Why are we committed to vanlife?

We described in our previous blog where the idea to live in a van began: returning from six months backpacking, it was a way to escape the conveyor belt of debt that is the London rental market. However, if the only reason you wanted to live in a van was to save money I’m not sure you would last very long, we wouldn't have anyway.

When we first started telling people we are going to live in a van they seem confused, so we had to convince them it was a brilliant idea. We thought this sounds great on the surface “what if someone offered to pay you £1500 a month to live in a van? Would you do it?” A lot of people out there would be like “Hell yeah!”, then we say “well that’s how much we save each month not renting an apartment or paying bills etc. in London” ... It’s easy to hook people in with that concept, people understand money, but I tell you now that concept alone is probably not be enough to keep you in a van long term on the streets of London.

The reality is that it actually cost us like 5 months of said rent to buy and convert the van, so it’s literally only now in our sixth month of living in the van that we have paid off the remainder of our van costs and flights from South America. So realistically this is when we start to actually save money, six months later! So if saving money is the only reason for living in a van you would probably have given up by now.

Now, apart form the obvious money related perks, what other reasons can I give you to justify committing to living full time in a van? Well, one of the recurring pros we all hear from vanlifers is about the freedom: new views, new places, the open road etc. All the travel adventures that vanlife can facilitate, well this is true if you’re travelling vanlifers (the dream obviously), but right now we are full time city vanlifers in full time jobs and our new places and open roads are only for a few days somewhere close by in the UK. So I can’t sit here and write to you about unlimited freedom being a big reason we are committed to van life, but the small bursts of freedom it grants us are definitely one of the numerous things that keep us committed to this lifestyle. One day we will hopefully achieve longer term freedom, but even the simple possibility of a weekend by the beach outside the city is awesome. You could argue with us that we could have went to the beach anytime in our car while living in our apartment, which is true we could have… but we didn’t. The reality is at the end of a long work week, heading for a weekend on the coast felt like a lot of effort and probably would not be very relaxing or cheap. However now, wherever we go, we are home! We are relaxed and all our stuff is with us, we are able to cook, eat, sleep comfortably, change clothes: party dress, swimsuit whatever takes our fancy… there is no planning and no packing, wherever we go our whole life goes with us. That’s why it’s so much more freeing than taking a road trip in our old yellow Seat Ibiza from our London apartment.

But the truth is, no amount of saved rent or weekends at the beach will help if you can’t cope with being confronted everyday with the realities of your own consumption and be willing to live in a more conscious way. Vanlife is definitely not for everyone, in fact it’s probably for hardly anyone, but man it is 100% for us. It is hands down the best decision we ever made (after veganism). It's frigging tough and we’ve had a lot of shit happen while we’ve lived in the van so far (I’m talking about you attempted break ins, flat tyres, break downs, empty water tanks, dead electrics, slashed tyres, graffitied doors), but vanlife is worth it all as it has made us more conscious people. In a society where we spent the majority of our life subconsciously trundling through the daily grind, this confrontation with ourselves had been long overdue.

If you want to save money and explore more places, great, living in a van can help that, but if you don’t want to live more consciously then you should know it’s probably not for you. You will be confronted daily with the necessity of living a more simple conscious life, and we personally love it, but many would not.

We would love to share the main areas of our life that living in a van has made us confront:

1. Our Possessions: Stuff, clothing, toiletries, homewares etc.

2. Our Consumption: Water usage, food waste, electricity and gas consumption

3. Our Perception: Space and time, what is needed and what is wasted.

This blog would be too long though if I was to delve into all these points here, so we will write about them in more detail in other posts. For us personally, living more consciously is the most rewarding thing about vanlife, but I know not everyone is interested in that aspect, if you are please look out for our other blogs where I will talk more about how we’ve changed in these different areas.

But for now to answer the title of this blog, “Why are we committed to vanlife?” I want to leave you with a quote. This quote makes me think of us and how we used to live our life; before travelling, before veganism and before vanlife:

“Did I? Maybe I did unconsciously, but don’t make me aware of it for I can’t justify my actions!” Ramana Pemmaraju

Not being able to justify how we lived before, is enough to justify living in a van now... everything else is just a bonus!

Thanks for reading x

Philly & Keely