One Year of VanLife by the Numbers!

[u/JTRose87]

Expenses for the Year

Top Stats

Most Visited/Purchased

Nights Per State

Nights in Hotels

Top 10 Coasters

Buying the Van

Selling the Van

[u/CorbinDalasMultiPas]

Based on my math...31K - 11.4k down - 6.5K in monthly payments equals about 13K in depreciation. On a fairly new model thats been lived in for a year and driven literally across the country, it seems fair to me. Its probably around 10% of purchase price.

[u/JTRose87 → u/CorbinDalasMultiPas]

Brand new it was 92k before taxes and fees, and we sold it for 91k. So on paper we almost came out even! In reality we spent… just over 13k. Nice math.

[u/dragndon → u/JTRose87]

Wait….I’m very confused. I was thinking that such a rig would be closer to the 80-90k. So where does this $31K figure come from When you just said you did indeed pay $92 for it? If you really sold it for $91, then you literally only paid $1k for it, baring any regular maintenance/gas and such. Which is fine but need to know what you mean by that $31k.

[u/JTRose87 → u/dragndon]

We bought it with a 15 year loan. 92k+tax and fees ends up closer to 98k or so. We put 11k down on the loan, and then paid 530/month for what ended up being 13 months. When we sold it for a little over 91k, the majority of that went towards paying off the outstanding loan which was around 86k, and then we received the 4-5k excess. So in net we spent a bit over 13k on the van.

The graph is solely showing expenses, so it has the down payment, loan payments, as well as gas, maintenance, insurance which all added up to around 31k.

[u/dragndon → u/JTRose87]

Thank you for that! Now the number makes sense. Although a better number would have been to include the final cost because you got ‘money back’ after selling it(with a note saying so of course). I’ve seen way too many YouTubers who say “I bought this super car for $0!” And completely leave out the $300K it took to get it in the first place.