Selling our RV?! Lifestyle Design and Financial Independence

Selling the RV and RV office?!

Climbing the RV for sunset! (and wine)

After one of the most incredible experiences of our lives, driving across the country and back in 80 days, we are selling our RV and dismantling the “RV Office”. But why?

Kailah and I’s goals are based upon the idea of both lifestyle design and financial freedom. For us, the lifestyle that we are pursuing is spending time with people we love AND experiencing new places, cultures, and people. The only way we can accomplish that is to free up our time, by increasing our passive income, reducing our expense obligations and therefore becoming financially independent. Otherwise, the majority of our time will be spent hammering away at our jobs and grinding our way to a traditional retirement.

For those new to financial freedom, it essentially means that your living expenses are covered by passive income (like rental property, dividends, royalties etc) and you don’t need to actively “work”. This is unlikely the ultimate goal for us, as we enjoy managing our businesses, but we want to minimize the day-to-day effort and give us time back to explore the world and see our families and friends. We don’t consider ourselves true FIRE advocates (financially independent retire early - look it up here if you want more info), but we follow many of the same principles.

Top of RV sunset selfie in Paso Robles, CA

I’ll write a subsequent article on our financial strategy, but for now…that was a long winded reason for why we are ditching the RV. It isn’t financially reasonable long term, given our goals.

So what are we going to do? Stop traveling the US? As Selima would say “No way, Jose!”.

Once we get the RV sold (we’re consigning it to an RV store in New Hampshire), we’re going to take our time looking for the next vehicle. We’re leaning towards purchasing a much smaller Class B Campervan RV, which we’ll use in combination with “air bnbs”. This will give us the flexibility to stay and work from anywhere, keep our costs down and allow us plenty of space in a rental. As the girls get older, a Class B will become easier and easier to spend time outdoors as a family (not to mention it fits in our driveway and Kailah and I can sneak away for a weekend while the grandparents watch the girls).

For the new vehicle, we’re looking for a combination of the following:

1. Best RV for families (space for the girls AND us to sleep)

2. Used (better value)

3. Best price point (pay it off quickly)

4. RV office (we need space to work, even if it is only a few days a month between air bnbs)

5. Small (Can double as a second vehicle, fit in the driveway and allowed in all state and national parks)

“Dry camping” in Beatty, Nevada

This may not be a surprise, but the fall of 2021 isn’t an ideal time to buy an RV. The demand for RVs is so high that manufacturers literally can’t keep up the supply, so this might provide a challenge for us in finding a quality used model.

Our goal is to hit the road again in the Spring to explore the northern part of the country, which we missed in 2021. This will give us an incredible opportunity to keep growing our NOE content business and see more of this beautiful country.

So we have 6 months to find our new RV. Stay tuned…

Kyle

Work From Anywhere Starter Pack: Work from RV and my RV Office

My RV office life!

Work from anywhere was a fantasy phrase for the gypsies, nomads and wealthy before the pandemic hit. But after many office jobs (like mine) were required to be performed from home, the remote work tipping point finally shifted and it became unavoidably apparent that we can truly work from anywhere. So much in fact that Kailah and I decided to purchase an RV and embark on an 80 day road trip across the United States, while I worked remotely. This obviously came with its challenges, but I learned an incredible amount about how to be successful working on the road (even with two young children). Below I’m going to walk through the steps and checklists that aided me in being successful in order to travel and work remotely. So whether you want to work from home, work from RV, or work from an air bnb, I hope that these remote work tips will give you a more stress free experience.

Somewhere in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park

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Pre-trip Checklist

Like any adventure, a few well laid plans can go a long way in ensuring a stress free experience. Below is the pre-trip checklist I lived by:

1. Map your route based on cell service

2. Make sure you have full hookups

3. Items that give physical flexibility

4. Have a backup plan

Map your route based on cell service: I relied almost exclusively on cell connection in order to conduct my work, while on the road. While we knew approximately where we wanted to visit on the trip, we didn’t figure out where we were going to stay until consulting the Verizon coverage map. Since we chose Verizon as our cell provider, we cross referenced the coverage map with Outly and Google searches to find out which RV parks/resorts met our expectations and fell into the Verizon coverage areas. In order to ensure high quality connections, we also made sure that the coverage map always displayed either 4G LTE, or 5G. How good of a connection can you sustain via cell? Well some of these connections might surprise you. I pulled faster speeds in the middle of the desert than I have in my house.

