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Living in small, mobile spaces is something that is typically glamorized on social media. We have all seen that Vanlife post picturing someone looking out of the vehicle onto the ocean with an adult beverage in hand as the sun is setting.

From this angle, tiny mobile living appears to be a dream vacation. But, we are here to tell you that this lifestyle is a lot different from what you see in the glamour shots.

Do you have many amazing instagrammable moments? Yes. Do you have plenty of hair-pulling moments? Also yes.

Here is what tiny mobile living is really like from our own personal experience. Get ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly (but, mostly good!).

Everyday Tasks Are So Much Harder

When you live in a tiny space that you are are hauling around all the time, everyday tasks suddenly become a project. Resources are limited and everything is wedged in weird spaces to maximize storage and make sure it’s secure in transit.

Something we never imagined to be so difficult is washing dishes. We have a small collapsible silicone basin to scrub dishes and a tiny sink to rinse dishes. Post dinner cleanup has legitimately become a team sport. One us is outside scrubbing dishes and passing soapy plates into the trailer to be rinsed and dried.

It’s messy. When we’re done the counters are all wet and there’s soapy water on the floor. At least it kind of doubles as mopping.

Power is a Limited Resource

Before living in a trailer, we never thought twice about plugging in electronics or powering our fridge. Now, power is a precious resource to be conserved at all costs.

Our first three weeks of living on the road, we exclusively dry camped. This means that we had no water or electric hookups for our trailer.

We have a roof mounted solar panel and a suitcase panel that we can set up next to the trailer. On a sunny day in a field, everything works amazingly. There’s plenty of of juice to power the fridge, fans, lights, and charge electronics.

But, there are clouds, trees, and rainy days that can upend your energy utopia, especially in the Northeast. This means keeping an eye on the trailer’s battery charge and pulling out the generator when your solar panels can’t keep up.

The Bathroom is the Worst Room in the House

Imagine an airplane bathroom. Now imagine a bathroom half that size that also has a shower. Yes folks, that is now your everyday bathroom.

Gone are the days of cracking open a nice novel while sitting on the toilet. Whether it’s brushing your teeth, washing your face, or doing your business, you are in and out of that bathroom as fast as possible. You’ll probably even start using the restroom with the door open to take advantage of the extra wiggle room.

You also have to be concerned with where your business is going. Flush it and forget it is a thing of the past. We have a composting toilet to conserve water (and we think blackwater is super gross), so we have to periodically dump jugs of pee and occasionally bag pet bedding mixed with poo.

The worst thing is when you don’t check if the pee tank is full before going to the bathroom in the middle of the night or your poo misses the poop bucket. But those are fun stories for another time…

You Always Have Bruised Knees

Something that no one ever seems to mention about living in a tiny space is just how close together everything is. You are going to overestimate the amount of space you have have to move around everyday.

This means constantly banging elbows and knees on cabinets, and sometimes banging your head in the doorway or on the outside awning.

You Become Good at Solving Problems on the Fly

Life never goes as planned, especially when you’re living on the road. Sometimes you could swear that Murphy’s Law is just giving you the middle finger for travelling full-time.

Problems that arise on the road tend to be the equivalent of the heat going out in your house in the dead of winter. It’s not as urgent as a burst pipe, but you still need a solution or band-aid to the problem ASAP.

One such problem solving moment that we encountered was when we were at the original Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont. We looked down at our hitch setup and realized that something had moved, which would damage the hitch if not fixed immediately.

Guess who didn’t have the tools on them to fix it? This couple! We were fortunate that there was a hardware store a half mile down the road. Two hours and a new socket, wrench, and ratchet later, we had ourselves a functioning hitch.

Although these moments are mentally draining, they expand your confidence in problem solving and are immensely rewarding. You are solving problems that literally allow you to continue living your amazing lifestyle.

You Have the Most Amazing Experiences

Living life on your own schedule can be challenging in some ways because you need to have a lot of self discipline to get things done. However, the reward is being able to seize opportunities that many people can’t.

You can plan outdoor activities around the weather and take advantage of lunch specials. This means that you can guarantee that you are going to see that breathtaking view on your hike instead of just walking mountain ridges in the rain. You can also afford to go out to eat more often because you can snag all of the restaurant specials.

