Vanlife Monthly Expenses: How Much Does Vanlife Actually Cost

Living full-time in a van is one way you can cut out one of the most expensive costs of living: rent. In this vanlife monthy expenses report, we will show you how much vanlife actually costs. 

While no longer having a rent payment is a perk of vanlife, that doesn’t mean you don’t have any expenses while living in a van. You might just be trading in your rent expense for other expenses.

Vanlife monthly expenses for each individual will look different depending on how you plan to spend your time living in your van. Many people travel full-time in their van to all different places in the country. While others stay stationary and continue working full-time at their job.

Therefore, expenses for full-time vanlife really can be all over the board. But in this vanlife monthly expense report, I will go over what we spend most of our money on each month. And give you the real answer of “How Much Does Vanlife Actually Cost.”

Jake and I work seasonally, so the months where we stay stationary in one place, we tend to spend less money per month, versus the months we are traveling full-time. I recorded our expenses over one year, where we are both traveling full-time and stationary working a seasonal job. We spend between $1,400 -$2,500 per month. 

Note: Jake and I are a couple, so there are expenses we split and expenses we each pay separately. We also pay for almost everything with our joint credit card, so it makes the flexible monthly expenses section very easy to tally. 

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Annual Fees In Vanlife

First off, I will start with annual fees, which are expenses we pay annually. Most of these expenses are paid in full, usually to get a discount. Even though we pay in full, the service is still covering each month of the year. Therefore, I split them into monthly fees to help us visualize our “monthly” expenses.

So in our annual fees section, Jake and I pay for our car registration, car insurance (Geico), National Parks Pass, Tailwind (business expense), Anytime Mailbox (our mailing address for getting mail on the road/register our car), and Surfshark (VPN/Business Expense). 

Van Registration Renewal	$150
Car Insurance (Doesn’t cover any of our conversion costs)	$1,112
Parks Pass	$80
Tailwind	$180
Anytime Mailbox	$220
Surfshark	$47.76
Annual Total:	$1,790

Our grand total for our annual expenses is $1,790. We then divide that number by 12 (12 months in a calendar year). 

Our monthly cost for Annual Fees is: $149.17

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Static Monthly Expenses

These are the expenses that are charged each month and often don’t change. Our static monthly expenses are: cellphone, health insurance, student loans, and music subscription. 

Jake and I each have our own monthly expenses that we pay separately and another section with our shared monthly expenses.

This is where you might need to include your monthly subscriptions such as Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Apple Music, Disney+, etc.

Emily’s Expenses
Cell Phone (still paying off a phone)	$89.40
Parent Plus Student Loan	$199.51
My Student Loan	$91.75
Health Insurance	$87.00
Jake’s Expenses
Cell Phone	$58.16
Health Insurance	$45
Split Monthly Expenses
Spotify	$10.90

Our monthly expenses total: $581.72

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Flexible Monthly Expenses

This is the section you will need to calculate each month. This section will really give you the answer to how much does vanlife actually cost. And obviously this section can be very different depending on your lifetyle habits. 

Our collective vanlife monthly expenses differ significantly if we are traveling full-time or staying in one place with a seasonal job. 

For reference, Jake and I consider ourselves pretty frugal.  We save lots of money by cooking most of our meals for ourselves. 

Our primary hobbies are cheap activities like hiking, kayaking, hammocking, or making YouTube videos. 

We really only go out to eat or breweries between 3-6 times per month (less now since COVID). We don’t spend tons of money on clothes or personal items (hard to fit that much in the van).

Categories:

I break our flexible monthly expenses down into 9 different categories: laundry, showers, gas, campsites, groceries, eating out/breweries, miscellaneous (park fees, gifts, clothes, etc), car maintenance, and business expenses (Two Roaming Souls Blog).

How To Calculate:

How I calculate our vanlife monthly expenses is by looking back at our credit card statements. I can usually decipher each category by the business’s name. If I can’t figure out what the bill came from I just put it into the miscellaneous catergory. 

Cash Payments:

Showers and laundry are the only two things that we pay with cash for. So, we often just need to keep track of how much we spend per month, or at least give a ballpark estimate. 

Below is a snapshot of our vanlife monthly expenses spreadsheet. Sorry if you’re on a phone or tablet, you probably can’t see a single number.  So here’s the this link to view the actual spreadsheet larger in your browser. 

Our average flexible monthly expenses total: $1,180.42

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Takeaway | How Much Does Vanlife Actually Cost

We find calculating our monthly expenses to be super helpful for living full-time vanlife. The lifestyle can have huge variations from month to month. So it’s crucial to predict our expenses to estimate how long we can continue to travel with the budget we have for living full-time vanlife. 

GRAND TOTAL:

Our average vanlife monthly expenses total is around: $1,802

If we plan to spend on average $1,802 per month then we can usually budget how long we can full-time travel before picking up our next seasonal jobs.

When we work seasonal jobs, we try to save as much money as we can, so we often have lower expenses during those months. And we are not traveling nearly as much as when we are working our seasonal jobs. Plus, we tend to get jobs in restaurants which usually offer at least one free meal per shift. Which helps reduce our grocery bill. And we also aren’t driving as much, so we save money on gas in those months.

Obviously each individual’s vanlife monthly expenses will differ, but by looking at our monthly expenses it should help you be able to gage how much you will actually spend per month.

Use this FREE spreadsheet to calculate your own Vanlife Monthly Expenses. Just open the link, click file, make a copy and begin adding in your own vanlife monthly expenses! 

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Save This ‘Vanlife Monthly Expenses Budget Sheet’ For Later