Operation Enduring Mesa

It’s no secret, we had a pretty miserable experience at our Fall/Winter work-camping gig in Mesa, AZ. While we wanted to give more details throughout the months of frustration, we refrained from doing so on the off chance someone at the resort would run across our blog and it would make it’s way back to management thus causing more problems. Not that we really cared what they thought, but there were other people who were work-camping there too and it wouldn’t be fair to them if things went sideways even more because of our blog.

While it might sound like we are giving our little blog too much credit when it comes to exposure, it’s not hard to put two and two together and figure out who we are when we are at a campground. It’s happened before so it can happen again and there were about 3000 people at this resort so caution was warranted.

Prior to this gig we had only one other work-camping job and we absolutely loved it. In fact, we loved it so much we became lifelong friends with the owners of the campground and we talk to them all the time. They actually sold the campground they owned and are now full-time RV’ers too!

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January 2023 Financial Update

The first month of the new year is already in the books! Hopefully the adage “as goes January, so goes the year” holds true after a nice start to 2023. Obviously there is a long way to go and many hurdles stand in the way of positive returns for the full year, but a good start is always welcome!

As we enter our fourth month in Mesa, AZ it is clear to us that we will never agree to this type of work-camping structure in the future. We covered the different types of work-camping structures, and our current agreement, in our November 2022 Financial Update blog if you would like to take a look back. We won’t rehash all of that here, but let’s just say that the longer we stay here the more obvious it becomes that it’s not worth what we get in return. And the rate increase that took place at the start of the new year is only making matters worse.

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November 2022 Financial Update

It’s hard to believe that we are heading into the last month of the year! While this year has been a great one for traveling the same cannot be said when it comes to finances. Maybe things will start looking up in 2023, but there are still some dark clouds on the horizon despite the recent positive turnaround in the markets. We need to remain optimistic, but at the same time we also have to be realistic about what is yet to come which is likely further economic decay at the hands of an out of step federal reserve.

We are now one month into our new work-camping jobs and it’s going fairly well so far. Some parts of the job are much more labor intensive than we were led to believe during the interview process and it can get a little frustrating because it often seems like we are doing a lot of manual labor instead of working events. On the bright side, we have been able to get more hours than are needed to cover the cost of our site fees and utilities and little extra cash never hurts.

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Happy Thanksgiving!!

As we approach 2 years on the road we are grateful that we are able to live our best life and share our adventures.

Thank you to our readers for your continued support and sticking with us! We hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoy spending time with your families!

Joe & Mrs. RVF

P.S. Happy 13th Birthday to our best friend and travel companion!

Murphy

January 2022 Financial Update

Anyone else happy to move on from January? Perhaps this update should be titled “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” as it might be more fitting? January was busy, expensive, and at times, frustrating. I don’t mind rough months in the markets as they are needed in order to facilitate long term progress. I would prefer large market drops happen in months where we are not already committed to shelling out a lot of cash. As the Rolling Stones song goes “You can’t always get what you want.” Hopefully we got it all out of our system and can move forward to greener pastures. Let’s stick with our theme for a little levity.

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Full-Time Travel Planning

How do you decide where to go? How do you decide where to stay? Isn’t it stressful to have to make plans all the time? Isn’t it expensive?

These are some popular questions we get asked so we thought it would be a good idea to give some insight into our current planning process similar to what we did with full-time budgeting. I say “current planning process” because I feel the process will evolve over time as our circumstances change and as we gain experience with a higher level of comfort on the road.

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2021 Year In Review

What a difference a year makes! As a matter of fact, we never published our 2020 year in review for a few reasons. Mostly because 2020 just plain sucked! The pandemic ruined everything from our son’s senior year of high school, large parts of our college road trip, his freshman year in college and our plans to start our full-time RV life. And who can forget the financial rollercoaster from the top of the world down to the pit of despair and back again? Publishing a blog post and reliving it all over again was the last thing on our minds.

Here we are at the end of another year and still dealing with the continued fallout from the pandemic. Some things have remained the same. Everything else in our lives has changed for the better.

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