Filed under: Working From Home

Do You Know Why You RV?

January 2, 2013 by Vickie Medley · Leave a Comment

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Like most fulltime RVers I always read articles pertaining to the RVing lifestyle. A lot of people who are standing on the fringe of RVing ask questions of any RVer they run into. The most prominent question is…”Can I afford to RV?” The usual answer is…”It depends on how much you need to live on per month.”

That got me to asking the question, “Why do we continue to RV?” You may think there’s an easy answer, but sometimes it’s more complicated than “Because we enjoy it.”

While I can’t find exact statistics, I do know from talking with other RVers that the number of people working on the road is continuing to grow. This lifestyle has caught on with more and more people. Baby Boomers are a good example. Many of them got caught at retirement age with no pension. A great many of them joined the RV community and are able to live comfortably and many are working on the road.

Now, back to why we continue to RV. We were like all other RVers wanting to travel leisurely. We were retired. Why not? This is where our easy answer to that question backfired.

We actually were semi-retired with plans to phase out of our home inspection business. The Pilot started the business when he retired from Continental Airlines. He had flown for 40 years and was ready to enjoy life…except he was still relatively young and energetic. Because of real estate investments he decided to become his own home inspector. From that point the business grew more than he’d anticipated.

If you own a business you reach a stage where you have to make a decision to either grow it larger or get out of it. We’d reach that stage. We had four inspectors working for us and we managed the administrative end of it…no matter where we were.

As the business grew it was taking up more of our time. What difference did it make it we were at our home base in Texas or in Arizona? Work is work and it appeared that it was defeating our purpose of being in an RV.

We finally found what we’d been looking for over the past several years. We’d tried to automate our business so that the tedious repetitive paperwork could be done with one entry. We finally found a company that does just that very thing, and more, in Las Vegas. We’ve made the transition and life is now back to what we’d envisioned in the first place.

Oh, at that point we became “unretired.” We finally gave up on saying we were retired when we realized that we liked the challenge of staying busy. In addition to the business I also write content for several hosting companies in addition to my weekly blog.

We can travel, sight-see, visit friends & family and still do our business. At different intervals we come back to our home base to do marketing for the business. At max, a couple of hours a day isn’t bad for another stream of income and a lifestyle that allows us the freedom to do what we want.

Next time I’ll talk with you about a back-up plan should you decide to hang up the keys. Until then…enjoy your life on the road.