Couple Ditches Home, Regular Jobs to Live Full-Time in RV

When Victoria Childers and Lamont Landrum Jr. bought an old RV in 2019, they knew they wanted to leave the suburbs of Detroit and travel the country full-time with their three dogs and two cats.

Five years later, they’ve fully embraced a “work-camping” lifestyle, with Landrum taking seasonal jobs in parks, campgrounds, and farms across the country in exchange for hourly pay and a free place to park and hook up their now-upgraded RV to utilities.

It wasn’t as simple as just heading out on the road one day: They first spent several months renovating a 1992 Tiffin Allegro motorhome, their original home-on-wheels, which they bought for $22,500 with cash from a home-equity loan. They hit the road just as they sold their house in Wixom for about $250,000 in November 2020.

For the first several months of RV life, the married couple relied solely on Childers’ income from her remote job as a customer success representative for a software education company. But Landrum, who had worked as a handyman in Detroit, didn’t take to funemployment. So he signed up for a popular “work-camping” job: helping with American Crystal Sugar’s annual sugar beet harvest in eastern North Dakota.

The job involved long days directing trucks loaded with beets from the fields to the processing plant. But the pay was good and the season was short — he made almost $7,000 in just six weeks on the job on top of a free place to park the RV with electrical, water, and sewer hookups.

Pre-retirement, but full-time RVers

The couple is among the pre-retirement full-time RVers working paid jobs while attempting to live the retirement dream of constant travel and exploration. Childers, 50, and Landrum, 40, don’t know if they’ll ever be able to afford to retire, but they said work-camping has given them some freedom to live their lives as they’d like to.

“We wanted to be able to travel with our animals, and just wanted to get out of the rat race,” Childers said.

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Work-camping jobs can be tedious and don’t typically pay much more than minimum wage — the sugarbeet job was an outlier. But Landrum likes how straightforward the work is.

For instance, one job in 2022 at a campground in Mackinaw Mill Creek, Michigan, paid Landrum $12.50 an hour to manage the campground. But it also included a campsite and hookup, which would cost non-workers at least $65 a day.

“I may be working a job that I may not be exactly happy about,” he said, but “I usually don’t let that affect what I’m doing after work.”

And the couple has been able to make enough of a financial go of their new lifestyle that they upgraded their motorhome a few years back — now they’re in a 2008 Jayco Seneca, which they bought in 2022 for $73,000.

Childers also joined the work-camp workforce after getting laid off from her remote job in February. She took her first work-camping job alongside Landrum with a company that manages campgrounds at the Pike-San Isabel National Forest in Leadville, Colorado. She also writes résumés for other work campers, whom she finds through word-of-mouth or on job sites.

On their days off, the couple hikes with their dogs and off-roads in their 2017 Jeep.

So far, they’ve lived in a dozen different places, some of which they’ve returned to multiple times. In early September, they’ll head back to North Dakota for their fifth consecutive beet harvest.

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Surviving storms and flaky employers

Living out of an RV and working seasonal jobs can be challenging and uncertain.

Travel days are stressful, Childers said. Their RV, which also tows the car, has broken down, forcing them into a motel for days at a time. Extreme weather is also a threat. They happened to be in Texas during the deadly power grid failure and winter storms in February 2021, which Childers said was scary.

Seasonal employers sometimes flake and cancel a job shortly before it’s supposed to start. Because Childers helps lots of other work-campers with their job applications, she’s seen how unpredictable the gigs can be. “Ghosting is such a big thing in the work camping community,” she said. She added that employees can be flaky, too.

The couple hasn’t had much trouble finding work in the summer, but winter jobs are harder to come by because so many campgrounds close up shop or significantly scale back their workforce over the winter.

Last winter, they took a break from working and returned to Michigan to visit family for a few months. Childers and Landrum have the added benefit of both being work-campers. They think employers are more likely to hire work-campers in a couple, rather than single, to maximize their workforce with limited RV hookups.

Despite not having rent or a mortgage, work-camping isn’t necessarily a deal. RV repairs can be expensive, and gas to power a 1,000-mile-plus trip to your next campground also isn’t cheap. It costs about $200 a month, Childers estimates, in gas and maintenance to keep their RV afloat. And the payment on their motorhome is $550 a month. Still, that’s a lot cheaper than the $1,250 mortgage, plus utilities, they paid back in Wixom.

“A lot of people think living in an RV is a great way to save money. It depends,” Childers said.

They’ve made friends on the road, some of whom they’ve reunited with in various places across the country. But ultimately, the itinerant lifestyle is quite solitary. “I would say for a lot of work campers, we’re more of a loner, kind of nomadic people,” Childers said.

Even for all its challenges, Childers said she “wouldn’t change it for anything.” Landrum said he hopes to die happy in his camper.

“I’m basically just going to be that guy who, one day, somebody’s going to notice that he hasn’t come out of his motorhome for a few days, and then they’re going to check and I’m going to be probably expired,” he said. “I love this too much.”