A millennial couple spent $20,000 buying an RV and turning it into a tiny home on wheels. They now have no debt, and their monthly expenses rarely exceed $2,500 — see how they did it.

07.08.2023 - 01:19 / insider.com

After being foster parents to eight children for two years, Chris and Lindsay Harvey were looking for a change in lifestyle.

"By then, we were a few years into our marriage and on the fence about whether we wanted to have kids of our own," Chris, 42, told Insider.

As the Florida couple started thinking about their next chapter, they realized that all they wanted to do was travel while living debt-free.

As Lindsay has Crohn's disease — which is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease — getting on planes or going hiking on multi-day trips was difficult, Chris said.

"We needed to have a bathroom with us wherever we went, so we said, 'Why not give RV life a try?'" he added. "That way, we can visit amazing, beautiful places and still be able to take our bathroom with us everywhere we go."

It was March 2018 when the couple sold all their items and set off in their flatbed truck camper.

"We started traveling in a truck camper and our initial plan was to drive from Florida to Alaska and then from Alaska to Argentina," Chris said.

But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the couple never made it any further south than Baja, Mexico, he said.

"We changed our plans and decided to buy a bigger motor home, and we've just been making loops around the US, and we go to Baja, Mexico, every winter," Chris said.

"I found it online — I'd been searching for a little bit," Lindsay, 37, told Insider. "It was a pretty good deal because it was right before RV prices really shot up."

In July 2020, the average retail value of a Class C RV like theirs would have cost $74,885, per data from a 2021 J.D. Power and Associates report. In July 2021, the average retail value rose to $93,146.

The couple drove about two to three hours from Georgia to pick up the vehicle from the seller, who was in Alabama. 

The couple was visiting Lindsay's sister in Atlanta at the time and drew a five-hour radius around the city. "We said we'd drive five hours to find what we could find," Chris said. 

Before they bought this Class C RV, they had shortlisted a few other motorhomes, but those flew off the market quickly.

"We picked out one or two other ones and we went and looked at them. By the time we slept on it and got back to the seller, they were already sold," Chris said. 

"The red camper was supposed to be our rugged vehicle to drive all the way down to Argentina, so we weren't thinking about how it looked or felt," Chris said. "Whereas with the RV, we wanted to have an apartment on wheels."

That's the main reason why the two of them decided to gut and remodel the entire RV.

"We wanted to be able to park it and stay for a week or two weeks or five months, wherever we were. We wanted it to feel like home," Chris added.

The RV had been kept in storage for