Can You Really Make Money Living in a Motorhome Full-Time?
It was 4am. Raining. I was standing outside in my boxers, in a forest, swapping gas bottles because we’d run out in the middle of the night. Cold, damp, and very awake.
Nobody puts that bit in the highlight reel. But this is the reality, and I chose this life.
We moved into our motorhome in the summer of 2025. Kathy and I, two dogs, two laptops (now four), 3 mobile network contracts (O2, EE and Vodafone) and a dream. We both kept our jobs. That decision, more than any other, is why this works.
The honest answer to the money question
Yes. You can make money living in a motorhome full-time. But the question most people are actually asking is: can I quit my job, buy a van, and figure it out on the road?
That answer is no. Or at least, not yet. Not unless you’ve already built something that pays you while you sleep.
We were fortunate. Kathy has worked for the state in some shape or form as a medical professional for nearly 25 years, she’s now writing clinical reports using her experience as nurse. When COVID hit, she transitioned to working from home and never went back to an office. My path was a bit more winding. I’d left my previous company because office life was destroying me, genuinely soul-destroying for someone with ADHD and a creative streak, and went off to qualify as a bus driver. While I was doing that during COVID, my old company got bought out by an American investment group, the office closed permanently, and everyone shifted to remote working. They offered me a role back. The wages were nearly double what I was earning driving buses, so of course I said yes.
We had stable, remote incomes before we ever looked at a living in a motorhome. That’s not luck we’re dismissing, that’s the foundation everything else is built on.
What it actually costs per month
People always underestimate the running costs. Here’s what our motorhome life actually costs, broken down honestly:
- Motorhome loan repayments: £450
- Insurance: £35
- Annual servicing: roughly £350 spread across the year
- Annual MOT: £36
- Fuel: around £30 most weeks, but Glasgow trips (four or five a year, two weeks at a time) push that to £100 there and £50 back
- Gas bottles in winter: £26 per week
- Gas bottles in summer: £26 every three weeks
- Ongoing van improvements and upgrades: roughly £1,000 a year
- Starlink: £100 per month, non-negotiable when you’re working remotely from remote locations
- Mobile phones: £40 each for me and Kathy
- Online business costs (hosting, subscriptions, tools): £150
- Food: £60 per week
- Drink: £25 per week (that includes Kathy’s Coke Zero addiction)
- Dining out: £100 per week (yeah, I know, lavish, but that includes take-aways sometimes)
That last one raises eyebrows. But getting out of the tin box regularly is genuinely good for your mental health. It’s not a luxury, it’s maintenance.
We also still have a mortgage. The kids live there, the most trustworthy tenants we’ve ever had, and we treat it as an investment rather than a cost of van life.
We don’t use campsites. Solar panels and a DJI Power 2000 handle our electricity needs. Laundry gets done when we visit the kids, we own the machines, so that’s free. It works out.
I put together the full kit list. Everything running in the van right now, honest costs, what I’d change. It comes as a short email series, three emails over a week. Drop your email below if you want it.
The income side – and being honest about it
The day jobs pay for everything. Everything else is being built for the future.
That’s not a comfortable thing to admit when you’re running a digital nomad brand, but it’s the truth. The side hustles – stock photography, print-on-demand merch, affiliate marketing, the YouTube channel, this website – they’re real, they’re growing, and they’re nowhere near replacing a salary yet.
The goal is to get to 50% of my current day job income from recurring revenue streams. Stock imagery, merch, affiliates, sponsorships, media deals, YouTube monetisation. It’s a long way off. But the work going in now is the work that compounds later.
The day job going through company-wide restructuring over the last two years has sharpened that focus considerably. I’ve survived each round of cuts, but it’s a reminder that relying on a single income – even a good one – is its own kind of risk. The motorhome loan clears next year. That alone will take a significant weight off.
The thing nobody expects: free electricity feels incredible
Going from 100 watts of solar to 400 watts last year turned me into what Kathy calls a wattage nerd. I’ve never seen more than 230 watts actually come in, solar panels are never 100% efficient, but on a clear day, watching the van power itself from the sky feels like winning something.
It genuinely lifts your mood. Sunshine electric is free electric, and free electric means one less thing to think about.
Starlink is the opposite of free, at £100 a month, but we’ve stopped thinking of it as a cost. It’s a utility, like water. Without it, we couldn’t work from half the places we park up. In remote parts of Ireland and Northern Ireland, it’s the difference between being connected and being invisible.
Living in Northern Ireland and Ireland specifically
This matters more than most guides acknowledge.
Northern Ireland is cheaper across the board. There’s no way around that comparison, costs are genuinely lower than the mainland in almost every category.
The accessibility of remote areas here is also underrated. Being in a motorhome rather than a caravan opens up a lot of spots that would otherwise be impractical. Starlink means the remoteness stops being a problem for work. We can park somewhere genuinely quiet, genuinely beautiful, and still send emails and join video calls.
The downside is waste management. Europe takes motorhome infrastructure seriously, black waste disposal points, water refill stations, proper facilities. The UK and Ireland are years behind (don’t get me started on the bins in here in Ireland). You have to plan your route around where you can empty and refill, which is an extra layer of logistics that wears on you after a while. The travelling community has, unfairly, soured a lot of goodwill toward anyone living in a vehicle, and that attitude shows up in the lack of investment in proper facilities.
What Kathy thinks about all of this
She worries. She also runs the finances with one eye permanently open.
The big purchases get discussed, the DJI Power 2000 was a proper conversation, justified because the old Jackery was losing capacity and we need reliable power for work. The smaller purchases sometimes meet the Amazon delivery driver outside before they reach the front door. This is a well-established system and we don’t need to discuss it further.
What she’s good at is recognising when something I’ve installed or bought has solved a problem she didn’t know we had. The IR passive lighting so we can see the dogs in the dark when we’re navigating to the bathroom at 3am. The extra solar panels. She didn’t spot the gap. But she appreciates the gap being filled.
The minimum you need to make this work
£1,500 to £1,800 a month, reliably, before you even think about it. And that’s outside the cost of the van itself.
Get the van you can afford and the one you can live with, not just live in. We needed space for two dogs. We needed a working setup for two people with remote jobs. Luxury can come later. Start with liveable.
And do not quit your job to figure out the money later. Ease into it. Winter is long, cold, and damp. Running out of gas at 4am in the rain while standing in a forest in your boxers is a real thing that happens. You want a salary behind you when it does.
Build the recurring revenue while you still have the security. Do the hard work now. The freedom comes after.
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