6 tips for living a debt-free life on the road, from a millennial couple who spent $20,000 buying and remodeling an RV

09.08.2023 - 00:53 / insider.com

Chris and Lindsay Harvey, a millennial couple from Florida, have been living on the road since March 2018.

For the past two-and-a-half years, they've been traveling around in an RV that they bought and remodeled for $20,000. They now have no debt, and their monthly expenses rarely exceed $2,500.

Here are the couple's six tips for anyone who's looking to remodel an RV and live a debt-free life.

The couple traveled around in a red flatbed truck camper for the first two years. But over time, they realized they wanted more space. In November 2020, they bought a Class C RV for $12,000 instead — which was exactly how much they sold their truck camper for.

"And that's part of our debt-free strategy — we weren't going to go to the bank and ask for a loan, so we set a budget and we paid for the new RV with money we got from selling the camper," Chris told Insider. 

The couple says they often struggled to find perfect tutorials teaching them how to build the exact features that they wanted.

In the case of the sliding sofa, Chris found two tutorials that combined the idea of what they were trying to build.

"Neither one was perfect. Like I needed to see how the hinges worked, so one video showed me how to do that so that we could lift it, and the other video showed me how to put slats in so that we could pull it out," he said.

Using their own intuition to plug the information gaps, the couple had to rely on trial and error to figure out if things really worked — and that's the reality of DIY projects, he added.

While the couple's monthly budget for their expenses is $2,500 — excluding the cost of fuel — it's not the same for everyone.

Before deciding on a budget, what matters is having a realistic expectation of how much money you'll need to live comfortably, Chris said. And that, in part, depends on a person's life stage and financial status.

"Somebody who retires from the military and has a paycheck coming in for retirement with full medical benefits, their situation is gonna look different from a 27-year-old kid who worked his first job for five years out of college and realized he wanted a gap year," he added.

The journey towards being debt-free starts with a commitment to the lifestyle, Chris said.

"I imagine it would be really easy to say 'I can save $2,000 if I get out of my apartment in New York and live in a van,'" he said. "But I feel like you need to have it in your mind to be debt-free before you really take the plunge."

Part of that involves making sacrifices: Although the couple doesn't deprive themselves of fun, they also don't overindulge.

"As much as we would love to go out to eat at every new place that we go, we cook most of our meals at home," he added. "As much as we'd love to go do amazing