We are back to monthly summaries!! These are probably entirely for my benefit as I feel it provides some accounting for us month to month, but I figured we could share in the interest of anyone else that might be crazy enough to feel the information is useful.
We have officially had our first “full time” (no mortgage) on the road financial month. I feel like it was a good representation of what we expect this life to be like, and fairly similar to our last round of summaries that you can find here. We did eat at a few favorite restaurants and I was surprised at our dining out bill – but since I know we stayed within our overall budget we spent less on other things to balance it out.
I’ll detail a post later on about how I budget in general (because that’s not really Airstream life specific) but just know that these are not ALL of our expenses. Not even close. These are just the ones that are fairly Airstream specific. We still have health insurance, life insurance, entertainment expenses, loans on the Airstream and truck, HSA contributions, children’s savings… You get the idea.
But aside from all that, most people want to know what it’ll cost in the Airstream. The biggest differences for us are the camping fees, higher gas spending, higher groceries, laundry, and occasionally the higher eating out (only because we never really ate out before).
Here are the numbers. I thought the spreadsheet worked well so I’ll keep that but start over on our monthly average totals:
Wow, how’d you get such a cheap laundry bill. We do laundry once a week (family of three) and spend about 40/month.
My current work is 1.9 miles from the hospital, so I ride my bike. Haven’t put gas in the truck for two weeks, which is saving us $85/week over what we had to use in California. Next job is 4 miles from the hospital, so same scenario. Nice to be able to ride to work.
Good question!! haha We generally end up at someone’s house so laundry is free. I also make my kids wear their shirts twice and their pants 3 times before they go in the laundry. Generally if I wash sheets & towels and a weeks worth of clothes we spend around $17 at most. That’s probably every two weeks with a clothes wash in the middle. Maybe we are dirtier than we think we are? Do we smell? 🙂