Are you keen on RV-ing? While adopting this wonderful lifestyle, you’ll get to travel and live in different types of RVs or recreational vehicles.
Depending on your RV-ing period, purpose, and budget, you can choose among motorhomes, camper trailers (caravans), and pop-up campers. You can choose to self-drive or hire a driver for your travel.
Short for Recreational Vehicle, if you’re dreaming of travelling places worldwide in an RV for several weeks or months or full time, you must think about earning mobile income. While you hit the road and utilise the RV’s living quarters, you’ll certainly need to fund your new way of life.
Unfortunately, this factor often keeps innumerable potential RVers from realising their dream. They perceive the idea of making money on the road as overwhelming, thus curbing their freedom to travel indefinitely.
However, whether you’re a retiree or still working or a mere fresh graduate, it’s certainly possible to afford RVing. By doing different things, including selling your assets to earn money, you can comfortably work your expenses around. You can do either fully remote or location-based jobs. Making money while RVing will make your trips only more pleasurable.
Here are 7 ways to make money while travelling in an RV.
At A Glance
How to make money while travelling in an RV
1. Rent out or sell your house
Before you get into recreational vehicle travel, it’s essential to make a decision related to your house. If it’s your own home, what you should do with it will certainly involve plenty of thinking.
If you’re planning seasonal or short-term travel, say for 3 to 6 months, it makes sense to rent out your house, letting you retain your investment.
Make sure to hire someone for doing routine maintenance and resolving any issues that could crop up. Look up sites like Airbnb for obtaining reliable, short-term rentals or tenants.
Renting your home also works in the case of full-time RV travel. Find dependable, long-term rentals in top long-term rental sites like Zillow and Realtor.com.
Else, the other option is to sell your house and earn a chunk of money before beginning your full-time RVing life.
Although extremely final, selling lets you focus on taking pleasure in your trips instead of stressing over repairs or maintenance. Also, no more associated bills to pay. You just need to take care of a few things like making an alternate arrangement of receiving your mail.
Carefully finalizing this huge decision will enable you to make decent or even lots of money. This way, you can enjoy your RV trips without continually worrying about the trip expenditures.
2. Look for workamping opportunities
How about working at a campsite or a caravan park? Workamping, also called work camping, offers you innumerable, seasonal work opportunities. What’s more, you get to work in scenic surroundings!
Through workamping, you can stay free of cost at beautiful campgrounds such as near a beach, in the heart of a national park, or even amid rolling desert sands.
For instance, won’t you enjoy workamping at Lake District National Park? How about working while caravaning in Dungeness, UK’s only and extremely intriguing desert land? Expect other benefits as well, like laundry or meals.
Typically paid an hourly rate, workampers can find work in the office of a national forest, help clean up caravan or RV parks or cook food at campsites. You can also take up specialist activities like fishing and open-air informational programmes.
Look up the many campsite job finder websites for seeking suitable workamping opportunities.
Campground hosting at a national park makes you the first face representing the RV site. The job responsibilities include checking in arriving campers, maintaining the campground, collecting fees and monitoring the camp activities.
Won’t you like working as a tour guide, leading horse-riding trips and treks? Workamping with an added flavour of adventure! You’ll enjoy leading the swarms of people gathering for such fun-filled activities, especially during weekends.
Who wouldn’t like dressing up as a hoary Scottish monarch and leading historical tours amidst the Scottish Highlands? Such similar work camping opportunities at historical places of interest are nothing but sheer fun.
Some national parks and large RV resorts house restaurants. So, besides cooking meals at a campsite, you can also work as a cook or wait staff at such eateries. Also, if you have sound knowledge or experience in landscaping, you could work as a seasonal gardener in the sprawling grounds of large RV resorts.
3. Freelance
A fun way of making money online while you travel in an RV, digital freelancing lets you work from anywhere on the planet.
Being location independent, digital freelancing offers a vast array of work opportunities. Writing, graphic designing, social media marketing, software development, video editing – the list goes on.
Several modern technologies enable you to work with enhanced internet connectivity while RVing. So, arouse the digital nomad within you and make a decent living while enjoying your RV trips.
Create your profile on highly popular platforms such as Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer or Behance. Detail your skills, provide a URL or link to your online portfolio, share past references, and await great job offers! This way, you can convert any talent you possess into money for your travels.
Full-time RVers can launch blogs and keep updating them with their RV travel posts. Doesn’t it sound exciting to record your travel stories digitally, while sitting in your moving RV office?
So, keep entertaining your audiences with engaging content about wherever your recreational vehicle takes you. Also, don’t forget to post nice travel pictures. Building trust with your readers will help you earn decent money online.
If you have a knack for proofreading, there are countless articles and books online waiting to undergo corrections! In this growing industry of editors or proofreaders, you’ll find ample scope for editing written medical as well as legal documents.
