Why We Are Taking a Leap Year


Have you ever had your spouse walk up to you and say, “we should sell everything and live in an RV full time?” Roughly three weeks ago my wife approached me with this question and at first it was a hard no on my end. We’d talked about doing this a lot and for me it was always the wrong time to do it. We either had family obligations, work commitments, or it just wasn’t financially advantageous. I thought about it more and even created a Google Sheets workbook to better understand how it would impact our family financially. The more I kept looking at it the more it became less and less of a crazy idea.  


  • Financially we would be better off a year later than we would be maintaining our suburban life.  

  • Our family would be able to slow down and really connect instead of just running from one event to the next.  

  • We’d be able to see friends and family that live outside of our weekend warrior travel radius.

  • I’d still be able to maintain my cancer treatments and even pursue some therapies that we don’t have access to in the Kansas area.


I went from being cautiously skeptical about the idea to enthusiastically pushing for us to make the moves to get there by summer of 2022. As I type this I’m sitting in an airport with my wife Aubrey waiting on our connecting flight to purchase our 2020 Grand Design fifth wheel and 2016 Chevy 3500 from an awesome family in Montrose, CO.  In the following post I’ll expand on why we decided to go for it and commit to living in an RV full time.


  • Full time RV living has always seemed like a pipe dream for me because there appeared to be a lot of unknowns out there. The main deterrent for my family was fear of the unknown in an unfamiliar area. It’s not that we are a fearful family but we do have a lot to consider having three kids, two dogs, and navigating my stage IV cancer diagnosis. However, the cool part about pursuing a full time RV lifestyle today is that a lot of the trail blazers out there have plenty of information on the “how to’s” and the “what to expect’. Even better is that most of these awesome people are extremely accessible and forthcoming with any information you would want on transitioning into your new lifestyle. (insert people we follow) This was very helpful for me when I began geeking out on the finances of our trip because I could curate more accurate numbers to predict what our costs would be. There are quite a few active RV bloggers out there that even include their monthly budgets. Here are a few of the financial considerations we made when deciding to go RV living full time.

    Current housing market to sell our home

    Lower cost of living

    Maximize savings and investments

    Boondocking and Moochdocking

    We were fortunate to be in a great position to sell our home and make top dollar. Had the market not been so seller friendly at the time we would have most likely looked at renting out our home. I don’t know if I’d say that the expenses are always less on the road but it is when you consider the costs of suburban living compared to what we envision for our full time RV lifestyle. For us the savings in our monthly budget will come from not paying for our kid’s school, extracurriculars, and the costs of owning a home. We’ll also be able to save money on the road by taking advantage of my veteran status to stay at Fam Camps and we’ve been told a lot of campgrounds out there offer veteran discounts. Another way we’ll save on lot fees is by boondocking in some areas and moochdocking off of friends and family when we go visit.

  • I’ve been battling stave IV infiltrative basal cell carcinoma of the head and neck since September 2020. It’s been a wild ride and I plan to write more about my specific diagnosis and what we’ve found to be helpful along the way in future posts. It’s been an extremely emotional and life changing experience fighting this disease to squeeze as much life out of my body as I can. In August of 2021 my oncologist at the VA told me that I had maybe four months to live if we didn’t do any treatments and one to two years with treatment. We didn’t have a great experience dealing with VA Medical and had to fight to get them to send me down to MD Anderson. We have been very blessed to have an awesome group of friends, family, and community to help us do a lot of that. They got us in contact with Senator Moran’s office to get us to MD Anderson. I’ve been treated at MD Anderson since January 2022 and as of today I am responding very well to the treatments that the VA oncologist said wouldn’t be effective.

    Going forward in this adventure it was important that I could maintain my doctors appointments at MD Anderson, treatments at Hope4Cancer in Mexico, and my at home cancer fighting protocols. Fortunately right now my treatments at MD Anderson only require me to continue taking the tabular chemo and then monitor the effectiveness. We’ve worked out visits to MD Anderson for check in’s and coordinated our travel plans accordingly. There is a treatment in Mexico that I’m unable to get in the US due to FDA regulations, so again we just simply coordinated our travel plans for that visit later in the year. The real challenge was figuring out how we would be able to continue the at home cancer fighting protocols. I won’t get too deep into these here because I plan on diving down those rabbit holes in future posts, but here is a list of what we’re currently employing at home to fight cancer.

    Coffee Enemas

    Vitamin C IV’s

    Mistletoe Injections

    Therapeutic Ketosis

    Infrared Sauna

    Infrared/Red Light treatments

    Care Oncology Protocol - See Jane Mclellands book “How To Starve Cancer”

    Supplementation

    Outdoor therapy

    Out of all the treatments listed above only a few of these posed any type of challenge for us and it was more logistical than anything. Having quality food is very important to us and fortunately I’m at a spot where I understand what I need to maintain this. I’ve been working with a company called Ketana to help me maintain therapeutic ketosis which is a metabolic state that favors starving cancer cells. My wife found a portable Therasage Infrared Sauna that I can set up on the road to keep the sauna treatments going. Outdoor therapy obviously isn’t going to be a problem because we plan on being as off grid as we can. The rest of the items listed are just a matter of having our packages shipped to wherever it is we call home that month.

