When you're across the country on a travel assignment, you still need a place to call home. There are lots of travel nurse housing options, but if you'd like to take your home to-go, mobile living might be for you. Travel nurse couple Chase and Lindsay (@WereOutNAbout on social media) break down some frequently asked questions about travel nursing in an RV and about travel life on the road!
RVing has been a part of our lives for as long as we can both remember! We both grew up RVing with our families and cherished all of the memories and experiences RV life brings. In fact, aside from nursing, RVing was one of the major things we both had in common when we first met.
After becoming a couple, we knew we wanted to buy an RV so we could travel the country together. We knew we didn’t want to wait until retirement to experience life and full-time travel — that’s when we discovered travel nursing!
In 2018, we both had four years of experience as critical care nurses and decided it was time to take a leap of faith and chase adventures!
We purchased our first RV and set out on the journey of a lifetime. We’ve been full-timing in our RV as travel nurses ever since! Looking back nearly five years later, we can still say that it’s been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
Social media in general does a great job showing all of the “pros,” but we definitely like to highlight ALL aspects of RV life and travel nursing!
Pros:
Cons:
For us, the pros have always outweighed the cons. We couldn’t see ourselves travel nursing any other way!
Another benefit of our RV is knowing we will always have pet-friendly housing! We travel with our cat, Moka! She does so well in both our travel trailer and our truck camper.
We are firm believers that animals are extremely adaptable. When we first bought our camper, we always took Moka with us to go see it. We eased her into it and let her explore the new space.
By the time we moved into it full-time, she already had her favorite hangouts picked out and never skipped a beat. Bonus points — she became even cuddlier and snuggled with us even more after moving into our RV!
We clearly love RV life so much that having one wasn’t enough. Our 30 ft RV has been our “home” for the past 5 years. It's home to us and all of our belongings, as we live in it full-time. We usually only move it 1-3x a year from contract to contract.
Despite already having a home on wheels, we craved the freedom to take our camper out on shorter, weekend getaways, but didn’t want to risk moving our “home” every time.
The desire for more adventures led to us purchasing a second camper almost two years ago: a truck camper. We consider our truck camper our “vacation home” and it’s the one we take out all the time on short getaways.
The truck camper is much smaller and has fewer appliances and amenities. We use it to explore off-grid and it’s perfect! It sits right on the bed of our truck and can go anywhere our truck can.
We have loved having both: one that we consider our “home” and remains fairly stationary, and the other “vacation home” that we get to adventure in several times a month!
Looking back over the past five years, it’s definitely been more affordable for us to travel nurse in our RV! We recently shared on Instagram what we paid in each location and compared it with the average cost of rent. Using those numbers alone, we saved around $90,000. This is just a comparison of solely RV rent vs Airbnbs or hotels.
It’s also important to remember you will have upfront costs if you choose RV life. This will vary based on if you buy new or used, the class of RV, the size of RV, and if you need a tow vehicle.
We already had a truck and specifically chose our 30 ft Sunset Trail travel trailer because our truck could tow it. When we bought our RV, we paid about $20,000 and had it paid off prior to travel nursing. However, don’t let upfront costs scare you! We actually just traded in our first RV for $18,000 so we essentially paid only $2,000 to travel in it full-time for the past five years!
Remember, if you decide that RV life isn’t for you or if you’re done traveling and no longer have the need for your RV — you can sell it and make a lot of your money back. We have friends that have actually made money selling!
In order for us to be eligible for tax-free housing stipends by duplicating expenses, we still have to maintain our tax home. This means you can’t sell your house, buy an RV, and still have a tax home. Back in 2016, we purchased a townhouse in Morgantown, WV — our hometown. We still have this home. If we sold it, we’d lose eligibility. There are other ways to maintain your tax home such as working, but that doesn’t apply to us.
The way we continue to maintain it as our tax home is by paying a mortgage (or any upkeep, insurance, and taxes if it’s paid off) and returning at a minimum of 30 days a year. We also know that we can’t work in any metropolitan area for over 12 months in a rolling 24 month period as travel nurses, or else we risk losing our tax home.
If you’ve never RVed before, there will be a learning curve, but it doesn’t take long to figure it out. We meet solo RVers all the time who picked it up in just a few weeks!
If you’re considering RV life, we recommend touring as many RVs as you can! This will help you decide the type of RV, what size, and what features are best for you. You can also rent RVs and test them out! There’s no better way to try before you buy.
Another tip to remember is to be flexible and have fun! As a travel nurse, it’s pretty much mandatory that you learn to become flexible, so that one shouldn’t be a problem.
Just like I’m sure you had “fear of the unknown” before taking the leap into travel nursing, you'll have the same feeling when you try out RVing. It can definitely be an adjustment, but it’s one we welcomed with open arms!
The RV community is awesome and it’s a great way to meet friends as a travel nurse. RVing has just added to our adventures and has made our experience better than we could have ever imagined.
One last thing — we’ve received MANY messages thanking us for inspiring them to try out this lifestyle, but we have received 0 messages from anyone expressing regret or disappointment yet! Safe travels & hope to see you on the road!
We’re a married travel nurse couple. We met in nursing school at WVU and called West Virginia our home before we started traveling in 2018. We’ve explored 20 countries and 30+ states together. We’ve been living tiny in our RV for 4 years and absolutely love it. We became debt free after one year of traveling for work + have been able to experience financial freedom! We share a lot of the ins and outs of travel nursing and how to navigate the travel nursing world to be as successful as possible!
Follow along with Chase and Lindsay on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.