In addition, you have the great advantage of avoiding weekend crowds wherever you go. Empty supermarkets, empty hiking trails, and available parking spaces become the new normal. You are suddenly going to be dreading weekends and looking forward to weekdays. Weird, right?

Life is generally just way more interesting because there is no such thing as a typical day. Mobile living always keeps you on your toes!

The news that we were quitting our office jobs to travel the country in a travel trailer was generally met with one of two reactions.

The first was a sentiment of intense jealousy. Those who were older than us wished that they had done something so adventurous when they were in their 20’s, and many of our peers expressed admiration for our courage to take what they perceived as an extended vacation.

The second type of response was one of offended confusion. Why would a budding CPA and engineer throw away their entire careers to live out some version of the romanticized millennial Vanlife stereotype? 

To say the least, neither of these reactions accurately captured what we were doing and why we were doing it. This was not just taking a gap year to go on a crazy vacation, and we were most definitely not throwing away our professional accomplishments. Instead, we were working to build a new lifestyle that supports our personal goals of flexibility, growth, and exploration.

Changing the Framework

In our previous lives, we were working office jobs in New York City. The healthcare and retirement benefits were envious, our coworkers were awesome, and we had all the best tools at our disposal to build long, successful careers. We were set up to live comfortable lives with a generous retirement.

But, we were quick to recognize that all of this guarantee and comfort comes at a cost. Our weekdays consisted of waking up at 6am, packing lunch, commuting two hours or more per day, working hopefully just 8 hours, cooking dinner and cleaning up, and then maybe 2 to 3 hours of freetime in the evening before we passed out from exhaustion. It felt like 5 out of the 7 days in our week were just a blur.

Staying within this framework, the alternative was to pay double or triple in rent to have a shorter commute, buy lunch in the city (you don’t even want to know how much a salad costs in Manhattan), and get delivery for dinner. We would have had slightly more freetime, but no considerable savings for vacations or other long-term goals.

To sum it up, the options were not great from our perspective. Although we were living the lives we had worked so hard to achieve, we realized that this did not feel like the right path for us long term.

The Travel Bug Bites and Thriftiness Strikes

Exploring new places and collecting new experiences has always been at the core of what we love. This resulted in us becoming weekend warriors where we would go backcountry backpacking, sometimes drive 4 hours each way to go on a strenuous day hike, visit wineries, see indie concerts in the city, et cetera. We even started taking three or four day weekends every other month to go on mini vacations including Miami, Sacramento, and Orlando. We were trying to maximize every moment of free time to explore. 

In addition to this, we went on a one week long vacation each year. This meant that paid time off was never used for sick days and we were always trying to be as thrifty as possible to build both a vacation fund and emergency fund. 

How thrifty were we, you may ask? We almost never went out to eat, we always packed lunch,  we walked two miles to and from the train station each day to save money on a bus pass, drinking was mostly done at home instead of bars, the bars we did frequent were all dives, and our apartment of four shared groceries to reduce living costs. We pictured every dollar saved as a dollar that could go toward a unique experience.

Basically, we were doing everything within our power to live as lean as possible. But, as much as we buckled down to save and travel, we were always faced with the problem of cramming a lot of experiences into short periods of time. We were in a crazy rush and there was a limit to how much we could do. Life was a big game of picking and choosing, sacrificing one thing over another. Do I want to read a book or explore the area? Do I want to sleep or enjoy more time at my vacation destination?

We wanted to explore places AND entertain hobbies AND get adequate amounts of sleep. How could we slow down our pace to live in the moment instead of chasing the clock?

An Idea was Born

After a year of exhausting travels and the weight of the daily grind that was to last roughly another 40+ years bearing down on us, we felt desperate for change.

The tried and true motto, ‘I don’t live to work; I work to live,’ was something we had always believed in. Yet, we didn’t feel as though our lifestyle was living up to the sentiment. Our professional lives clearly overshadowed what we wanted to accomplish in our personal lives. Hobbies and interests were always reserved for when we had the time and energy outside of work.

We understood that we needed money to live, but the most valuable currency in our eyes had always been time. We wanted more freedom in our time to work on things that feel meaningful to us and spend time in nature. To explore the world and ourselves was the ultimate wealth we were seeking.

While cooking dinner one night after work, Gio spontaneously said, “Let’s travel!”. 

“Like, go on a vacation?”

“No. Let’s travel full-time,” he said quite seriously.

