Living in the bus — daily life, travel, financial, health, parking
This is probably the most common debate in the bus life community, and honestly I’ve gone back and forth on it myself. You see a beautiful skoolie build on YouTube, you get excited, and then your spouse or your buddy says “why don’t you just buy an RV?” It’s a fair question. I’ve spent a … Read more
You want to know how much it actually costs to turn a school bus into a home. Not a vague “it depends” — real numbers you can plan around. That’s what this article is for. (See our guide on How Much Does It Cost to Convert a Bus Into a Home? for more on this.) … Read more
You’ve got the bus, you’ve got the dream, and now you’ve got the question everyone asks: how do you actually pay for all of this? It’s the single biggest concern people have before going full-time, and honestly, it’s a fair one. The short answer is that most full-time bus dwellers make money through a mix … Read more
You’ve watched the YouTube tours. You’ve saved the Instagram posts. The dream is real, but there’s a whole layer of bus life that nobody puts in the thumbnail. Here’s what actually catches people off guard once they’re living in it. The reality of full-time bus life isn’t bad, it’s just different from what you expect. … Read more
If you’ve been scrolling through Instagram looking at those gorgeous skoolie builds with the butcher block counters and the cedar ceilings, at some point you’ve probably asked yourself the same thing everyone else does. How do people actually pay for these things? The short answer is yes, you can finance a bus conversion, but not … Read more
You’ve got the bus built and you’re ready to go full-time. But the question that keeps people up at night is, where do you actually put this thing? You can’t just park a 35-foot bus on any random street and call it home. Most full-time skoolie owners park at RV parks ($400-$800/month), on private land … Read more
If you work remotely, or just want to stream Netflix after a long day of driving, internet is a non-negotiable part of bus life. I spent a lot of time researching this before we hit the road, and I’ve talked to dozens of full-timers about what actually works. Here’s what I learned. Most full-time bus … Read more
This is the fear that keeps people from pulling the trigger on bus life. Your house IS your vehicle, so if it breaks down, you don’t just lose your ride. You lose your home. At least that’s what it feels like when you’re thinking about it from the outside. When your skoolie breaks down, you’re … Read more
So this was something I worried about way more than I probably needed to. I had this image in my head of pulling up to an RV park in a converted school bus and the manager coming out to tell me to leave. And yeah, that can happen, but it’s way less common than the … Read more
This was one of the first things I had to figure out when I started seriously looking at bus life. I’d been browsing RV listings for months, and the prices were making my eyes water. Then someone in a forum mentioned skoolies and I went down the rabbit hole. But I wanted to actually do … Read more