Budgeting for a Long Road Trip in an RV

Budgeting for a Long Road Trip

We began planning a road trip with our teens by making a list of must see places, drawing out our tentative road trip route on a wall map, and planning our overall travel time and road trip budget. Once we had an estimate of the full mileage for the trip, using Google Maps, we could estimate a total price for gas. There are road trip planners you can purchase, but we just used Google Maps to plan a piece of our route at a time. You can only add 10 destination max at once, so we put in a few stops at a time to get the mileage. After we had pieced it together to get accurate mileage, we created this map by using 10 stops along the way to get a screen shot of the map for our whole trip.

The kids used this Fuel Cost Calculator to estimate the total cost of gas for our road trip. Gas prices have been high in CA, so we estimated gas at $6 per gallon. You don’t need a special calculator, just divide the total number of miles by your average miles per gallon, then multiply by the current cost of fuel per gallon. For us that meant dividing our estimate of 8,000 miles by a sad 10 miles per gallon for our RV, then multiplied that by $6, cost of fuel per gallon, to equal $4800. So we budgeted $5,000 for fuel. Fuel prices are lower in most other states, but it’s better to over-budget.

We have been purchasing all the supplies we’ll need for the motorhome and including that in our travel budget totals. I included a sample Travel plan and Budget Template in my last post if you want to see it. We set aside a remaining budget for maintenance, repairs or other unforeseen supplies we might need along the way. The only thing we know we’ll need to resupply is food, but it’ll be important to have extra set aside for any unplanned maintenance. The food budget is easy because we will almost always be cooking meals in the RV and can just use our normal grocery budget. I know we’ll splurge in NY on eating out since they have many gluten free options, so that’ll come out of our activities budget.

That leaves activities and lodging. We will boondock, or dry camp, as much as possible or stay at low cost State or National Parks (my hubby gets a disability discount), but every few nights we’ll need to stay in an RV park with hookups so we can shower, do laundry, dump and fill our water tanks. We do have a shower in the RV, but it would use up most of our water tank and we’re using the space for storage.

Budget Categories:

• Gas
• Food
• Supplies/Insurance/Maintenance & Repairs
• Lodging
• Activities

Since we now have the budget set for gas, food and supplies, we’ll focus on lodging.

We’ll need to find free and low cost campgrounds when we’re not staying with family. I’ve been trying out a bunch of different sites for finding free campgrounds or BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land for free camping and low cost RV camping. I’ll share the one I like the best. We need to make reservations for campgrounds we’ll be paying for, mainly those in or near cities we’re stopping at. Then, once we know what our total lodging cost will be, the remainder of our total budget will be for all the fun things – museums and fun activities!