Thirteen Months Living in a Van While Working Full Time: What It Was Actually Like

Van life gets sold as freedom with fairy lights. Mine was a parking rotation, a gym membership that doubled as my bathroom, and getting to the office before everyone else so I could clean up before anyone saw me. I am not writing this to romanticize it or to warn you off it. I am writing it because almost nobody shows the actual routine and the actual numbers, and both surprised me.

What a normal Tuesday looked like

1. Wake up parked in a quiet neighborhood.
2. Drive straight to work.
3. Get ready in the office bathroom before anyone else arrived, which meant I was always the first one in.
4. Work the full day.
5. Hit the gym, which was less about the workout and more about the shower.
6. Dinner made in the van with what a limited kitchen allows, or eaten out, which quietly eats into whatever you think you are saving.
7. A little time on hobbies or with a friend.
8. A stop at a gas station or grocery store, because I needed a bathroom.
9. The nightly question: where do I park that looks safe tonight?

That last hour is the part I did not expect. Every single night ends with a small logistics problem you have to solve again from scratch.

What the van actually cost per month

Call it roughly $880 a month before food. The van was not free housing. It was a vehicle payment, fuel to move it every day, and a gym membership that existed mostly for the plumbing.

The worst night

One night the lack of space got to me. I drove out to a desert campsite with my dog, thinking open space would fix the closed-in feeling. Instead I sat in an abandoned parking lot getting more and more paranoid about anyone who might show up. I barely slept. It was the loneliest I felt in the whole thirteen months. The van does not just shrink your kitchen. On the bad nights it shrinks everything.

Keeping it a secret at work

A few coworkers knew. Most did not, and I worked to keep it that way. The office had a large parking lot, and my routine depended on beating everyone in so I could get presentable without questions. Looking back, the hiding was its own job. There is a real cost to spending every workday managing what people might notice.

The math: was it worth it?

I probably saved a few hundred dollars a month versus renting a cheap room. That is it. Set that against the constant logistics, the nightly parking rotation, the cooking limits, the nights that did not feel safe, and I do not think the savings alone made a difference.

Was it worth it as a savings strategy?

If you are considering a van purely as a savings strategy, run the numbers first, payment, gas, insurance, gym, eating out, and compare them against a room, not an apartment. The gap is smaller than the videos suggest.

So why do I not regret it? Because the van forced a discipline I never unlearned: knowing exactly what my housing costs each month, down to the line item. That habit is the entire reason the duplex worked later. The van did not build my savings. It built the spreadsheet reflex that eventually did.

Keep going

How the story ended: my duplex, year one, with the numbers. If you are closer to the beginning than the end, what is house hacking? A plain-English guide is where the path out started for me.

This is my own experience, not advice. If you are facing housing insecurity, HUD-certified housing counselors are free to talk to and worth more than any blog post.

Frequently asked questions

What is a savings rate?

A savings rate is defined as the share of take home income not spent over a given period, and it is the figure that determines how quickly a down payment accumulates.