A Foreward
How it all began:
It’s difficult to isolate the specific moment of time to use as the starting point of this story. Deciding to live in a bus was never our intended goal. Until a few months ago, the thought had never crossed our minds. Yet buying a bus was not a spontaneous decision either, nor was it our first consideration. Instead, the idea of moving into a bus has developed into the solution to a few problems and the means by which we will achieve our longer term goals.
So back to determining the proper starting point for this tale. Perhaps we should start with a little history. We were happily married in March of 2013. Our courtship and marriage is an adorable story which we will not go into here, instead we will just focus on the living arrangement part and how it led to us buying a bus. First, can I just say apartment leases suck? The apartment complex won’t provide a 2 or 3 year lease, because then they wouldn’t be able to raise the rent each year. And the month to month costs are extravagant. Anyone who can afford the month to month costs of an apartment could just as easily afford to buy a house. So the renter is stuck with these one year blocks, which are too short to do any long term planning, but too long to accommodate real life, marriage, job opportunities, or finding a cheaper apartment.
Sorry about my rant on apartments, but it is important to the story. As hard as it is to live in an apartment, it has actually become even harder to get out. But back to our history. Things were going well with work and school, but we were both having some pretty severe health issues which kept getting worse and worse. The most frustrating thing was that there were no obvious causes. We ate very healthy, we prepared almost all of our food from scratch, we went to lots of doctors, but it took a long time for us to finally figure out what was wrong.
John caught a break first after multiple sleep studies. He didn’t have sleep apnea, which would have been much easier to detect, instead he had a very high RERA count. The short version is, he was jumping between sleep stages too often and never getting enough deep sleep or REM sleep. So even after a full night’s sleep, he was clinically exhausted throughout the day. Getting a C-PAP machine made a world of difference!
It took us a lot longer to track down what was making Alexis sick. Again, I will skip the long explanation for now and just say that she had a whole bunch of food allergies. (technically they are not ‘allergies’, because they do not involve autoimmune responses to proteins, but people understand the idea of food allergies much better so we will just stick with that term for now) The important part is that about 3 months ago, after we removed those ingredients from our cooking, Alexis’s health vastly improved. She no longer had shooting pains, joint pains, migraines, insomnia, and a long list of other symptoms. She was able to double her daily calorie intake and still lose 25 lbs in the first two months.
So really – Alexis getting healthier is the true beginning to the bus story because up until that point, we hadn’t done much long term planning. Her full recovery will still take a while, but the improvement so far has been nothing short of miraculous. We started looking into our future together and thinking about when we wanted to start a family. We both believe it’s impossible for anyone to be fully prepared to raise a child, but there are things that we could do to be better prepared.
After a lot of planning and discussing, we realized the biggest thing obstructing with our future was debt. Most of our debt was current medical bills and previous medical expenses. (MRIs are expensive!) John has a great job and we were slowly paying off this debt but it is hard. Alexis is starting to get healthy enough to work again, but it’s a trade-off. The more she rests the faster she gets healthy. Adding a stressful job on top of full-time culinary school brings in more money, but slows down the healing process a bit.
The important part of all of this was that we realized that we needed to pay off all our debt before we could have a child. We have struggled with high interest rate debt our entire marriage and although we are slowly advancing, it has been a huge struggle. We had already started reading some financial books and we already had a basic budget outline, Alexis was especially good at being thrifty and good with money. We revisited our budget and found there were a few small things we could cut, but the most meaningful cuts would have to be rent and medical insurance.
We are stuck with Obamacare and it has truly been an awful experience. I won’t rant too much here, but I will say that we were not able to keep our doctors, we had the hardest time finding physicians that would take our insurance, it costs $617/month, and it has just been really confusing and horrible. We recently got a letter saying that our plan is not being offered next year. In the letter they suggested a comparable plan. The deductible is 4 times higher, the out-of-pocket maximum is 4 times higher, the copays are double, and the coverage is 20% less than before. And to top it all off, the monthly premium costs more. So to summarize, our Obamacare plan sucked and apparently is was too generous. So now they want us to get less and pay more. We don’t know what we will do next year, either be penalized for not buying insurance or try to find some bare bones catastrophic plan and hope we never get sick.
