Even though it is hard to find anything under 80 dollars a night, staying in hotels and KOAs is actually not that expensive for an IT professional with no rent—especially in 2023 when the average rent for a single bedroom is 1700/month or 56/day. Most single IT professionals would pay closer to 2000/month or 66/day to rent an apartment in a decent area. So living from a Hotel (average 150/day or 4500/month) or KOA (average 24-80/day or 720-2400/month) isn’t really as expensive as it seems. Here’s why.
The decision to live on the road automatically includes the increased cost of gasoline and car maintenance but also includes many unseen expenses such as electricity, clean water to bath and drink, sanitation, and lost time that could be used working instead maintaining a living space. These costs show up in the difference between average rent per month (2000) and average cost to live in a hotel that provides all these amenities (4500). Assuming that half of that difference is hotel profit that leaves roughly 2000 a month in hidden costs that any renter would have but just not be immediately aware of.
100/day
Hotels and KOAs don’t require any time to “setup” and maintain. Hotels (worth staying in) even do all the towel and bedding laundy for you. It is very hard to calculate the value of this time lost, but let’s use the low-end of an IT person’s salary in hourly dollars. Let’s round to 60 dollars an hour or a dollar a minute (120,000 per year). Just the cost of converting from “sleep” mode to “office” mode in my Outback would be 5 dollars a day. Add in the cost of locating and traveling to a place to shower, use the bathroom, and get groceries and eat breakfast and we are talking at least an hour a day, if we are conservatie. That’s roughly 70 dollars a day in lost time futzing with things and does not include the lost time to get into concentration mode to actually do the tough knowledge work required of an IT professional. In fact, it would be very easy to blow more than 100 dollars a day just in lost time. This is the single most important factor when comparing living out of a vehicle to living out of KOAs and hotels.
2/day
2/day
Rather than paying a monthly membership fee to a gym that I may or may not be around to use from the car you get a luxurious, daily cleaned bath, shower, and toilet. For a active athlete this is absolutely essential for recovery.
Planet Fitness is about 30 dollars a month. Let’s round that out to include gasoline cost to get to one from whereever the car might be, so 2 dollars a day.
32/day
The cost to boil my own eggs in the morning would be the cost to charge and induction burner or use the gas stove, the cost in time to set it up and clean it up (about 30 minutes), and the cost of the eggs (2 dollars for three).