Two Years Of Vanlife: A Retrospective

Table Of Content

1- Life Before Vanlife

2- Two Years in Numbers

3- Tales From The Road

4- Top 3 Mountain Biking & Skiing Destinations

5- Things We Wish We Knew

6- Van Build: What We Would Change If We Had To Start Over

7- Introspection: Have We Changed?

8 - Vanlife and Relationship

9 - Make Money On The Road

10 - Vanlife Cooking

11 - What's Next?

1- Life Before Vanlife

The Normal Life

We were products of the system: we had well paid permanent jobs with benefits (we were both engineers), a nice house, cars, friends, we had access to local mountain biking trails, whitewater rivers, ski hills, craft beer scene, etc. We were not attracted by luxury (except for mountain bikes!) and didn’t buy a lot of stuff, so we considered ourselves “rich” in a way that we could afford all the fun we wanted (keeping in mind that we’re reasonable people! wait… are we?).

Redefining Normal

We lived a comfortable life, but when reaching our mid-thirties the years seem to repeat themselves. The idea of working full time and taking short (and expensive) vacations each year until our old days was not really fulfilling… Mountain biking and backcountry snowboarding is what we love the most in this life, can we create a lifestyle where we can enjoy these activities to the fullest when we’re still young and healthy?

Creating A Sustainable Lifestyle

Play more, work less… Less expenses, less income. It’s all about balance. Can we turn that daydream into reality?

Less Expenses

Easier said than done. How much converting and travelling in a van cost, actually? There was a lot of guesswork involved in our planning… But if you’re reading this now you can take the guesswork out of the equation, because we tracked everything down:

Van Cost

There are so many different van options, so we leave this part up to you. Check out classifieds or inquire to your local dealer to get a quote. On a side note, here is how we decided on the Ford Transit:

Conversion Cost

We tracked down the total cost and labor it took us to convert the van. It’s breakdown by category/task, so it doesn’t get any more comprehensive than that! Hope that helps!

Vanlife Cost

We publish our monthly travel expenses. There are over 2 years of data in there, breakdown by categories. You can use this as a baseline to plan your own trip (don’t forget to adjust the numbers to your own lifestyle).

Less Income

Pro tip: Quit your day job = less income!

You’re welcome.

We’ll be fully transparent here, we initially didn’t plan on becoming “true” full time vanlifers; who does that? Instagram stars do somehow, and we certainly didn’t fit into that category. So our initial plan was to travel about a year (from our savings) and settle somewhere on the west coast.

So here’s the crazy part of the story. We decided to build this website; far out something. The idea was to keep us busy during the rainy days in the van (to share our travel pictures, stories, etc), that’s all. We’re not exactly sure how and why, but it finally turned into this massive how-we-built-our-van reference website. This might be one of our best idea ever, because while our day jobs kickstarted our vanlife, FarOutRide.com turned it into a full time gig. We can’t say it enough: -THANK YOU- for using our affiliate links (Amazon mostly) from our Build Journal and our Build Guides. Thank you for downloading our diagrams (Wiring, Water & Propane). Without YOU, we couldn’t keep going. It’s as simple as that! 🙂

Thinking about starting your website too? Here’s everything to get you started: