Van Plans: Origin
Upon cleaning out old drafts of blog posts I figured would never be completed, I stumbled on this one. A little over a year ago, I completed a three-month stint living in a van, and I might as well drop some knowledge on you about how it feels to travel the Pacific Northwest (PNW) in a “pedo van” while figuring out remote work. The original “origin story” post follows, and this could turn into a series of blog posts, who knows?…
I just got done with the weekly chat with my parental unit, and it came up again. “Do you really have to go live in a van?” Every Sunday, no matter what the week has turned up, our conversation inevitably touches some part of “…well I won’t have to worry about that when I live in a van…” and all hell breaks loose.
I can understand where my parents are coming from. No one around me is planning to be a man in a van gettin’ a tan…fan…rhymes? But I am determined to do so, and I can’t even give you an honest answer as to where my plan came from. I can give you plenty of reasons “why” I want to live in a van, but I can’t tell you “how” I came to that conclusion…oh wait, I’m Irish and kind of drunk so of course I can tell you exactly how it went down.
A Visit To Brother Ted
I probably had dreams of van life before this occurred, but the most concrete moment I can point to happened when I was visiting my brother over Christmas of 2017. He moved to the Bay Area not long ago and seemed tired of his daily trek to and from work that I came to understand was four hours total. I felt a little bad that my round trip to and from work was about 20 minutes total…and that was walking. Yeah, I live two blocks from work. Sorry, not sorry.
I can imagine that my brother’s plight is shared by many of his neighbors and many of his neighbors’ neighbors. I’ve heard many crazy stories of absurd commutes across the Bay Area just to make a living, and I don’t envy any of that. You might think you’ll get something done in the commute, and maybe you’re listening to more podcasts now, but the frustrations of rush hour traffic and wear and tear on your vehicle tend to outweigh any perceived gains.
At one point, Ted talked longingly about the idea of living in a trailer so he didn’t have to drive all that way to work every day. Maybe he could drive in late at night, sleep close to work, and then not have to beat morning traffic. Or maybe he could sleep in a trailer for a few nights during the middle of the week and only have to bear the brunt of rush hour traffic towards the weekend.
I countered his thoughts with my own romantic visions of living in a van and traveling around the country. My rent in Boulder, CO was increasing 10% a year while my salary only increased around 4% a year. I was getting poorer staying where I was; however, I had a feeling I could talk my employer into letting me work remotely rather than having them lose a good employee. Sometimes your boss might not be authorized to pay you much more than you make now, but they usually can allow other perks, like remote work, that doesn’t affect the company’s bottom line at all.
As we washed down the beer in our glasses that Christmas, Ted and I’s conversation of mobile living ended, but my interest in the possibility of working remotely and traveling only grew.
4.5 Months to Blastoff!!!
Turns out, yep, you can live in a van. Surprised!?! Not really? There are so many people on “the gram” posting about their travels or on YouTube showing you how to install a roof vent that you’ll have no issues figuring out how to start living in a van if you want to.
I feel like I researched this topic several years ago and found a lot less information, but skeezing out that mobile life these days is becoming hella popular for the millennial crowd. Hell, the Boomers still own most of the housing stock anyway so some of the alternative living arrangments people have been trying out lately aren’t for whims of fancy. Sometimes they’re for survival.
But not for me…I’m all whims and fancy over here, and since it’s just me, I had no issue making up my mind. It’s different if you have a family, significant other, or community of people trying to get you to stay around, but I had none of those issues. Furthermore, having made none of those connections in Colorado, it made me even more eager to set off for greener pastures.
My biggest challenge was funding and how I would/could work during my time in the van. The lease to my apartment was up at the end of July 2018, and I had no intention of renewing it. By the end of February of 2018 (according to old emails), I was set on finding a remote gig so I could still work as a web developer while living in a van.
That’s right…five whole months to switch jobs, buy a van, retrofit it, downsize out of my apartment, and take off. Actually it was more like 4.5 months since I backpacked around Europe for a couple of weeks that May. I don’t recommend trying to change your whole life up in a little over four months as I did, but just know that it’s possible and it might work out to your advantage…and I’ll explain why in a future post.
The Work Conversation
Before I went out and dropped money on a van, I wanted to lock down a remote job: the main contingency of my plan. If I couldn’t ensure an income source after my lease was up, I would have to think of another next step.
I first looked to my network for remote job leads. I was lucky enough to have a few companies that wanted to interview me, but then they were late to calls, didn’t show up, and/or gave me a sense that working for them might be way more chaotic than staying at my current somewhat cushy job.
If you have a job like me where you can do everything over the internet coupled with phone calls and video chats for “personal interaction”, it doesn’t hurt to ask your current employer before you try and get another job. Telling your employer you “need remote work or else” can backfire quickly so make sure to massage your language and ask in an email first, but at least you know how it is to work with your company. Someone once told me:
“Better the devil you know then the devil you don’t.”
And I wholeheartedly agree in this situation. You don’t know how it is to live in a van so why bring another unknown into the mix? As I came to find out, living in a van is really challenging mentally, and I’m not sure I could have pulled it off the way I did if I actually took another job right before blasting off.
I don’t have access to the email I sent my boss regarding “my future in the company”, but I made a case for why I needed to get out of Boulder and pulled some resources from HR that helped employees make remote work pitches to their boss. I worked for a large university at the time so your mileage may vary (YMMV) in terms of help from HR, but in general, any precedents you can find of other remote workers in the company or times you worked remotely over the holidays will help your case.
This is huge. I spent several holidays partially working remotely while traveling so I could point directly to those times when I sent the email to my boss. I also was good about pushing up my code to GitHub and documenting everything I did in readmes and issue queues previous to my remote work sales pitch.