We can’t do anything about that right now, but we can do something about rent. After one and half years, we finished our lease in a fairly nice, but overpriced, apartment in Frisco, and we moved to the cheapest apartment we could find in Collin County. We needed to stay in-county for school, but it really didn’t matter much, apartment rent in the entire metroplex has consistently risen since 2008. Again, I won’t go into too much detail, but I highly recommend reading this article: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2015/08/11/death-of-starter-homes/. There are many other great articles as well, but they all basically say:
- Mortgages are harder to get
- More government ownership of mortgages
- Less competition between lenders
- More government regulations
- Less profitable for banks
- Fewer homes are being built
- The homes that are being built are either:
- Large homes
- Luxury homes
- Government subsidized housing
- Investors are buying up foreclosures, flipping them, and renting them out instead of selling them
- Because young couples can’t buy a starter home, they are staying in apartments longer
- Because demand for rent is so high, prices are increasing each year while the quality decreases.
- Lots of new apartments are being built because they are so profitable, but not fast enough to surpass demand.
- Rents are expected to continue to rise steadily for the many years to come
We call this whole situation the rent trap. When you sign up for a lease, you have to give the apartment company proof of income. So they always know how money you have and how much you can afford to save. Because demand for apartments are so high, they can easily raise rent and eat up all the money we were trying to save. They know we can’t buy a house, and renting a house just transfers the problem, it doesn’t solve it. We looked into buying a mobile home or an RV, but they were basically just as expensive as a house. We got really excited about Tiny Homes, but soon learned that there are still a lot of blocking factors, like HOA’s, minimum house size requirements, property taxes, and city regulations.
As we were researching tiny homes and RV’s we came across skoolies. These were school busses that were converted into tiny homes. Sometimes they were made into Recreational Vehicles just for weekends or vacations, but more often skoolies were designed and built to be lived in year round. Some were made to be fully off grid while others were designed to reside at an RV or Mobile Home Park. We quickly fell in love with the bus idea for several reasons:
- School buses are built like tanks. You can stack school buses on top of each other. They can handle roll-over accidents and their engines are easy to maintain
- Once the seats are removed, they are blank slates, you can design the interior however you like.
- They are relatively cheap. School districts buy them in bulk and replace them regularity way before they break down. Most US school busses end up in South America where they are used for decades.
We will be able to drop our rent costs by $600/month. Shrinking our living space by 2/3rds will lower our electric bill considerably. Simplifying our lives and only buying the bare necessities will also help up save money more quickly. We estimate that within two and half years we will be able to pay off all our debts as well as the cost of the bus and bus renovation.
Our plan is to simplify our lives and start to live the bus lifestyle now before we actually move in. We won’t have a lot of room on the bus, so we have to decide what is worth keeping and what we can do without. We have to give up most of our hobbies and find new homes for all of our pets (except our dogs of course, they have become more like furry little members of the family, much more than just pets). The idea of moving into a bus has made us plan our future a lot carefully and more specifically. How long will live in the bus? Should we leave room for a crib in the design? For Christmas, should we drive the bus to Utah instead of fly? Should we move closer to work to reduce the commute or should we stay close to our friends in Plano? How many pairs of shoes do we really need?
We have titled our blog “The Big Bus Theory” partially because it’s a cute scientific pun, but also because the bus has become more than just a place for us to live; it’s a lifestyle, it’s our future, it is the means by which we will achieve our long term goals.
We want to say a special thank you to Steve and Carolyn for loaning us the money to get started. Without their help, we would be stuck in the rent trap forever.
The Big Bus Theory 