Hi! I’m your friendly van gal, living… perhaps on your street!
I started this site after living in a van full-time in the suburbs for the last two years (what is known as stealth camping) while working and studying part-time.
I live and stealth camp in Australia and so that is the focus of this site, but hopefully some of my experiences will be helpful for people living elsewhere too – please sing out in the comments if this is true for you!
I choose to stay anonymous here both for work purposes and also to help keen myself able to continue stealth camping relatively unrecognisably – but will share as much as I can about my day to day life living in a van!
Why Van Life?
Alternate living of some kind has been a dream of mine for almost as long as I can remember. Tiny homes, living on a boat, travelling full time, building your own home from scratch, intentional communities – these ideas have always appealed to me. So has the idea of not working full-time all my life.
Why not travelling?
I’m in my late 20s, I like the city I live in and the job I have. While full time travel is one of my dreams, I’m also pretty passionate about my work. I work in healthcare, which is great since when I travel, I can probably find short-term work in the field pretty easily wherever I go! However, leading into vanlife, I had also just started my dream job at the time, and didn’t want to give that up.
Two big things that had always appealed to me about an alternate home was the ability to avoid the weight of a big debt like a mortgage, AND to have a truly custom home that I loved. If I ever moved between cities, I wanted to be able to take it with me. I still didn’t want to buy a house, but I didn’t want to keep giving my money away to rent for a home that I couldn’t make truly mine. I wanted to have more options for my money. Less reliance on a steady income, AND the flexibility to do more of what I wanted with the money I did earn. That way, if I did decide to travel full-time in Europe for a while, as I hope to eventually do, I would have been able to save up a reasonable amount of money for this without sacrificing what I wanted in a home.
I also wanted to have these things – a custom home without debt – in a way that was sustainable for me. I would love to travel full-time for up to maybe a year at a time. But I don’t picture myself travelling forever, picking up work when I choose or need to. I love meeting people who do that, and I am so inspired by them, but I need a bit more stability. I want a mix of adventure and freedom and the ability to be close to friends and family and do longer-term work that I am passionate about, even if what this is changes.
Changing Plans
After starting vanlife, I eventually realised that I wanted to do something different than my “dream job.” I wanted to learn new skills in a new area, and found a course I really wanted to study. I have struggled with my mental health on and off over the years, and I didn’t want to take on too much at once. I already worked part-time to allow myself some extra days of freedom during the week, to hike without other people around or do whatever I wanted – I felt a little less trapped by not working full time hours, and shift work meant that I could make up the money by choosing to work shifts with penalty rates. But introducing study into the mix would take away this extra time that was so precious to me. Living in the van when I decided to go back to uni allowed me to cut back on work so that I had time to study as well, without having to worry about managing regular costs like rent or bills. This has been invaluable to me and I don’t think I could have managed it otherwise.
Is it worth it?
Living in a van has been incredible for allowing me a sense of freedom while still doing a lot of what other people are doing. I’m able to study, keep saving money, and still spend some time outdoors and more mindfully. Full-time vanlife without travelling is definitely something that gets raised eyebrows from some friends, family and strangers, and enthusiastic interest from others (one friend has also joined the fulltime stealth camping crew). Is it for everyone? Is it forever? Probably not, but it works for me, for now, and I’m so grateful!
Full Disclosure: I do link to items across my site that I have purchased and found useful for stealth camping in a van. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.