path: root/se-renta.txt

When we left Dallas a few months ago our plan was to be gone six months. We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. Then we were going to spend the Spring traveling the southwest, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, to spend the summer at higher, cooler elevations. Then we'd swing south again when it cooled off and come back down to Mexico and work our way down the west coast of Mexico for the winter of 2019/2020. 

It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. But as the man said, it's important that you make them, but it's rarely to actually follow a plan for too long. And that one, much as we still like it, is not going to work out for us. At least not on the timeline we'd envisioned.

There are a variety of reasons it's not going to happen, one of them is money. To get where we want to go in the bus, we need to rebuild the engine. We need more power on hills and the only way I've come up with to do that is to either drop in something bigger, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes money and we lost about 50 percent of our income earlier this year. 

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining or asking for money, I'm not doing either, we're very fortunate to be able to do this and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for everything we've been able to do. If we had to sell the bus and go home tomorrow I would have no regrets. We're not ready to do that yet, I'm not even sure what that means anymore, but sometimes you do have to adjust things if you want to keep going.  

I'm going to get into something very few people seem get into: money. It takes money to travel. For a point so obvious, this one gets little press. Before we left I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV and came up with very few hard and fast numbers. Consider this my contribution to anyone searching for information on how much it cost to travel the United States in a 1969 RV.

First though we need to get some terms down. We track our spending to the penny, so I can give some pretty accurate figures at the monthly level. Ultimately though this is not how much it costs. The real answer is that how much is costs to travel the U.S. by RV really depends on where you are, how many of you there are, and how you travel.

That said, here's a rough number for a family of five: $3000-$4000 a month, baring unforeseen expenses -- which is a euphemism for months where the bus doesn't break down. 

Yes, that's a big spread. The reason is that roughly 30-40% tends to be food, which varies tremendously depending on where we are in the country. The west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially for food. Generally speaking the $4000 a month areas would be California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, etc. The midwest and south are cheaper for us because food is cheaper there. In the end things rounded out to just over $3000/month[^1]. 

On the flip side of that equation boondocking tends to be easier out west -- there's lots more BLM land, which means you can find a free place to stay much easier -- so you spend less on camping (except in California, Calfornia is just expense). If you're on the Gulf Coast it's going to cost you upwards of $30 a night in to camp in most of Florida (unless you know where to look). 

Another thing worth noting is that throughout the course of our trip we've spent less and less per month (except for last winter in California, which puts an irritating bump in the nice downward sloping graph I generated). There are two reason for this I think, first, we're getting smarter about boondocking and finding cheap camping, and two, we went back cross the country to the south and midwest where food is cheaper.

Final point -- we could do it for less. We could probably cut our food bill by 30 percent if we dropped the organic meat and eggs for conventional and changed our eating habits a bit (in fact we have by necessity here Mexico). We don't, or we didn't in the U.S., because we didn't need to. As I noted in the post on food, food is one of life's most important elements to me. Not that good food has to be expensive, but good quality ingredients in the U.S. are going to cost you even if you do what we do and mostly shop at Asian and Latin grocery stores.

So what's the point of all this money talk? The U.S. is considerably more expensive than Mexico. We spend just over half our U.S. monthly spending here in Mexico, sans bus. You probably could have guessed that, what you probably would not guess is why.

Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. I'd say food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper for us to live in Mexico.

When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with spending categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. It holds the non-essentials. That category doesn't exist in Mexico. We have spent less than $200 on misc spending in four months of living in Mexico.

Why? It's pretty simple, we don't have access to Amazon.com.

But wait, you're travelers, you live in a bus, you don't buy useless stuff, you can't where would you put it? 

I know right? But it turns out they makes some pretty small and expensive useless stuff you can fit in the bus.

Why do we buy it though, surely we know better? We do know better and yet we still buy it, The spreadsheet does not lie, so why?

After spending some time meditating on this I've a very simple answer: access.

Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, especially here in San Miguel. My wife brought home duck fat yesterday for crying out loud (it was only $2). We're not in the boonies, we're not just eating beans and tortillas. The difference is that here all the stuff you could buy is not all in your face 24/7. 

Shops here do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Half of them you can't even get to the stuff yourself. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want.

Everything you buy here comes from your own mind first and is found second. 

In the United States everything is presented and then your mind decides what to buy. On the internet literally everything is right there at your finger tips.