    Another bonus perk is that we’re pretty limited on what we can find in Kansas for non-toxic integrative therapies. We plan to start our adventure out west and eventually end up in places like Arizona where we’ll find plenty of options for different therapies and labs that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.

  • Even though I wasn't right about this first our initial consideration was and always will be how our decisions will impact our children. I believe that the first thought families have when considering the full time RV lifestyle is how it will impact their kids socially. It’s a fair thought to have and for a lot of people their initial impression of a camper family is a bunch of dirty kids running around chewing on sticks. By the way I don’t think there is anything wrong with some of that, but there is so much more out there for your kids than being filthy and sticks to chew on. We love getting into new situations and meeting new people and learning about how they do life. It gives us an opportunity to expand on our world view and better understand our fellow man which in turn makes it easier for us to love our neighbors. My wife and I both grew up in somewhat of a small town and had some big world experiences along the way so we understand the benefits to both. I don’t think this is an either or matter, though. I believe that having a home base such as lovely Manhattan, KS and coupling that with adventure can add so much substance to your child’s upbringing. However, I do acknowledge that there are some cons and it will require open dialogue with our kids to understand when we should hang it up.

    Pros

    Real world hands on experiences

    Opportunity to make friends from different parts of the US

    Slower schedule allows for more family time

    Able to continue same curriculum as their home based school

    Develop a taste for chasing adventure

    Cons

    Meeting new people can be intimidating for our kids

    Three small minds in a confined space will lead to conflict

    Not being able to work on developing long term relationships at their home base

    Mom and Dad are parent, teacher, recreation coordinator, chef, and many other hats

    These pros and cons are specific to our family and the top ones we considered before we pulled the trigger on this. Aubrey and I didn’t think that there would be a problem mitigating circumstances to flip those cons into pros. It will be an adjustment for our kids to meet new people as we move but I believe it’s an important skill for us to help them develop. Think of how often there is unnecessary tension when a bunch of people who don’t know each other enter the same room. I believe it will be an asset for our kids to know how to navigate this instead of just clinging onto whatever or whomever is comfortable. The confined space and many hats for mom and dad will be an adjustment for all of us but we will be able to work around this. For one there will be plenty to do on the road that will occupy us and if someone isn’t feeling it that day then we can adjust to meet that person's needs. That might look like mom or dad taking the kids and dogs on a walk so mom can decompress or letting one kid sit alone in the rig while the other two finish up school on the picnic table. There are countless situations I could come up with but they all lead to just maintaining flexibility and enjoying the journey. There will be conflict, we will face challenges on the road, and not every adventure is going to be amazing. This is what we call adversity and it’s a prime opportunity for teaching your kids how to handle it either through hands on experience or by modeling it for them.

  • One of the great things about living in Manhattan, KS is that it has such a dynamic population. Between Kansas State University and Fort Riley you get the opportunity to meet a lot of new families. The downside to this is that you grow close to these families and then they have to move away either due to pursuing work opportunities or in the case of our Army families they have a change of duty station. I myself was in the Army for 10 years and most of the friends I made along the way scattered across the US. We keep in touch with these friends but it’s always the same song and dance when we talk. It starts with, “You should come see us in (insert location) we’d love to see you and your family could do X, Y, and Z.” Then it ends with a full calendar of obligations and family commitments that take precedence. Next thing you know you have to decide on disappointing family or friends because there isn’t enough time. Well the truth is that there is enough time but we’ve all started wearing this badge of honor for being the busiest. In my opinion you’ve lost the meaning of life if you look at all the things you want to do and can’t find the time to do them. One of the most exciting factors for us is to finally get to make plans with and see all the cool ass people we’ve met along the way.

 

After reading through this I think it’s easy to see that my wife and I didn’t take this decision lightly. However, we also didn’t consider everything that every other family would list because all of our situations are different and we all value different aspects of life. We’ve considered doing something like this off and on for quite a while now and everytime we would talk ourselves out of it. I mean we did have valid reasons, but I’m not so sure that they were legitimate deal breakers. Oftentimes people stand on the threshold of a big life altering decision and let themselves get lost in the details. The truth is that we can’t plan for and mitigate every risk life throws our way and if not careful you can let the fear of stepping over that threshold cripple you from what could be the most impactful decision of your’s and your loved one’s lives. For us and other full time RV’ers it’s taken a life altering circumstance to give them that push such as health issues, career change, or even the death of a loved one. I think if you asked most of us if we’d wished we started sooner most of us would say yes. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into a life you aren’t happy with. I hope these considerations help others as they consider taking the leap to full time RV living and please feel free to comment with any questions or considerations you’d have.