How Much Money It Takes To Buy A #Vanlife Van

Today we are going to be tackling the question:

What’s an average or ideal cost range to have when looking for a van?

People often ask me that question thinking the answer as simple as saying “Oh, $10,000!”, and they’re surprised when I launch into a 45-minute explanation of various van models and mechanical failure rates and conversion philosophies.

So unfortunately, I do not have a canned answer for you. Your ideal cost range is going to depend a lot on your priorities and your ability to do work yourself.

I say ability, not willingness, because most people who live in a van say things like “You can save a lot of money on the conversion/mechanical repairs if you’re willing to do it yourself,” and then the prospective van buyer tells themselves “I’m willing to do it myself,” only to be confronted with starter motor failure and realize no, they are not willing to do it themselves, because they do not want to spend three months teaching themselves how to make a simple damn repair, and then they pay Firestone to do it in 2 days with a warranty to boot.

So if you’re ready to be honest with yourself about your abilities and priorities, here’s how much it can cost to buy or build a camper van.

First, Decide If You Are Going To Buy Or Build

You can buy a pre-built camper van or you can buy an empty van and build it out yourself.

The reasons you may want to buy an empty van over a pre-built one are as follows:

1. Since you’re building it yourself, you can build it exactly the way you like. Your fridge can be as big as you want, your bed the exact kind of mattress you want, your floor the precise color you want, so on and so forth.
2. It’s cheaper.
3. Pre-built ones are impossible to find in your area (a common problem for people not based in the American West).

The reasons you may want a pre-built one, on the other hand, are:

1. If you’re a complete beginner to anything “handy,” you won’t be able to build a very nice looking van, no matter how much money you spend and how much time you put in, because you’re limited by your own lack of skill.
2. Even if you are handy, it saves you a lot of work. Months and months of it. God, so much work.

Why I bought an empty van:

The reason I bought an empty van, as opposed to a pre-built camper van, was that pre-built ones were impossible to find. In my area of Ohio, there was nothing pre-owned available even remotely within my budget. There was in Colorado, but buying vehicles off of Craigslist can be an annoying and lengthy process, and I didn’t want to have to drive to Colorado and pay for accommodations several times before managing to secure a vehicle which suited me.

(That was three months ago, though, and I look like I’m not even halfway done with this conversion. Honestly, if I were to do it all over again, I would have just traveled to Colorado and found a van there).

What you should do:

Unless you’re either comfortable with a very bare-bones camper experience (something akin to tent camping in a metal tent) or you are willing to spend six months on the conversion, just buy one pre-built. Yes, they’re more expensive, but your own sanity will thank you.

Never Do Mechanical Work Yourself

One of those things van people love to say is “You can save a lot of money on repairs by doing the work yourself!” But unless you are already a professionally trained auto mechanic, that’s not really an option. You can always teach yourself, but that takes months, if not years, and it’s not something you can effectively do while simultaneously living on the road.

It’s also really risky to do while living on the road. If you don’t know what you’re doing, a repair done yourself is always going to take 5x as long and break much more quickly. And in an automobile, one crappy install job can be a point of cascading failure for an entire vehicle, so you end up losing the money you “saved” anyway.

And when you’re out on the road, you don’t exactly have anywhere you can stop to do repairs. People talk about those “DIY repair bays” on Reddit, but I’ve never seen one in person. They certainly aren’t available within 100 miles of most breakdown sites, which is the distance limit on a AAA tow.

You know what is available within 100 miles of any breakdown site? Firestone. And they provide warranties and same-day turnaround, both of which are important when you sleep in your car. I love my Firestone credit card.

So no, you’re probably not going to save any money by “doing the work yourself.” Do yourself a favor and emotionally (and financially) prepare for the sky-high repair costs beforehand.

Buying An Empty Van

Van shopping is a lot like house shopping. You can spend as little or as much as you want, and you get what you pay for. You can buy a $2500 1999 Vandura and deal with broken parts, weird engine noises, and the potential for catastrophic failure, you can buy an $8000 cargo van that might look a little rough but be essentially mechanically sound, or you can buy a $30,000 Sprinter that’s new on the inside, new on the outside, and definitely not fucked up in some way by a previous owner.

The el-cheapo van: $5000 or less

The first time around, I bought a 1997 GMC Savana for $2000.

I paid for that decision.

• First I paid $4000 to repair the ruined brake lines and failing transmission only two weeks after I bought it.
• Then I paid $800 to fix something about the engine. I don’t remember what.
• Then I paid $500 to fix the starter motor after I’d gotten several hundred miles away from home
• Then I paid $600 to have… something else fixed. The brakes, I think? I don’t remember.