Make sure you have full hookups: I think that the fantasy of RV life is cruising around with no plan, just exploring the wild. While we love this idea (and take advantage of it when we can), it just doesn’t usually provide a stress free experience for corporate jobs that require constant power and connectivity. Most RVs require that you are plugged in, or the generator is running, in order to supply power to outlets. Since it isn’t practical to run the generator 5 days a week, we made sure that we always had 50 AMP plugins at the RV parks/resorts that we stayed in. It took one variable out of our equation, which otherwise might have added stress.

Items for physical flexibility: There were a few items I bought before leaving on the trip that made working in different parts of the RV (and even outside of it) easier.

My portable desk setup in one of the bedrooms of an air bnb we stayed at

• Moonbeam curtains. They are triple ply, so they block the sound and provide a functional barrier.

• Portable desk. Technically it’s a side table, but it works perfectly as a desk and it allowed me to move from my “office” to the back of the RV with ease. I also was able to use this in air bnbs that we stayed at on the road and still maintain my setup.

• Bed chair. I purchased a comfortable chair without legs, which gave me a backrest on the RV bed, so that I could literally work on my bed and have back support.

• RV Cell Antennae. The antennae was expensive, but it gave me peace of mind that if I ended up in a sketchy cell connection area, it would reach out and pull the best possible service for me.

Have a backup plan: This one is straightforward. We always made sure that we had a backup plan in case I couldn’t connect to the internet via cell. Generally, this consisted of air bnbs, or coffee shop research that ensured that if it came down to it, we could pack up shop and move somewhere that would have internet connectivity. We lucked out and I never had to execute “plan B”.

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Office setup

If you are going to work remotely and travel by RV, you really should have a solid RV office setup. Below is mine:

Stock layout for our Thor Freedom Traveler A32

We own a Thor Freedom Traveler A32, class A RV and I wanted to find a way to set up an office each week. At first, I thought it might be easiest to close myself in the bedroom, but with the proximity to the bunk beds (and girls napping) I was afraid the noise might be too disruptive for both naps and work. I ended up installing an 8’ noise dampening Moonbeam curtain to isolate myself in the cab of the RV. By doing so, I was able to sit in the comfort of the large, co-pilot captain’s chair and leverage the fold out desk, which extends from the dashboard (there is also a convenient 120V outlet).

Once I figured out where I would set up my RV office, I bought the following tools to make my life a little bit easier:

My 3 year old Bose noise cancelling headphones

1. Lepow Portable Monitor. I think this is a must have for anyone looking to be working on the go. It stands up on its own and easily plugs into your laptop, without a power supply of its own and provides a 15.6” picture.

2. Logitech Multi-device keyboard. Small, portable and easy to use. It also doesn’t require a dongle, so it won’t take up one of your precious usb ports.

3. Logitech M705 Mouse. This is the best blue tooth mouse that I’ve found to date.

4. Bose Q35 Noise Cancelling Headphones. I’m wearing these as I type this and I simply can’t advocate for them enough. They are great for taking work calls and drowning out the background noise for both me and the people on the other end. They are also perfect for airports and airplanes. There are newer versions of these headphones on the market, but either way, you can’t go wrong with the quality of Bose.

5. Verizon MiFi hotspots. I purchased two of these units, capable of 5G speeds (if available) through my existing Verizon plan loaded with 30GB of data usage per device (I also used my phone as a hotspot).

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Key Measurements for Success

Beyond being prepared to “work from RV”, I’ve found it important to keep an eye on a few key measurements that ensure I stay connected at the speeds that I need:

1. GB of data usage

2. Cellular internet connection speeds (both upload and download)

3. WiFi internet connection speed (both upload and download)

GB of data usage: This can get confusing, but it became one of my most important numbers because I had a limited amount of data usage per month. Verizon claims to have unlimited data, but that is not true with hotspot data as they GREATLY reduce your speeds once you hit your limit (which would prevent me from working). Through my Verizon plan, I had 90 GB of usage per month (two hotspots and my cell). On a given day, I would consume somewhere between 2-7 GB of data through my video calls and data/analysis tasks. So if I was to assume I have 20 work days a month and have 90 GB of data, that leaves me with a 4.5 GB of average daily usage. Each day I would check my usage on the Verizon app to make sure I was averaging under this 4.5 number. Otherwise I risked running out of data and not being able to work.

Cellular internet connection speeds: There are actually two connection speeds that I measured whenever I arrived to a new location - download speed and upload speed. For those that don’t know, download speed is the rate at which content is moved from the internet to your computer and upload speed is the rate at which content is moved from your computer to the internet. Both speeds are generally measured in megabits per second (Mbps). For my purposes, I generally found that I needed to maintain at least 10-15 Mbps download and 2-3 Mbps upload in order to take part in video calls (other tasks required reasonably fast speeds, but a slow down wasn’t a show stopper compared to the impact on a video call). You can easily measure your download and upload speed by Googling “Internet speed test”.

