becoming a vagabond

We are planning to sell our house and travel for at least two years.
We want to go everywhere and see everything, but we don't make a lot of firm plans in advance.
We will need some kind of legal address, I guess, for SS, voter registration, vehicle registration etc.
How is the easiest and safest way to do this? Which state/city etc. would be best.
Anyone have any ideas?

We won't be homeless, just taking our home (TM 2730SL) with us.

Dick Thomas

Do you have any kids or close relatives? Talk to them and see if you can make that you permanent address for the time you are on the road. If you can arrange that, then have al your legal stuff sent to them and go from there. Other than that, I have no idea how to go about it.

Hi... There are many, many full time RVer's today who sell their homes and live in their RV's. I think most of them, if not all of them, have a home base, but I'm not sure how they go about it. Maybe it's as simple as a relative's address, or a post office box address. You could get lots of information by going on the web to do a research on "Full Time RVing." There are even forums for full timers.

There are also some books on full time RVing...Borders, Amazon, and Camping World all have them. Living Aboard your RV by Janet & Gordon Groene is one...and the two we have give answers to your questions.

You can join Escapees and use their Livington, TX address.

Is there no RV question that can't be answered on this site? What a great site to belong to!

Originally Posted by Dick Thomas

We are planning to sell our house and travel for at least two years.
We want to go everywhere and see everything, but we don't make a lot of firm plans in advance.
We will need some kind of legal address, I guess, for SS, voter registration, vehicle registration etc.
How is the easiest and safest way to do this? Which state/city etc. would be best.
Anyone have any ideas?

We won't be homeless, just taking our home (TM 2730SL) with us.

Dick Thomas

Banking is the easiest to solve... continue with your current bank and set up pension/SS checks to be automatically deposited to your account. Also, take with you website URLs for your credit cards, etc., so you can check balances on-line and send in payments without getting or waiting for statements. Mail forwarding of bills may be delayed 30 days, which will make most of your payments late.

The other issues, such as residence and mail forwarding may best be handled by ESCAPEES from all I've read on other bulletin boards.

Happy travels.

[Bill]

One other minor thought. Some states charge a lot less for vehicle registrations than others. And some states charge A LOT less for new vehicle excise/sales tax. Since you already own your vehicles, and they are a few years old, this is probably not a direct concern to you. But if there is a chance that you will be buying a new tow vehicle or trailer while you are gone, choose one of the "good" states. I'm not familiar with the ESCAPEES, but I think Texas is one of the "good" states, so that may be the way to go.

I know that Arizona is NOT one of the good states. When I first registered my brand-new TM in the fall of 2001, the cost bowled me over. The excise tax, plus some kind of sales tax (since we didn't pay sales tax in the state where we bought it) came to well over $1000! Anyway, the clerk went on to say, with a laugh, that they have a fair number of heart attacks there at the DMV when some guy from the midwest brings in his shiny new $1 million dollar motor home. The initial fee to get Arizona plates is over $50K. Yeah, right. Ha Ha! Funny.

Bill

Check on credit unions, too. Our credit union has all of the services Leon mentioned for FREE. Also the printed checks are free after age 62. Online banking and bill payer are great. We were in Hawaii for a month (all of October) last year and didn't have to worry about bills coming due or if our check was in the mail box. Our pensions and IRA withdrawals are all direct deposit. Bill makes a good point, too. Don't register your vehicles in Washington. We voted several years ago to make the fee $30 on everything, but the legislature voided the referendum (How can they do that? Ought to fire them all!) and now the RV fee is going way up again. Talked to a guy with a $150,000 rig and he said his fee was $2600 and he was going to try and establish residence in New Mexico where the free was something like $25. Cars and small trailers are still fairly reasonable here - less than $40 in most cases. I wish I could move to New Mexico! I hate Winter and snow!

[RockyMtnRay]

Originally Posted by Texas_Camper

I have the "home banking" feature with my credit union. My retirement and SS pensions are auto deposit. My insurance, utility, phone and car payments are auto pay. I use credit cards and these are paid on line when I schedule the payments. I monitor bank and cc transactions daily, or at least weekly when on the road. I use very little cash and write very few checks. I can transfer money from savings to checking and back again, buy cd's and have them deposited to checking or savings when they mature. All on-line...
Direct deposit, auto pay and home banking via computer has really been good for us....and we don't even have a lap top. We use the campgrounds puters or the ones in the public library when on the road as needed....

I strongly recommend that public computers never be used for banking or any other sensitive personal information. The problem of using public computers, any public computers, for sensitive financial information is the ease with which that information can be captured by a device known as a keylogger. These devices, which look just like an ordinary keyboard cable plug, can easily and almost invisibly be inserted between the keyboard and the computer...and will capture every single keystroke entered into that computer over the period of hours or even days. Sure, these devices eventually have to be temporarily removed to "harvest" the captured data but this is extremely easy, even at a library computer. And it doesn't take very sophisticated harvesting software to correlate the keystrokes to access a banking website with the inevitable entry shortly thereafter of a username/account# and password. Once a thief has that combo...bank, username or account#, password...they can do almost anything to your account including totally drain it into a overseas bank.

Public computers are fine for surfing the web to look for stuff. But anything else...even retrieving email...is dangerous because it's so easy to capture an email login and then hijack that account for whatever purposes.

Laptop computers, especially used laptop computers, are almost dirt cheap anymore. As long as you make sure you use a secure connection between the computer and website (and keep them free of spyware/trojans/viruses), they're very safe to use for away from home banking.