How about doing virtual assisting from the road? You can take up this online job in addition to other freelancing work like writing. While providing this service of backup support as you travel in your RV, you can work contractually for gathering specific data required by a business for research purposes.
Alternatively, you can take up work of continuing nature like answering emails.
4. Deliver parcels or packages
When RVing, you’d have (if not detailed, then at least) a vague itinerary in mind. Also, you’ll likely have some space remaining in the RV vehicle, right? Then you can make a good amount of money by becoming a delivery person.
Many people experience difficulties while sending stuff through postal services. Why not bring a smile on somebody’s face by delivering the package as you drive to your destination?
In return, you’re also making a few bucks of course. Expect to make even more by delivering larger packages and at longer distances.
On a thoroughly professional level, you can pick up gigs on local and long-haul delivery service platforms.
There’s another fun part of delivering packages while RVing. A few international services let you buy certain products in your country but not others. Someone you know from a foreign land may desire a product but there are no delivery services to their home country. You can deliver them to the buyer, earn a bonus for the service, and get your money back from the shopping platform.
You can easily take up this fun-filled work if you’re RVing across Europe. For instance, deliver parcels from France to Switzerland, from Norway to Sweden, or even the other way around.
5. Modelling
-
Costa Mesa, California -
Kangaroo Island, Australia
While RVing to a foreign country, looking outstanding can fetch you the job of a model! This might be one of your greatest moments even if you don’t consider yourself specifically good looking or attractive back home.
The entire idea is that in a foreign land, its natives may perceive you as fascinating or exotic. For instance, if you’re a blonde and RVing in South Africa, don’t expect to walk the streets unnoticed.
Why not turn such a spotlight to good advantage? Without having to become a celebrated model worldwide, numerous small modelling jobs are enough to earn you money for your trips. Having said that, you can even earn a great deal of it if you qualify as the next highly paid fashion model.
If you’re offered a modelling job by a passer-by, you’ll have the ball rolling right away! Otherwise, pop into regional modelling firms and inquire if they need exotic-looking people like you.
Try local educational institutions as well as art workrooms to check if you could model for art and other sessions.
Look forward to modelling for clothing brands, traditional, intricate jewellery, elegant designs of footwear, and even travel accessories.
6. Do a farming job like fruit picking
How about working outdoors on a farm and picking ripened fruits as you soak up the sun?
While RV-ing in summer, a farming job can make a wonderful work opportunity if you’re really keen on connecting with the land.
While travelling in your RV, you might chance upon farmers needing help on their farmlands. Else, you can find such jobs on websites like Picking Jobs.
For fruit picking, you won’t need any specific skills or even past experience. This job involves manual labour, so besides being healthy, you ought to have an extreme eagerness for working hard.
Indeed, an excellent way to shed those extra pounds! What’s more, you’ll also meet new friends as you meet fellow fruit pickers on the farm.
Generally, you’ll pick certain fruits according to the summer months. For instance, if you’re working on an English farm, you’ll pick strawberries and apples between June and September. Gooseberries are ready for harvest between early June and the middle of July. You’ll do plum picking towards the end of August and pear picking in the month of September.
Once on the job, you’ll get to learn how to decide if fruits are sufficiently ripe to pick and how to treat them after picking. You’ll also learn how to grade picked fruits according to colour, shape, etc.
Expect to earn money per hour of your effort, or on a daily basis. In some cases, you’re paid based on piecework. For example, a specific amount of money per pound of fruits you pick. So, the harder you work, the more you earn!
7. Teach languages
You can teach in-person as well as online. If you have a strong interest in languages, you’ll certainly find well-paying teaching jobs worldwide.
The best part is that without needing to be a specialist or have certifications, you just require to be a cut above those wanting to learn.
Nearly all students seek someone for practising elementary daily conversation with. This gives you the flexibility of teaching in your native language as well as a newly picked up foreign language.
While teaching in-person in a foreign land, you’ll get to know different ways of teaching as well as of classroom management. For example, in some countries, people learn languages quicker with flashcards, while in others, games make learning easier.
By teaching in-person, you’ll get to learn about foreign cultures, taste traditional cuisines, and also form great bonds with strangers.
How about teaching English and maybe Spanish in Tibetan schools while RV-ing around the picturesque region and enjoying its local life?
If you desire the freedom of teaching languages from anywhere worldwide, look for an online job. Through digital freelancing platforms like Premier TEFL or Dave’s ESL Cafe, you can get certified and find several such language teaching jobs.
Alternatively, create language courses with Udemy where you can teach a global audience! Earn money whenever a student buys a course. You can easily answer students’ queries on Whatsapp and Skype.
A happy client will most definitely recommend you, and with word-of-mouth referrals, you’ll soon quickly boost your mobile income.
Now you know how to keep money flowing in while you enjoy your recreational vehicle trips. With careful planning, self-motivation, creative thinking and a willingness to work hard, you can certainly afford RV travel.
So, gear up to roam the globe freely and enjoy the comforts of your mobile home.