The very next morning on our commute to work, we began brainstorming what travelling full-time meant for us. We weighed grabbing backpacks and travelling the world, but instead settled on exploring the U.S. first. We had seen so little of our own country and wouldn’t have to worry about all the complications that come with visas, phones, and accessing bank accounts overseas.

Creating a Lifestyle

We are absolutely in love with hiking, camping, and generally being outdoors (another reason that living in a city made zero sense for us), so naturally we honed in on the idea of living in an RV. We could have a consistent home base and still change up the scenery whenever we saw fit.

This is the point at which our more serious soul searching began. How do we make this more than just a big vacation? How do we make this a lifestyle?

Well, the most obvious question to answer about transitioning our lifestyle was how to make it financially viable. We were not rich and would have to work our tails off for another ten to twenty years while living off of ramen to fully retire, so strictly living off of savings was not a long-term solution.

We ended up boiling everything down to a simple formula. If we can bring in enough income to offset or exceed our living expenses, then this lifestyle would have long term viability. This was honestly the financial mindset we already had in our lives, we just had to get creative with limiting living expenses and making money. How we would accomplish this is where the real magic and reward of the lifestyle would be created.

Living minimalistically has always been in our nature. We found that the more things we owned or were responsible for, the more stressed we were. Living in a larger apartment meant more time spent cleaning it, and the more items we owned, the more energy we had to invest in maintaining and keeping track of everything.

Scaling down to a small mobile living situation allows us to cut the stress out of our lives caused by excess possessions. By virtue of how little storage space exists in our trailer and vehicle, we are forced to keep only what adds value to our lives. And ultimately, less stuff means lower living expenses!

Our necessities boiled down to a short list: sporting equipment, bikes, acoustic guitar, a few books, solar oven, portable solar panel, generator (for cloudy days), tools, Internet setup, laptops, phones, camera, toiletries, linens, clothes, food. 

As you can see, the list of what we need is a combination of strictly practical items and a few things that bring us happiness. There are endless hours of free fun built into sporting equipment, musical instruments, and books. It’s just a matter of finding the time and energy to dedicate to them, which is exactly what our new minimal lifestyle allows.

Funding our Adventures

After lots of research and crunching numbers, we concluded that our yearly living expenses would in fact be lower living a mobile lifestyle than they were when living a stationary life. Talk about a win-win situation. We get to live a fun, adventurous life every day and it costs less than living in one place.  

Now came addressing the more daunting question of how to create income. A safe option would be for us to work full-time remote positions. But, one of the main catalysts to trying this lifestyle was the desire to create our own schedules and have the flexibility to be where we want. Working a full-time remote position would limit where we can camp because it required an uninterrupted internet connection. We would also still have to do our work during normal business hours instead of when we feel most motivated and productive.

Our solution was having a financial runway to experiment with creating diversified streams of income while travelling. Essentially, this means that we saved up some money to live off of while we figure out how to make money. For us, this portion of the experience is equally as exciting as the minimalist lifestyle because we have the opportunity to really stretch ourselves and test our abilities.

We went to an affordable state school for accounting and engineering degrees, which translates to ‘we have always taken the safe path in life’. Our formula was to work hard, get practical degrees, and settle into well paying careers. We have no regrets in where life has taken us thus far, but felt that it was time to forge our own path. It’s when you’re stretched to your limits that you learn what you are capable of. So we thought, ‘let’s cram ourselves into a trailer, tell ourselves we need to make money, and see what happens’.

The beauty of it all is that there really is no risk. If we run out of financial runway, then we stop somewhere and find traditional jobs. No harm, no foul. But, if we were to fall in love with the freedom of location independence, we hope it will put enough fire under us to make the money we need to keep going.

Living an Intentional Life

We quit our office jobs to see what could be instead of wondering ‘what if?’. Exchanging certainty for a more flexible, cost-efficient lifestyle was the perfect opportunity to see what we are capable of creating.

Who knows where this could lead long term. Maybe we’ll find the perfect place to build a tiny house as a homebase. Or, maybe we’ll be inspired to park our trailer and go backpacking around the world. 

No matter where this journey may lead us, what is certain is that we are now living our lives with more intent. Every day is a choice instead of mindlessly droning through a predetermined daily routine. We can now focus on personal growth in all aspects of our lives.