Laura and Sasha Jevtich: Full-Timing in a Truck Camper

Laura Jevtich and their SnowRiver 8' 10" home

Sasha Jevtich and his new Suzuki motorcycle

Sasha admires his bovine neighbors

Laura and Sasha were the subjects of our second interview ever on February 15th, 2007, "Go Full-Time With Laura and Sasha".  At the time, they were just getting ready to launch their full-time lifestyle and, like us, faced many challenges.  Now fifteen months later, Truck Camper Magazine has run 199 truck camping stories and Laura and Sasha have got the full-time thing down.  We've come a long way.

Laura and Sasha presented the sum of their full-time lifestyle experiences last month during a well attended seminar at the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Truck Camper Rally.  We attended the seminar and asked Laura and Sasha if we could share their findings with you.  So without further ado, here's what one couple has learned from living full-time for over a year in a truck camper.

TCM: Why did you choose to live full-time in a truck camper?

Sasha: Because we already owned it and figured we could make it work. We talked it over a long time and, luckily for us, both have the same mutual desires for the future. I would compare it to living on a boat.

Laura: We are doing this because we did not want to be in a stick and brick home any longer. We felt stifled by the rules of our Home Owners Association (HOA) and felt we had too much stuff. We were couch potatoes and slowly killing ourselves with suburbia living. We read “Your Money or Your Life”, a book about transforming your ideas about money and how most people believe they have to work until they are sixty-five to “make a living”.  This book showed us how we were actually, “making a dying”.  We formulated a plan, sold our house and all the extraneous stuff, and moved into our truck camper.

TCM: So it was the book, “Your Money or Your Life” that compelled you to go full-time?

Laura: We also went on a six-week vacation back in the Fall of 2006. It was a life-altering experience. We fell in love with the traveling and living in a truck camper. Granted, we were on vacation, but we took careful notes of our expenses, boondocked, stayed in campgrounds, and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Once we got back, we started making plans to sell the house and everything in it. Because truck campers are small, we had to decide what should go and what we could use.

Sasha: In addition to the book, I would also add that at the end of our six-week trip, we did not want to go home! We strung it out to the last possible minute. We both knew at that time that we needed to ditch the house and the "stuff" in it. We were pretty lucky on the timing too. Had we waited like some in our family wanted, we might not have been able to work it out like we did. The value of homes in our old neighborhood has dropped $50 to $100K since the spring of 2007.

TCM: How did you go about selling all of your stuff?

Laura: For part of it we used Amazon.com.  Of course you probably know about buying stuff on Amazon, but you can also sell on Amazon. You can sell your books, CDs, DVDs, and they pay you for postage. We sold hundreds of books, CDs and DVDs when we were getting rid of stuff. You pay a small fee per item sold.

We also used EBay.com and Craigslist.com. We used EBay for selling knick-knacks and almost anything else that you can ship.  Craigslist is good for items that need to be picked up, like furniture.

For anyone who wants to pare down like we did, I would recommend checking out donating versus selling. We gave away lots of books, CDs and DVDs that we could not sell to libraries and received write-offs of about $1.50 to $5 per item.  We might not have made that much if we had sold them.

TCM: Why did you choose a truck camper for your full-time rig?

Laura: Well, it was a pretty easy choice. We had the truck camper while we were still in the stick and brick home. Our thinking had been that the truck camper would be our “vacation home”.  But when we started getting into our ATVs and dirt bikes, we needed more space.  So we had to get a trailer and the trailer became our garage.  The camper was rated highly for all seasons and it became our house.

TCM: How did you handle your finances?

Laura: We sold the house and everything in it and put the money into laddered CDs.  Since I was volunteering for the National Park Service since January, I was able to get into the Department of Interior Credit Union. If you can find a credit union to belong to, do it!  They have the best rates. I also belong to the Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed), by making a donation to the Military Families. Both of these Credit Unions had excellent CD rates. PenFed CU was fabulous in the sense that I did not have to even go to the bank; I was able to do everything online. I could transfer money in, open accounts and get CDs. With the DOI CU, I had to go into the bank, but it was in Reston, close by, so that was not a problem.  We also got an account with ING Direct, an online banking account.

TCM: Do you pay all of your bills online?

Laura: Yes, all of our bills are paid online. We have found it to be completely safe, and we have been doing this since 1993 (well Sasha has, I started when I met him in 1995).  We set up companies that we were to pay, dates when they were to be paid and transferred money from the money market account to the checking account.   We are able to transfer money between all of the banks via interagency transfers, which do not incur fees. I could call the DOI FCU to set up a CD rather than go in, but the other banks, I just did it online.

TCM: Have you found new ways to save money?

Laura: Yes.  We use a pay as you go cell phone from Net10 Phones.  You can get them at Target or Wal-Mart for $30. You get a phone and 300 minutes to be used within two months. You can add minutes. There is no contract. That is why we got them. And you always pay ten cents per minute.

I previously had Cingular/AT&T for my business. I paid $199 for the phone and $70 for 550 minutes a month. My family was all on Verizon, so I did not get the person-to-person free calling.  Plus - if you decided to get a new phone with a contract service, you had to get a new service contract for another two years. I cannot think of any other electronic device where you have to be in a service for two years. Even a house rental is only for a year!  We were not sure if the cell phone would work in Prince William Forest Park, so we did not want to pay for something that we were not going to use.