WiFi internet connection speeds: These measurements are the exact same as the cellular connections. I felt it was important to call them out separately because just WiFi alone doesn’t mean you are all set from a connectivity perspective. In today’s world, most internet speeds in homes are more than sufficient to meet the measurements I mention above, but I found that most RV parks (and even some air bnbs) have sketchy WiFi.

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That concludes a deep dive into what I learned working from my RV office in my first “work from anywhere” experience. Please comment below if you found something useful, or have anything else to add. You can also follow along with my other posts real time, as I navigated this new lifestyle change by clicking here. Otherwise, I hope you find the tips, tricks and tools helpful as you embark on this new lifestyle!

Best,

Kyle

Work From Anywhere Blog: Week 7; Vacation while traveling and Verizon coverage map failure

Last week was an interesting one because it was my first of two vacation weeks while we’ve been on the road. We also got very lucky with the timing of this first week because we were staying on Lake Powell, in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and we barely had any cell service - which would have completely prevented me from working. This week I’m chatting through how we handled both.

Family pic on Lake Powell in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area

Gloria enjoying a sunset bottle

First and foremost, it was SO NICE to be off of work for the entire week. Since I’ve been working on an east coast schedule, while on the west coast, this usually meant getting up around 5 AM and working in the dark for a couple of hours. I never thought it would actually be nice to be woken up by a toddler again. It was also so much less stressful because Kailah and I didn’t have to work around my meeting schedule (not to mention that I could help Kailah with the girls). Normally, we would discuss my schedule and which meetings I couldn’t afford to have background noise during. She would then take the girls outside, or put on a movie in the back of the RV. Last week we didn’t have to worry about any of that!

Stroller ride before sunset over Lake Powell

The other half of “vacation” on the road is purely psychological. I put the word vacation in quotes because I don’t really like using the word. Mostly because of the traditional connotation it carries with it being “something we do to go somewhere and spend time away from home” - usually to disconnect from the day-to-day and let loose. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and science shows it is beneficial for all of us, but for Kailah and I, I don’t think it accurately describes what we are trying to accomplish long term. With technology being what it is, we want to free our time and not be limited by the handful of weeks each year that we are allowed to be somewhere other than home. So, when we take time away from work (notice I didn’t use the V word) we try and plan action packed adventures, in our bucket list locations, so that we can experience as much as possible.

That’s where the psychology of this whole cross country RV adventure comes in. Aren’t we already doing that AND working? Whether its my “day job” during the day, or NOE work at night, Kailah and I are VERY busy on the road. We have so much to do on a daily basis, it was very tempting last week to just back fill my additional time with more “stuff”. It took until Monday afternoon, or Tuesday for us to say “STOP”. It was time to literally not work, not plan, not do anything, but enjoy spending time with each other and the girls in the beautiful Glen Canyon NRA.

Lake Powell Resorts and Marinas - Driftwood Lounge (Click on the photo for a direct link to the “Travel Like its 2019” shirts!)

To tie all of this back to WFA…last week we dodged a huge bullet in the form of cell reception. I had originally planned to work from Lake Powell for the entire week, with my previous employer. As fate would have it, I switched jobs and took these two weeks off in between. Not only was the Wi-Fi extremely slow, the cell reception was almost nonexistent. Both of them were around 1.5 mbps download speed, which would not have worked for any video calls and probably wouldn’t have provided enough bandwidth to hold reliable audio calls. Say nothing about managing data and reporting processes virtually (this is the first time that the Verizon coverage map and Outly cross reference has failed us). It would have either been a train wreck of a week, or we would have had to leave our best RV site yet (pictured below). The WFA gods were with us…

Our RV site at Lake Powell Resorts and Marinas

Cheers from the Grand Canyon. I’ve got some special guest visitors with us this week. Can’t wait to share in next week’s post.

Kyle

Office and technical gear links:

HP Monitor

Lepow Monitor

WeBoost Signal Booster

Bose Q35 Headphones

Moonbeam Noise Dampening Curtains

Connection Gear:

30 GB usage Verizon Jetpack MIFI 8800L

30 GB usage 5G MIFI M2100

30 GB usage utilizing my iPhone as a hotspot on the “Get More Unlimited” plan

Current usage trend: 0 GB / work day (We didn’t have reliable enough service).

Click here for our WFA Gear Page