How Does Full-time Family Travel Work?

We realized we wanted to travel full-time as a family in the fall of 2013. Living overseas a few years back had left us with a big travel bug but no big budget to make it happen.

We were in our early thirties with two little kids, ages 5 and 8, and we wondered,

How do people with small kids make the full-time travel lifestyle work? How is it even possible?

With one quick search online, we were thrilled to discover a few other families traveling full-time by living in their campers. So, having only ever camped a handful of times, we sold our house and all of our furniture and bought a camper – an extra-large 43-foot fifth wheel camper and the heavy-duty truck it would take to haul it.

In May of2014, after traveling in the fifth wheel for just six months, we knew we had made a big mistake – we needed something much smaller so that we could travel further. So, we downsized to a 30-foot Airstream and we’ve been rolling around the country ever since.

As of this writing, we’ve traveled full-time as a family for nearly 6 years, visited 48 of the United States, and pulled our tiny rolling home over 45,000 miles. And every time we ask ourselves if it might be time to settle down, we have to admit that our travel bug hasn’t gotten any smaller just yet.

When people hear our story for the first time, they often ask us a whole host of questions:

How do you live and work and homeschool in such a small space 12 months out of the year?
Where do you all sleep?
How do you have any sort of privacy?
How much does it cost?
What about your kids’ education?

And our answers are pretty much always the same.

We really would rather be outdoors than in. That means we love having a small space indoors so that we can enjoy all sorts of outdoor spaces wherever we roam.

While that certainly isn’t true for all families, it’s just the way we’ve always been.

We love hanging out pretty close to each other, so that helps too.

When we had a 2,500 square-foot house, you would often find all four of us hanging out in the same 200 square-foot space, so it’s not hard to do that now that 200 square-feet is all we have.

That doesn’t make our family perfect or better than families who love to hang out in their individual spaces. It’s just the way we roll, so living in a small space just works for us.

We all have our own individual spaces to sleep – the kids on two single beds and my hubby and me on a queen.

While it’s not the bigger beds we had in our regular house, it’s pretty comfy. And 9 times out of 10 we feel like we’re pretty spoiled.

We have to get creative when it comes to privacy with curtains, doors, and white noise machines.

I also do most of my web conferences and recordings in the truck when I need complete silence. But we make it work, and we’re always looking for new solutions.

When it comes to cost, we’ve found that traveling full-time can cost anywhere from$20,000/year to $100,000/year or more, but for us, our expenses come in at much less than they were in our suburban lifestyle.

We aren’t extremely frugal, we splurge fairly often, and we have loans just like most Americans, but by foregoing the cost of a large home, multiple cars, fancy tuitions, lawn care, etc., we find it pretty easy to keep our monthly expenses within a reasonable range and invest in our travels. (For more about finding the money to travel more, visit “How Much Money Does It Take to Chase Big Family Dreams?” right here.)

And we’re huge fans of homeschooling, so that part is a lot of fun for us.

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That being said, I like to be honest with families considering full-time travel – It can be a lot of fun, but it’s definitely not one big family vacation.

There’s lots of work and homeschool and life that happens in that 200 square-feet each day, and sometimes we can’t go outside. Sometimes it gets too loud. Sometimes it feels too small. Sometimes we all need a break from each other just like every other family.

In the end, it works for us because we realize that chasing adventure by traveling together is our thing.

Do we want every family to be like us? No way.

We think every family has to find their own sweet zone. We just like sharing about ours because it took us a while to find it and it wasn’t easy to get there. So if we can help other families who want to try it out, we definitely want to do the work to make that happen.

If traveling only once a year or always sticking close to home or never traveling at all works for your family, I’m 100% your cheerleader, and you’ll find loads of other ways to connect with fun family activities in my writing.

But if you’re struggling like we were or looking for your family’s thing and considering the possibility that it could be related to travel, we would love to hear from you.