I’ve been living in a motor home for five years. It’s pretty good for me, I work from home and have spent a good long time at dozens of national parks and other awesome places.
Also boring places. Moving all the time and fixing broken things can be stressful and staying in nice places can be expensive. But overall it’s been way better for me than sitting in a house and staring at the walls.
Terrible as I only find joy in a few things and the van life makes almost all of them impossible. I guess that’s the difference between choosing the van life, and the van life choosing you.
What is life worth if you cannot do what is most important to you?
Absolutely nothing. Less then nothing. Negative Nothing (sweet band name)
I move around every 4 months in the US. I stay in long-term Airbnbs (min 1 month stay). I work remote; so, the issue I mostly deal with is my working setup. No standing desk, comfortable chair, multi-monitor setup (using portable external monitor), etc.
Otherwise, the surroundings of the place I stay at is always a gamble. You never know if its a loud or safe neighborhood just by looking at the posting or street view on google maps. Sometimes there could be construction going on next door.
Eating around and exploring the country is the best part.
Hardest thing for me has been finding actual remote work. Look on any job board these days and everyone’s claiming “remote*” when they’re nothing of the sort.
Maybe you should claim things are true, knowing they are false, when you apply.
I’m not opposed to that, but if they expect me to be at a physical location at any point, I’m SOL.
This is the way
I spent about 4 years traveling the world working remotely, as a digital nomad you might say. Before the name was popular
Put things I didn’t want to throw away into long-term storage. Had a laptop. Flew from place to place. The most important thing was securing a good internet connection in a place. If I couldn’t get a good connection move on to another place, or back to a known good place.
Libraries, coffee shops, hotels, co-working spaces, all viable options for internet requirements.
Mail digitized through a mailbox service, and emailed to me.
Google voice for an international phone number that just needed internet connection
The day to day living was pretty cool. You could stay in a place as long as you want, you could leave as quick as you want. Finding people was fun. Sometimes you weren’t sure about where you would be, could you book the hotel for more time? If you couldn’t you had to find the next place. So you always had a plan of where you are, and where you want to go next.
I move every 2 weeks in an RV. So I roughly wake up in 26 different places over the year.
Internet is rough. But has gotten better over the years since I started.
I could imagine that socially it might be difficult for some.
But largely my routine is similar to if I were in a house/apartment:
Weekdays: work, cook/eat, walk/hike/explore, games, sleep. Weekends: groceries, cook/eat, chores/maintenance, relocate if needed, walk/hike/explore, games, sleep.
Oh - I usually remind people they’re giving up a dishwasher and laundry machines unless they’re going pretty big on their RV purchase.
Recently I’ve been parking during the summer and flying to different countries. It’s more or less the same - solid internet is a challenge and you get to work on a potential language barrier.
If I ever go that route, you bet I’m getting a dishwasher put in at the very least. I know my limits, haha.
They’re available on the bigger rigs. It’s just worth noting that space on any RV/trailer is a tradeoff, and appliances tend to be limited for space and weight.
Countertop dishwashers are a thing. I found one that fits on the tiny counter I have, and do my chopping and slicing on the kitchen table instead.
Yeah, but it’s different in an RV. With a countertop unit, you’d have to either secure it for travel, losing limited counter space in the process, or find somewhere to stow it, and storage in a camper is already at a premium. There’s also the fact that any form of dishwasher operates on 120vac, meaning you can only use it when you’re on shore power or running a genny (whereas a refrigerator can auto switch between propane and 120v). Again, not saying it can’t be done, but there are logistical concerns that mean dishwashers and other large appliances are the first to be forgone.
StarLink has been a game changer for me. Expensive as frick but so worth not having to find cell towers or monitor data caps anymore.
Verizon wouldn’t sell anything larger than a 15gb plan - glad those days of juggling SIM cards are past.
But yeah - Starlink has helped a lot. I still have 3 big cell prover SIM cards and modems/router for redundancy.
How do you make income if you don’t mind?
Software Engineer
This is Lemmy, they didn’t even really have to ask.
Hey not all of us are in software, at least professionally
How do you deal with permanent addresses? I know like some jobs want you to have a permanent address and bank accounts want you to have a permanent address.
I’d consider getting a really cheap, small chunk of rural land and boondocking there sometimes (so nobody can claim it’s not actually a residence of yours).
That’s a good point. Wouldn’t it have to have a mailbox though? Or is that something that the post office just does if you buy a piece of property without one already there?
Yup - I am keeping an eye out for something like this.
My residence is registered at my parents house. I’m fortunate for that – not sure what I’ll do when they pass.
The companies I work for are typically smaller - my bosses and teams usually know I’m a bit of a vagrant. When I get acquired by larger companies I’m a little more tight lipped and vigilant with VPN use.
There are mailbox services, you get a permanent address, they can email you your mail.
Banks are more sticky, they don’t just want a permanent address, they want your place of residence. If you’re always on the move, you can have an intended place of residence… They may not accept the commercial mailbox service addresses, and in that case most people use a friend or a relative as their official banking location, but use the mailbox service for all of the mail. I live here, but I get mail there. That works for most people
out of interest, whats the deal with banks needing to know where you sleep at night?
is it a serfdom thing?
or is it only in the case of eg. that being the place you hold a mortgage with them on?
The Patriot act required banks to know their customers, explicitly knowing their place of residence. For people who have a non-standard place of residence, digital nomads, homeless people, etc it becomes difficult
fascinating, thanks.
no doubt ushered in under some notion of “protecting” us from well funded groups, yet mysteriously didn’t include a minimum threshold so poor folks with $4.25 in their account are still included in these broad sweeping laws.
Okay, that’s good to know. Until we can ditch the entire banking system for crypto wallets on our phone, that bank account issue is going to be a bit of a noose around people’s necks.
As long as it’s one of the actually efficient cryptos.
Monero ftw
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