One of these purchasing models will leave more money in your pocket than the other, full stop.

And I know, I know. I like to think I am immune to advertising too, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught "buy this stuff". 

Unfortunately my spreadsheet says otherwise. I am not immune.

And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television and were subjected to that much more advertising? And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what led me to this conclusion. It got me thinking about it, but it wasn't until I went back and made another comparison that I believed it. It was when I comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, to the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious to me. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. 

Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here too, but it's not the situations or places really, it's us.

I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall for advertising. 

Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful and you probably are not aware of its power in any conscious way. I know I am not. However, now that I'm outside its sphere of influence a bit, I've noticed something -- I don't want anything. Maybe that's not quite true, I want much less. So much less that I became aware of it, I noticed how much less stuff I wanted. At first I thought I was maybe a little crazy, but we've talked to couple of Americans who've been down here a while longer than us and they've noticed it too. 

A good example of this for me would be camera lenses. I use old, manual focus lenses. In the course of the trip I've bought and sold about a dozen, and there were many more I wanted to buy. I used to follow all the used lens websites and would lust after various expensive hard to find lenses that I wanted. Wanting gives you a hit of dopamine. So nice. Not wanting takes away the dopamine. This is biochemical source of buyers remorse, once you have something, no more dopamine from wanting it. You have to move on to wanting something new. This will never end. Nothing you ever buy will satisfy you. It can't, no dopamine. Subjected to this cycle of wanting we become like a rat in cage, running on a wheel, around and around, chasing that hit of dopamine in an endless loop -- desire gratification dissatisfaction, desire gratification dissatisfaction. 

Once you see yourself doing this you can't unsee it. It's horrible to realize this is you. That you are a lab rat in someone else's experiment. You also start thinking more broadly about other things. I started obsessing more and more about where my attention goes and how that affects me.

In the case of the lenses I stopped reading all those sites and redirected my attention to actual photographs. I started directing my focus to technique instead of tools -- things like composition, texture, light, tone and all the other bits of craft that actually make good photos. Not only have I not bought a lens since, I've become much more satisfied with the ones I own. 

This dovetails with a lesson we learned early on in the bus -- once you realize you can live without something, get rid of it. It will never become more useful by existing in your closet. It is either useful right now or not at all (tools are the only exception to that rule). Once I realized I could live without reading about cool new camera lenses I sat down and scrutinized everything I read on a regular basis and got rid of anything that was likely to make me want stuff. 

I wanted off that wheel.

If you like to travel there's a good chance you have more D4 dopamine receptors than the average person, which makes you especially prone to wanting, which in turn makes you susceptible to advertising, which in turn, ironically, makes you less likely to be able to save up the money to travel. 


What does this have to do with traveling? Well we sat back and took stock of things, what we all wanted to do, and we decided that we wanted to stay here in San Miguel for longer than six months. Not too long after that we found a house that was just about perfect for us so we signed a year lease and we're staying here. We're staying here to slow down for a while, to work on some projects that require the kind of deeper focus that's difficult to manage on the road, to get better at Spanish, to try to move beyond a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the place we're in, and to save money, both because we can live a little cheaper and because we spend less here.

There are other reasons, the kids wanted to do somethings that are hard to do on the road, like take gymnastics and swimming lessons, and I wanted a break from crawling under the bus every other day to see what the mysterious fluid was leaking now.












[^1]: This is endlessly debated on the internet by people looking to justify which variety of travel they support. Based on what I've read at the [Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies][1], as well as Michael Sivak's work for the University of Michigan Transportation Research on the energy intensity of both driving and flying, a family of 5 driving, even in the bus, puts less carbon in the air than flying. Would it be better to do neither? Yes. As for the whole climate change debate, I managed to pick up enough of an understand of energy flow and the laws of thermodynamics back in high school to realize that billions of tons of infrared-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere is going to fuck things up as it were. The fact that Earth’s climate has changed drastically without human interference in the past should really just demonstrate how idiotic it is to tinker with a system clearly vulnerable to destabilization.

[^2]: To arrive at that figure I also threw out all our early spending on bus restoration. If you haven't been following along since the beginning, know that we went ahead and hit the road with no water tank (no plumbing at all for the first two weeks), no propane system and no solar system. Solar especially makes our actual monthly spending considerably higher for the first year, but assuming you're not remodeling on the road, you won't have these expenses so I left them out.

[1]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/