This post won’t appeal to everyone. But then, what post does? If you’re curious about #vanlife logistics though, this post is for you!
I’ll set the scene on the quick. In October 2021, my husband Mike and I sold our 550-square-foot house of 18-years. Then we spent a few months on retreat at Deer Park Monastery in southern, CA. And ever since we returned home to Montana in early April, we’ve been living the van life while on the search for land we can afford to buy, located within a one-hour radius of our hometown of Missoula, MT.
We sold our house in order to liquidate our assets, so we’d be ready to rock and roll on a land purchase. After weighing our options, we decided not to take out a loan and instead are trying to work within our means and budget on hand. There are pros to trying to buy land sans bank loan, but it greatly reduces our reach as to what we can afford with the limited money we have on hand.
We rolled the dice and bought a 1989 Chevy G20 conversion van off craigslist last August and thankfully, it’s taking good care of us. In 2000, we drove up to Anchorage AK after we got married in a similarly styled & aged Ford Econoline conversion van, and then toured around the states in it in 2001 for a few months, when we came back down to the lower 48. So in a way, this is us, now in our early 40’s, returning to our roots.
Nowadays, at least around here, van life is booming. We see live-in style vans on the regular. A lot of folks have bigger, more outfitted, way more expensive rigs that what we have, still, we’re all one big van life family. We’re van livers on a low budget. And while it was a conscious choice to sell our house and move into a van, we’re van livers more out of necessity than by passionate enthusiasm for the nomadic lifestyle. We were active land searchers last year before we sold our house too. Properties were just moving too quickly for us to keep up. In order to compete with out-of-staters rolling in with cash in hand, we felt we had to get rid of the hitch in the giddyup, which for us meant selling our house so we too could have cash at the ready.
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