And if you're going to
be camping during the winter, youmight want to get yourself a heated water
(14:50):
hose. Oh yeah, absolutely.Another thing that I think is really critical,
especially if you have pets, isa temperature monitoring system. What it'll
do is it'll actually monitor the temperature. It actually monitor the power that's coming
into your RV and the temperature rangein your RV to make sure that it's
(15:11):
a comfortable temperature. A lot oftimes, with those temperature monitoring services,
including the one that we have,you can set whatever that comfortable range is
on the app and it'll continue tomonitor it. It'll send you text messages,
it'll continue to monitor the humidity,inside your camper, because humidity in
a camper is deathly It's terrible forthe camper itself. And that's a good
(15:33):
point, like getting a dehumidifier,yeah, to help with that humidity,
because once it starts getting humid,you need that de human reifier. Now,
I will say for us majority ofthe year, with the way we
travel, we don't run into thatvery often. No, but we're in
Florida right now, so guess whatit is an issue right now. And
so yeah, definitely something to consider. You can you can get just a
(15:54):
plain humidifier, those are great.You can also get the damp rid balls
that will just absorb the water orChemco now has like a version of the
damp red balls that like are refillableso you can just dump the balls out
and pour more in. And sothat's really so that's kind of what we
use. We don't actually have adehumidifier. We use those little damp red
balls. Yeah. Thanks Maloney CreekFarm for the roses. I saw somebody
(16:18):
ask where do you buy I don'tknow which one you were asking about.
He I think answered the question onthe dehumidifier. But if you're asking about
the temperature monitoring service. We actuallyuse a system called Marcel. It's m
A R C ELLL. We absolutelylove it and we partnered with them.
They were kind enough to share outthrough us a twenty five dollars discount code
(16:44):
for anybody who clicks on our linkin our website and goes and makes a
purchase to buy their product. Butthey'll send you text messages if the power
goes out, if the humidity getsbeyond a certain range that you set,
and if the temperature gets beyond acertain range that you set. It's come
in handy more times than not.Because we were just out and about,
we were exploring, our pup washome in our camper and all of a
(17:07):
sudden we lost power because there wasa storm that happened and where our camper
was not we were and we wereable to get home and take care of
her. So it's been really nicefor us. It's super critical to have
that if you have pets. Ifyou don't have pets, probably don't have
to worry about it as much.But it's kind of a nice to have.
Got a couple of bonus nice tohave. I mean, some of
(17:29):
these are going to be things thatyou're just going to want to upgrade down
the road, so you might wantto save up for them there. You
may not need them right when youbuy your RV, but they're really nice.
Some of them you might really wantimmediately. I will say. One
of them, like somebody brought upalready, was the TPMs. We have
not had a TPMs system the entiretime we've been traveling down the road.
We just manually check. We justmanually check check it. Manually check it.
(17:53):
Yes, But a few other thingsare like you might want to upgrade.
You probably want to upgrade at somepoint. Your RV locks. Yeah,
So it's pretty well known that mostRVs will come with just a standard
RV lock on them, and thatis your RV lock for your doors to
gain entry into your camper. WhenI say standard, I mean standard.
(18:15):
People can just like it's the samelock, it's the same keys. If
you buy an RV and somebody elsebuys an RV, they all have the
same locks on them. Your keyswill work on their RV and their keys
will work on your RV. Andcrazy you can buy replacements I think on
Amazon for just a couple of bucks. So if a thief really wants to
(18:37):
break into your camper. It's notsuper difficult if they just buy a set
of RV locks. So getting aseparate RV lock system and installing that is
going to be much safer, andit's probably something that you want to upgrade
to, if not right away,at least down the road. Yeah,
And another couple of things are youmight want to have, Like you might
(19:00):
need a specific set of sheets foryour RV, So you might have we
have a full size queen, butsome RVs will come with what's called an
RV king, and so you mightneed to have specific sheets that you buy
just for that mattress because it's nota standard size, right, and a
lot of RVs will have they callit an RV king or an RV queen.