Sasha: The most obvious is that we have no housing expenses, other than propane, which lasts us a long time. With Laura work-camping for our spot, she also has no commuting expenses. This allows us to save the bulk of my salary and will ultimately allow us to retire earlier than we otherwise might. Moving to Winchester, my one-way commute is now sixty-five miles. I deal with that in a positive manner by riding my motorcycle whenever possible. It gets great gas mileage and I come in with a smile on my face from the ride. It's so much better than driving a "cage". As a bonus, riding 130 miles a day is somewhat physically demanding, so I get some exercise as well. This is a major consideration for a desk jockey like myself who sits in a chair all day looking at computer monitors.

TCM: How do you track your expenses?

Laura: As I said earlier, we are firm believers in the book called, “Your Money or Your Life”. The authors believed that most people were “making a dying” rather than “making a living”. Your wage is calculated not only in monetary amounts but also in time. Using easy calculations, you find out your true hourly wage and can figure out your life energy for everything you spend money on.  From there you can figure out if you want to spend your life energy on whatever, do you believe you will be spending that same amount in the future, and is it part of your life’s purpose.

We figured out our true hourly wage, then looked at our mortgage. We did not want to spend our life energy each month paying for a mortgage and decided it was not part of our life’s purpose and so it was gone.

Now we calculate every penny in and out. For those who are interested in full-timing expenses, you can check out our website on the home page is a link for expenses. Last year we did it by quarter, this year is by month.

Obviously some expenses go down when you are full-timing.  We do not have to worry about rising oil prices in regards to heat, but we do have to deal with propane.  Electricity prices can be less unless you do not follow the sun.  We plan on eventually being in the south or desert in the winter and in the north or in the mountains during the summer. Otherwise, you have to plan on some campgrounds and paying for electricity.

For most campgrounds, the site, water, electricity, and sewer are all part of the price. Because I volunteered at NPS for thirty-two hours a week, we received all of the above for free.  Otherwise, you can expect to pay from $10 to $90 per site.  Water and Sewer prices are less than a stick and brick home.  And you usually do not buy knick-knacks as there is no room!

TCM: How are you dealing with health insurance?

Laura: If you are retired at 65, you have health insurance with Medicaid/Medicare. But that is a distant future for us, so we went online to eInsurance.com and put in our ages, non-smokers, and zip code. From there, you get a list of different carriers. I went with a high-deductible plan so that I pay only $135 per month. Once I meet the deductible of $1,250, then it pays for me at 80%. We usually figure out a certain amount to go into the Health Savings Plan that is right now taken out of Sasha’s pay check. We will ultimately have to pay for that.

TCM: Tell us about your truck, camper, and toys.

Laura: We have a Ford F-350 crew cab long bed with 19.5 Rickson wheels, air bags, Rancho 9000 adjustable shocks.  We sold the tail gate because we didn’t need it.  The camper is an all-season 8’ 10” SnowRiver with dual pane windows, wet bath, and 100 watt solar panel.  The trailer is a fourteen-foot ProLite.  We keep our extra clothes, food, tools, and other stuff in there.  For toys we have a Suzuki VStorm 1000 motorcycle that Sasha uses to commute to work.  It gets about forty-two to forty-five miles to the gallon.  We also have a Saturn Ion which we will have until I am comfortable riding on the back of the motorcycle.  I have an ATV and Sasha has a dirt bike that we keep in the trailer.

TCM: What do you do for entertainment?

Laura: Reading is a big part of our lives.  Being part of a local library community, we get access to the books and magazines, audio books and DVDs and downloadable books.  I have on the right side of the website, most if not all of the books we have read in the past year, each showing during the month we read them. I decided to keep track so that we knew which books we had read in a series.

Sasha reads the Newspaper (Washington Post) online instead of getting the paper format. Less garbage for us and certain articles you can get and save for later.  I read three forums on a daily basis, plus two others at least weekly. Sasha goes to two daily and has Google Desktop to get the news on the side of his screen.

We do not have a TV in the camper, partly because we associate a TV with the suburban couch potato lifestyle that we had before and partly because there really is no room.  We use our laptop like a TV with a Sprint air card.  We watch streaming TV shows on the internet. They are usually on CBS.com, Fox.com, ABC.com, NBC.com, and YouTube.com.  The shows are usually online the day after the show airs and stays on for at least two weeks. They have fewer commercials than broadcast shows.

TCM: What’s the plan for the future?

Laura: Our plan has several parts.  We have figured that it will take approximately three to five years to save enough money so that Sasha can retire from the audio-video industry. When that happens, I will work for the National Park Service on a seasonal status, working six months and then traveling for six months.  I have already received offers from the National Park Service, so it is very likely that I could get a job with them. Once that has happened, we will get a bigger rig so that we no longer have to have both a trailer and a camper.

TCM: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’d like to include with your story?

Laura: One of the best parts about full-timing is being in areas for longer periods of time and really checking them out.  You can go to the grocery stores, the restaurants, hike the trails, and attend the local festivals.  You get a feel of what the area is like. You can only do so much on the computer and read about it. You have to go out and experience it. That is the best part of full-timing; the experience of it all.

For more information about the truck camper manufacturers and gear companies, please visit our Buyers Guide.  For more information about Laura and Sasha and their full-time lifestyle, visit their website at www.laura-and-sasha.com.