RVlife – Page 6 – RV-on-FIRE

March 2023 Financial Update

Published on April 9, 2023May 6, 2023 by RV-on-FIRE.comLeave a comment

Free at last! As we mentioned in our March Dividend Portfolio Update we are finally back on the road and settled in Utah once again. Most importantly, we are free from the work-camping hell we found ourselves in for the last five plus months.

We will be doing another blog on the experience, but in short there were many issues we, and every other work-camper, had with our time in Mesa as it turned out to be a terrible experience.

For starters as we said the deal itself just wasn’t worth the time or hassle. We knew the details, or most of them at least, and we agreed to them beforehand so that’s on us. We hoped to find a place that we enjoyed and could return to when we winter in the southwest and we were a willing to take a subpar deal if it meant being at a great place. The bad financial deal turned out to be the least of the problems as the whole experience in and of itself was horrible.

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March 2023 Dividend Portfolio Update

Published on April 3, 2023April 2, 2023 by RV-on-FIRE.com1 Comment

Yay, March is over and we are back on the road! I’ll save the details for our larger financial update and we apologize in advance for this hastily thrown together dividend portfolio update.

We just left our winter quarters and have relocated in Utah and because of the work schedule we had in Arizona there are a lot of things we need take care of and a lot of things we need to catch up on before we can get back to our regular lives. So in this update we are going to cut right to the chase and dive into the details.

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February 2023 Financial Update

Published on March 7, 2023March 6, 2023 by RV-on-FIRE.com4 Comments

Another month in the books and I don’t know about you, but it seams like February went by at a lightning fast pace! Didn’t we just publish our January update?

But you won’t hear any complaining about time passing quickly from us. At this point we are itching to get the heck out of this place and move on to our next destination in Utah. We desperately need to get back on the road! Even more so, we need to put all of the negativity that has consumed our time here and pretty much ruined our work-camping experience behind us!

I have to admit, this months blog has been very difficult to write as there is so much we want to say about our current situation and the experience here. Not only would it be therapeutic to vent a little, it would also provide some food for thought to those of you that are looking at work-camping opportunities. We detailed some of our frustrations in last months blog mostly about how we were misled about the job responsibilities as the actual job we are doing is not what was sold to us during our interview. But there is so much more going on that we would like to express. We just can’t detail this stuff at the moment as we need to wait until we are either gone or closer to leaving this place.

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February 2023 Dividend Portfolio Update

Published on March 1, 2023February 28, 2023 by RV-on-FIRE.com4 Comments

There is only one word that can sum up our dividend portfolio for the month of February, “blah”!

We could probably end this blog quickly as this was just one of those months where nothing exciting really happened. The only exception is that our dividend from ABBV hit a small milestone and continues to be our top performer. February is typically a slow dividend month in general and our contributions to the portfolio were abysmal on top of that. While we managed to eke out some small year over year growth it wasn’t very impressive as you will soon see.

Even more frustrating is that there are so many opportunities to pick up shares of some great dividend companies right now with JNJ, MMM and others trading at low levels. But it’s no money, no funny time for us as our income sources for funding this account are as dry as death valley in July and there is no

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RV Life Hits and Misses – Two Years On The Road

Published on February 16, 2023February 15, 2023 by RV-on-FIRE.comLeave a comment

As we approach our second anniversary on the road we thought it would be fun to take a moment and reflect on our journey as well as what we left behind. This exercise might also be beneficial to those folks considering taking a similar path by giving them some things to think about before taking the leap into RV living. Make no mistake, life on the road is great and it can be so much fun in the best of times. However, it’s not all roses and at times it will definitely keep you on your toes or have you scrambling to find a solution to problems that arise.

We will preface this by saying that we have absolutely zero regrets about our decision to sell nearly everything we owned in order to enjoy life on the road. But, there are some things that we do miss about living in a regular ol’ sticks n’ bricks home and having a plain life in the suburbs. On the flip side, there are many things that have made those sacrifices well worth it and life more fulfilling too. This is why we recommend people considering this lifestyle sit down and put together a serious list of pros and cons relating to their lifestyle and living situation before taking on this type of adventure.

Let’s take a look and reflect on the good and the bad, welcome to RV life hits and misses!

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January 2023 Financial Update

Published on February 2, 2023February 1, 2023 by RV-on-FIRE.com2 Comments

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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Full-Time RV Budgeting Revisited

Published on January 23, 2023January 23, 2023 by RV-on-FIRE.com4 Comments

In our October 2021 blog we ventured into our budget for full-time RV living by comparing our actual expenses after a couple of months that we had been fully retired to the original budget we compiled during the planning phase of our journey. At the time we thought it would be helpful to our readers as the main question we get from people who are considering this lifestyle is “how much does it cost?” While it was a small sample size the data still proved to be very useful for our readers and it confirmed that we were in the ballpark with our original budget plan. But how would it hold up over the course of a year? That was a bigger question and one that would have to be provided at a later date when we had more data, which brings us to this blog.

This blog post was originally going to published one year after our October 2021 post, but we decided it would be more beneficial to hold off until we had a full calendar year worth of data. This allows us to provide a more accurate accounting of what an actual year on the road costs. It also helps us see the impact that things like work-camping have on our budget.

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