Monthly Expenses for Full-Time RVing – August 2016

Wilson at Olympia National Park in August 2016.

Before our trip, we created a monthly budget for our RV trip, and we planned to share our monthly expenses to see how much it costs to RV around America.

We’ve shared our monthly expenses for March and April, May, June, and July. Below are our expenses for August.

We obliterated our budget this month, spending 73% more than planned.

Our two week stay in an AirBnB in Portland and purchasing new tires for the Tahoe and the trailer contributed to most of the excess spend. The rest is made up of a bunch of clothes, shoes, and gear purchases we made while in Portland, finally having an address where Amazon could ship packages.

Regarding the tire purchases, when I created our RV travel budget long before we ever drove the first mile, I did consider that we would need to spend $1,000 or so at some point on the trip for tires. I amortized this into the Auto & Fuel category, where we’ve consistently spend under budget. The tire purchases push us closer to budget. In retrospect, I probably should have separated the capex-type expenses like new tires and the regularly expenses like fuel into separate categories to give a better picture of our true spend.

Anyway, below is a table breaking down our costs to RV for the month of August 2016.

Note that this breakdown of expenses for our RV trip excludes any financials related to real estate and other financial investments, where we do incur costs. We’re trying to convey the day-to-day lifestyle expenses of an RV trip around America, and that other stuff muddied the waters.