At the end of our RV journey, I promised I would keep up with our expenses while living in Florida to have a comparison to what we spent while RVing America. It's important to note, however, that we have been living our typical lifestyle that we would live anywhere in the world, whether that be in Florida, the RV, SE Asia or even Europe.
Our goal of these posts is not to show you how to live on a budget, but to compare the different lifestyles and locations and how much it costs without having to sacrifice on those creature comforts. For going on 6 years now, we have been traveling the world looking for the best value for our money and best quality of life (not just the cheapest place to live).
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I (Brittany) lived in St Pete for 7 years before we left for Thailand back in 2013, so we thought it would be really interesting to see what our expenses would look like living here again. St Pete is a place we could definitely see ourselves staying long term again if we ever moved back to the States permanently, so we were anxious to gather this data for comparison.
We were somewhat surprised at the results, especially considering that we thought the RV lifestyle would be a lot more affordable when we first embarked on that journey at this time last year. It turns out that our month in Gulfport was about the same as our cheapest months in the RV and it was actually less than our average month RVing. That being said, we got to travel from coast to coast and see a lot of incredible places in between while spending roughly the same amount as we would in one place. I'm going to be very cliche and say that those experiences that we had are priceless and it would be impossible to factor those into the table below.
Just to give you an idea of what our month in Gulfport looked like, we are staying in a really cute 2 bed/1 bath beach bungalow just a block from Beach Blvd, the main street through town with a variety of shops, restaurants and bars. We are also just 3 blocks from the beach. The house came fully furnished so we pretty much just had to bring our clothes. We immediately signed up for the gym when we got here (something we dearly missed while on the road full time).
We spend some days working from home, and other days in one of our favorite coffee shops/work spaces in downtown St. Pete. Its nice to have plenty of coffee shops to choose from and spend a few hours getting out of the house during the day.
We've also had company almost every weekend, so during the week we are usually cooking our own meals but we do dine out a lot on the weekends (and drink more!). This is pretty standard for our lifestyle though.
We still have just the one truck and really don't do much driving. Everything is very walkable here in Gulfport, and the grocery store and gym is less than 2 miles from our house.
Our cell phone and internet charges dropped as we got rid of our extra Verizon plan that we used as a hotspot on the road. Our auto insurance also dropped some after removing the RV from our policy, but our Health Insurance went up about $75/month. In addition, we had some expenses for doctors appointments this month which was something we never really had while on the road.
We took our average spend from our 5 months of RVing to compare to our month living in Gulfport.
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Utilities (water, sewer, trash) | | |
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This is definitely not the end of our expense report series. We are pretty excited to continue tracking our expenses while in Europe this summer and sharing them with you here. We will also continue the vlogs on our YouTube channel where we will show you what its like living in Europe (grocery shopping, gyms, coffee shops, apartments, and more!). If there is anything in particular you would like to see, let us know in the comments or send us an email!