(19:22):
Those are not standard sizes. They'renot the same as a residential queen
or residential king. Now, thankfullyfor us, we actually our camper came
with a RV king, but thematt underneath it was big enough and long
enough that we were able to replaceit, and we replaced it with a
full residential size queen mattress that welove. We got a purple mattress,
(19:45):
which is great because it breathes reallywell, but it's really nice to have
separate sheets, separate towels, separateyou know, just stocked supplies in your
RV so that if you want totake a trip really quickly, or you
need to bug out because there's badweather coming or something, or you know
something's going on, then your RVis fully stocked. So it's just another
(20:08):
nice to have. And then extrakitchen items things like that that you are
gonna have to lug back and forthfrom your house to your RV if you're
not full time. Just being ableover time to stock your RV full of
all of those things so you're nothaving to carry all of them back and
forth every time you want to takea camping trip is going to be another
(20:30):
really nice to have thing. Yeah, and Dwight Vials brings up first aid
kit. Oh, one hundred percentfirst aid kit. We actually have two.
We have one inside the camper andwe have one inside the truck as
well. So if for some reasonwe're driving down the road, we're either
not towing, we're not hooked upto the camper, or we are and
it's just an emergency that we needto bust out the first aid kit.
(20:52):
We have one in the truck andone in the camper. That's a great
call out for sure. And Ithink that's that's the on the ones that
I can think of right now.We'll keep an eye on Chat and if
Chat brings up to anything great,we'll toss it in. But I think
it's time for our pick of theweek, yep. And this week,
since we're talking about costs, weare talking about costs. This has been
(21:14):
a lifesaver for us in saving costs. So maybe if you get into rby
life and you hit an unexpected costthat we didn't think about, that we
didn't cover, this might help offsetit if you use this service. Yes,
so it's called open Roads. Weare not sponsored by them, we're
not affiliated with them. We justheard about it like so many other people
did. If you've got a dieseltruck or a diesel motor home, then
(21:40):
what it allows you to do isto get the discounted prices at truck dealerships
or not truck dealerships, at truckstops, at fuel stops, fuel stops,
so that way, and it's discounted. So like there'll be a number
posted at the fuel stop that's theregular rate in the app, you can
actual look and see, oh heyhere it's cheaper, and you'll get a
(22:03):
discount and they apply that discount.The biggest thing I've heard from a lot
of people that aren't happy about itis that it does have to hook up
to your bank system. So Iknow that that can be a little unnerving
at times, but it is agreat way to save money. And I
mean the costs are sometimes as muchas a dollar a gallon. Yeah,
(22:23):
most of the time we see coststhirty to forty cents discounted from what's posted,
but sometimes way way more than that. So yeah, it's definitely a
cost saving especially if you're going todo a lot of travel in your RV
and you have a diesel. Andagain it's called open Roads. I believe
good Sam has one as well.They partnered with Pilot and Flying j.
(22:47):
I think that you can get adiscount. We haven't used that one personally,
so I can't speak to it.Open Roads has been great for this
and we've been using it for ayear and a half now and we couldn't
be happier. Yeah, we absolutelylove it. Hey, friends, thanks
for camping out with us tonight.We'd love to stay connected we are on
live on Thursday nights on TikTok ateight pm Central every Thursday. Like comment,
(23:12):
follow for more and check out ourwebsite at beacons dot Ai slash wandering
our Vbabe. That's b acns dotai slash wandering our vbab and we will
see you next time. Bye byebye. So I think we're up for
(23:33):
Q and A at this point.Have we talked through everything? I think
we have, But first little storytime. All right, So it's kind of
on the same topic this week,and it was really timely, so I
thought it was kind of a funnything. I was at the doctor earlier
this week and I don't know how, but we got on the topic of
his home internet service. And mindyou, he's not a full time our
(23:55):
Beer, but we told him aboutour situation and what we do in our
lifestyle of being full time our Beers, and so we got on the topic
and he started talking about his homeinternet service and how the cost has just
skyrocketed and it was super unexpected forhim. But he also started talking about
how terrible his internet service is forthe cost that he's now paying, and
(24:15):
I got to thinking about it andI was like, yeah, our Internet
was pretty shitty at our house too, and we were paying a lot of
money for it, and we actuallyhave better internet, better quality internet in
our RV than we did at ourhouse that we had before we sold it
and went full time two years ago
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