live. work. dream.

… and paying for it.

I would have loved to stay and watch the Superbowl with Gene an his new 42″ Aquos HDTV. But it sure feels good to be on the road again.

I am also seriously happy to be amongst some trees with some space at Lake Manatee State Park after that seriously cramped RV “Resort” in Fort Lauderdale.

It is eye-opening, however, to pay $94.00 to fill up the truck from a quarter tank after not spending anything on fuel for nearly two months while we helped make our own homebrew biodiesel.

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Whew, what a relief. I just crunched our trip expenses from June to December, and found that we actually came in under budget by almost $12,000! How did we do it? By over budgeting, being ultra careful about things we chose to see and do, and Workamping. Now, this nice little savings is going to allow us to continue our journey even longer than we originally planned, by at least 6 months or so.

Now, let’s talk money. Pay attention; here are some important lessons we learned:

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We’ve been on the road six months now, and time has flown faster than it ever did when we lived the conventional lifestyle.

We want to slow time down and extend this sabbatical. One way to do that is to spend less than we budgeted. We’ve managed to do that again, as this November Expense Report PDF shows.

Next week, we start another Workamping gig, at White Rabbit Acres Farm in Vero Beach, Florida. For 20 or so hours of work each week, we get a free place to stay in one expensive state — for the entire winter season if it works out. Talk about saving money!

In return, we get to find out if we are Farmer Jane and Farmer John material. We’ve always talked about starting up a small hobby farm to help pay for whatever land we settle on. By interning at White Rabbit, we’ll learn the ins and outs of vegetable farming, raising chickens, making biodiesel, and doing what it takes to keep a small organic farm in top shape. Stay tuned.

After driving for thousands of miles over the past few months, I have to say that one of the most vital accessories we purchased for this cross-country road trip has to be our iPod. We got a used 40GB iPod on eBay that has a good dent in it, but it was a deal!

I spent many a late night transferring most of our CD collection onto it before we left, and it was time well spent. I only wish I had copied all of our CDs.

While you can always find classic rock somewhere on the dial, much of this country has really, really bad radio. That’s why I was happy to find out that Amazon is finally offering MP3 downloads!

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We had a good month in October. Thanks to family and friends allowing us to park our rig on their properties, we saved a nifty little bundle on rent. Fuel costs went down too. We aren’t putting as many miles on the Dodge. If you’re interested, a full budget report for the last 5 months is available on our Fulltiming Resources page. And here is the link for the monthly Live Work Dream Expenses: October 2007

November marks five months on the road. There is still so much to see, and we are at a turning point. Should we travel around the south east to cool places that we know we’ll never live in (i.e., Florida, Memphis, Louisiana), just for the experience? Or should we skip ‘em, bank the money, and start moving south west to focus our time and money on the places that meet more of our criteria (i.e., Arkansas, Montana or Idaho)? What to do?

Last month we got that taste of Big City Life in Toronto, and we spent more than usual on lodging and food. We also had some higher than usual business expenses involved in setting up our digital scrapbooking business.

It’s so important to aim high when you’re creating a road trip budget forecast. When you don’t spend as much as you thought you would, you feel great about it! Also, if you spend more in one area and less in another, then it all evens out.

Click below to see our RV road trip expenses for September 2007

Road Trip Budget Expenses and Savings September 2007

Even when a fulltimer hits the road, the drudgery of paying bills doesn’t stop. My paperwork got a lot lighter since we sold our business, but I still have to push some around. Especially when we receive a package of mail from Jim’s fabulous sister, who’s handling our PO Box for us.

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Here’s a question for the web-savvy full-timers:

Would you rather rely on spotty campground wireless service for your internet connection, or have your own more reliable yet much more expensive satellite dish service such as MotoSat? This may be irrelevant to the weekend warriors but for those of us on the road full-time, who need to remain connected for either business or pleasure it is a serious consideration. So consider this…

We have a top of the line .98 meter F2 satellite dish from Datastorm with MotoSat internet service and a Linksys 300N wireless router. Yet I have spent most of this morning trying to publish these posts and get pages to load with a very weak connection to this campground’s 802.11b network. Why you ask?

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