For those that follow our blog and are planning to fulltime in the future, I thought I would publish some statistics to indicate what we did this year and our expenses in major categories that would have some commonality.

2009 was our 4th year on the road and the Wandering Wishnies haven't slowed down a bit. At the end of every year we say we have to slow down and smell the roses, but seem to constantly find interesting things to do and places to go the following year. This year was no different. Guess we like to smell a lot of roses :)

We visited 21 states and stayed in 59 campgrounds, so we still average moving once every 6 days (even though we had an extended stay of 5 weeks in one place when we camphosted in Wisconsin). We spent $7333 for campground fees for an average of $611 a month, or $20 a day (again skewed by the camphosting gig which gave us 5 weeks of free rent). We also stayed in more public campgrounds this year (i.e. county, state and national parks) which are cheaper and discovered the pleasure and low cost of Corps of Engineer parks where we pay only 50% of the already cheap fees with our Golden Age Passport. (Age has to have some benefits :)

We towed 8121 miles and our average move was 137 miles. We spent $4359 for diesel fuel, or $363 a month. We don't keep track of regular driving miles each year, but after 4 years we have 90,000 on the truck, so are averaging 22,500 miles a year.

Some other common expense categories are RV and truck registration and insurance at $2090, or $174 a month. Propane at $233 - $19 month, mail forwarding service (this includes the annual service fee plus postage) $265 - $22 month and maintenance at $2109 or $175 a month. Maintenance has been about $125 a month historically, but we had some special work done when we visited the factory in July.

There you go – see how inexpensive this lifestyle is? Throw off your chains and come out and join us. You won't believe how much fun it is.

If anyone has any questions or wants additional information, just let me know.

Fred
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