A couple parks outside Moab, Utah, three hundred miles into a desert loop. One of them wakes up at dawn with chest pain. They drive to the nearest emergency room, the care is fast and kind — and then the bill comes, and their insurance, based in South Dakota, calls that hospital out of network. They've spent maybe four nights in South Dakota in their lives.
Here's the thing that catches almost everyone. When you live nowhere, the ordinary systems a house quietly ran for you don't disappear. They just become your job.
That's the real story of full-time RV living, and it's the opposite of the one you've been sold. The pitch is freedom and sunsets. The reality is that a house was doing a dozen invisible things for you the whole time — handing you an address, a place to sleep every night, a budget that mostly held still, a steady paycheck. Pull the house out from under all that and the question stops being where do I want to go. It becomes something stranger and more useful: what was my house actually doing for me, and how do I build a version that travels?
So here's what's coming. There's a stretch on choosing where you're legally "from" where you'll meet people who became South Dakotans after a single night in a Sioux Falls campground — one night, that's the whole residency requirement. There's a section built around a full-timer who's logged every dollar since 2018 on a site called RV Cost Calculator, whose first three months on the road blew past budget by sixty percent. You'll sit at a laptop at 7 a.m. Pacific the morning a Yosemite reservation window opens — and watch the whole month vanish in twenty minutes. And you'll learn about workamping, where places like the Grand Canyon Conservancy and the US Army Corps of Engineers trade you a free campsite for about twenty hours of work a week.
By the time this is done, you'll be able to choose a domicile state on purpose, build a budget that survives a blown tire, and line up an income that outlasts your savings.
The place to start is the decision that quietly governs all the others — not the road, not the view, but which rig actually fits the way you plan to move.