I was surprised at how easy it was to get them to agree to allow remote work. But then again, what is the cost to them? Lose an employee and spend thousands of dollars searching, hiring, and training someone else, or let the employee do the same job they’ve always been doing just not at the same desk. A no brainer equation to me, and I’m glad my boss thought so too. I also threw in a pitch for a raise and promotion that never came, but maybe the promotion ask made appeasing me with remote work more palatable to them.
Finding A Van
Before I left for my European trip, I was pleased to not have to look for another job, and I enjoyed myself in Europe. For some reason, I wasn’t worried that I now only had two months to buy a van, retrofit it, downsize out of my apartment, and take off.
I use a glorified bullet list tool called Workflowy that sends updates of things I’ve added, deleted, and completed after each day I use it. This allows me to look back at the time I was preparing to move into a van and see how I went about the planning process. I’m pleased to see notes and research dating back to February 2018, when I made up my mind to move into a van, however, a lot of the research remained research. It’s really easy to daydream and plan when you have time, but necessity is the mother of invention…and lighting a fire under your ass!
Not long after I got back to Boulder in June of 2018, I started panicking. According to my notes, I hemmed and hawed on topics like whether to get a “high top” van, whether I could afford a Sprinter van, and obtaining measurements of a Chevy Express cargo van.
None of that mattered…I repeat, none of that junk matters since you are limited to the funds you have at the time of purchase and the current market of used vans around your area.
I think I settled on the Chevy Express cargo van before I went to Europe, and I recommend buying that style for your first vanning experience due to several reasons.
Price
This is by far the largest determinant for what type of van you should look for. I know people who have fancy Sprinter vans they spent $30,000+ on…before putting an extra $20,000 into retrofitting it. That kind of money seems insane to me, especially when the whole point of traveling around is to NOT be in your van as much as possible.
I also think Sprinter vans suck regarding maintenance. In the US, there are boatloads of Chevy Express vans used as fleet vehicles, and the Express is known to be a beast of a machine with a good track record of being reliable. Once you start messing with diesel engines and foreign car parts, you might be even further in debt wondering why the hell you bought a Sprinter van with no experience vanning in the first place.
Pick a van that you can actually afford, and if you need a loan to buy any van, don’t let your fantasies get the best of you by succumbing to the Sprinter van jerks. Chevy Express foreva!
Camouflage
Once you start living in a van, you’ll get really good at being able to spot who else is living in a van. Is that a Sprinter van I see? Yep, living in a van over there. Roof vent and solar panels? Might as well call the neighborhood watch on that yahoo…and some people even put their freaking Instagram handle on their window like their some kind of local celebrity God.
I hate these people with a passion and don’t want to see you become one of them. Plenty of people live in a van for necessity’s sake so don’t be a dick and flaunt your privileged #vanlife in their face. I can’t tell you how many people wanted me to start a blog about how awesome it is to van around, and I told them they just don’t get it. I wanted to travel around in the cheapest way possible. That’s it. I don’t want to bother anyone or make them jealous on social media. I just wanted to be a vagabond and blend into the background.
Buying a van that plenty of people use for work allows you to blend into your surroundings. Not having a roof vent or solar panels, which you definitely don’t need for brief travels, allows you to remain inconspicuous. The more you flaunt it, the more people who have no option but to live in a van will suffer.
I can’t tell you how many bullshit “no parking from 1 AM — 7 AM” I saw in my travels as a result of people not giving a shit about the communities they avoided paying property taxes to live on their curbs. Please be considerate in keeping as inconspicuous as possible. Turns out the most stealthy vehicle out there tends to be the Chevy Express. End rant.
Buying The Van
I used sites like cars.com and AutoTrader to look for vehicles, and I found way more Express vans than Sprinters. YMMV based on where you’re at and when you do your search, but I bet you’ll find the same results as I did.
Even though I had a list of local Colorado postings to call from those sites, I decided to also try looking in Ohio where my parents live and where I was storing all my apartment stuff while living in the van. I really encourage you to look around the different regions of the US where you could potentially stay to look for vans.
I was shocked at how big the price differences were for roughly the same vehicle specs in Ohio versus Colorado. I could save several thousands of dollars by choosing to purchase the van in Ohio, and that’s exactly what I did.
Once I switched to searching in Ohio, I made a list of postings around several cities, but driving to those places and looking at the vehicles that could be bought at any minute was difficult. Maybe I could look at a car in Columbus one day but making it over to Indianapolis on the same day was challenging. This is where being in a larger market might help you out on the driving distances between van options, but I still think the larger the market, the higher the overall cost.
All that online van research didn’t mean anything to me in the end, though. And that’s because I drove into my small hometown one day…
…and there it was on the side of the road. My future van! Unlisted online! Low mileage! Hella good price! I could hardly believe what I saw. After taking it to my local mechanic and hearing his version of “that’s a hell of a deal” I was sold.
But I got it for $8,000, not $9,000. How? I came back to the seller with a print out of the mechanic’s estimate for some fixes and talked him down to $8,000. I think the guy was underwater in debt, as well. Your best bet with buying any vehicle is an unlisted side of the road deal like this. I’m not exactly telling you to drive around for hours until you find your perfect match rather than spending time online looking at postings, but if you see a listing on the side of the road, stop and check it out.
In the end, the story of how I purchased my van turned out to be as simple as driving around my hometown on the way to grab lunch. All the other prior thoughts and research were a moot point. I’m definitely lucky to have found the vehicle when I did, but I wasted a decent amount of time daydreaming that I don’t think you should waste.
The moral of the story is to get off your ass and look around sometimes rather than spending even more time behind a screen. You’ll get the best deals that way. At some point, I’ll get off my ass and continue this story, but until then…
