What I wish someone told me
This is a rant on living in vehicles and privilege. What they tell you about van life is often the travel, not the more mundane day to day tasks. My partner and I have been living on and off in vehicles and our life has not been the typical, “van life”.
We seldomly move our van due to costs, age, and basically something always broken. Many folks have privileges they're not aware of. One of the biggest words of advice has to move everyday otherwise it will burn spots. I'm sure other folks can relate to this, that they can't. This is to call in folks in the community and say hey, instead of blaming our own for the reasons we can't stay at spots look to the people who are doing the bans which are corporations and the top 1%.
When different issues arise such as automotive, heat, residency, mail, etc.
People advise to go to hotels, or go to family or friends. For people like us, we need to maintain our residency where we are now to maintain insurance and receive medications. Advice also, many hospitals have financial aid that will forgive debts owed.
I recommend if you want to get into this lifestyle that you enjoy the outdoors and have a high tolerance for coming up with solutions. I’d also say that if you have the ability, to try living in a vehicle for a couple weeks to feel out if it's right for you. Unfortunately for us many of these problems we have we had to try to figure out along the way. It’s been very stressful at times.
The biggest issues we have encountered are the weather and auto mechanical issues. In regards to the weather we end up sleeping in a tent.
We do the majority of our own work and its still expensive. A note to the community not everyone is able to fix their own vehicles physically or feel like they are able to which is valid. Also, another point as well which is frequently talked about is income. We donate plasma. However, residency is a BIG issue. We went to several locations that we could not donate because of our previous zip code.
A note on pets. For better or for worse, we have pets and have a bike with a cargo trailer that we use to help tow the pets around when its too hot to keep them in there. So I’d say if you're a fence sitter, don’t rush into things, listen to the folks that are full time, have clearly lived in vans, and don’t filter their lives into only the good parts of van life.