In between those major charges were a lot of little transactions as well. Brake pad changes. Fluid exchanges. Fuses. Constant >$100 charges.

I bought it for $2000, but my total cost of ownership of that vehicle over 2 years was close to $14,000. I sold it for $2000, same as I bought it, with a strong suspicion that its next owners would be it’s last.

I already talked about why “doing the work yourself” is a usually a delusion, but what I don’t hear people talking about is how stressful it is to live in a van that’s breaking down all the time. Even if you have the professional training and/or all the money you need to fund repairs, it still sucks to be traveling in a vehicle that isn’t reliable. When your van isn’t reliable, you can’t drive into cellular dead zones because you need to be prepared to call AAA at any moment — and on a scenic road trip through America, there are a lot of dead zones. Like most of the National Parks. I traveled America that way, and it sucked.

Do yourself a favor. Don’t buy a van unless it’s rock solid.

The trustworthy van: $5000 to $20,000

My second van is a 2009 Ford Econoline I bought for $8000. I have since put another $2000 into fixing some brake and engine issues, bringing my total investment to $10,000.

This is much more in line with what you should expect out of a car-buying experience. When buying a used car, it’s typical to have to pay around 30% or less of the car’s cost in post-purchase repairs, especially when dealing with a car valued less than $15,000.

The car I owned before this was a 2012 Scion xA that I bought for $3000 and then immediately took to the shop to have $2000 worth of repairs done. Had I not totaled that car four months like a dingbat, it would have run for years without needing more work. (God, what a stupid mistake).

But I digress. I’m pretty happy with my decision to purchase a 2009 Ford. The only other thing I know it needs is some suspension work, which, unlike brake and engine work, can be put off for some time, especially when it’s not being driven much while the conversion is in process.

There were some downsides, of course. It’s 11 years old.

• There were some fairly large rust holes, which I patched with corrugated metal and painted for about $150. No big deal.
• I took out the front area matting because the insulation underneath got wet and gross in the last 11 years, which was probably what caused the rust. This was an excellent opportunity for me to put in a swivel seat.

Altogether, it was probably 10 hours of additional work. Definitely worth it to save $10,000, but it was additional work nonetheless.

The bougie new van: $20,000 to $40,000

Next up is what I like to call the bougie vans; the Mercedes Sprinters, the newer Ford, RAM, and Dodge high-tops, so on and so forth.

I call them bougie vans because the type of people who buy these vans are people who are leaving lucrative location-based full-time positions as graphic designers, accountants, software engineers, or other well-paid professional roles to embark on a magical adventure of full-time remote-work and digital-nomad-ism. Based on the Instagram photos, they’re all staggeringly beautiful and somehow always wearing REI. In other words, they’re bougie.

If you’ve detected a little shade in that paragraph, it’s because I’m throwing it. As I’ve mentioned before, I think a lot of people who leave full-time positions to live in a van do not fully understand what they’re getting themselves into. Moving from a house to a camper is hard enough; learning how to work remotely raises the difficulty level from high to extreme. Try to balance all this while constantly sleeping in a new place, scoping new locations, and doing the other high-energy tasks traveling requires, and your chances of unhappiness are very high.

As far as I can tell, most people who attempt this end up just giving up on work for a little while. They travel for the better part of a year until they run out of money, and then they go find location-based jobs with generous vacation plans.

Anyway, if you want a bougie new van, the cost is the only downside because there are a lot of advantages:

• You are not going to have any breakdowns or mechanical failures for a good long time, presuming you get your oil changes
• Your manufacturer’s warranty will cover surprise failures under their lemon policy
• There are going to be lots of standard aftermarket parts available for your vehicle
• All the “how to convert a van” guides will be written for your vehicle
• The standard dimensions of your vehicle will make it really easy to convert

Anyway, if you have this much money and you really, really don’t want to have any breakdowns or rip up weird old floor matting, you can take this route. If I had a $40,000 budget I would just go ahead and buy a pre-built camper van, but hey, it’s your life.

For A Pre-Built Camper Van

I said earlier that if pre-built vans were in my budget in my area, I would have bought one. That’s true, but there are still some considerations you must be aware of when shopping for a pre-built camper van.

First, the difference between a #vanlife van and an RV

At first glance, #vanlife vans and RVs seem like different flavors of the same thing. And in some respects, they are.

But the thing about RVs is that RV buyers have different priorities than #vanlife buyers. RV buyers want TVs. They want sleeping space for six, even if it’s hideously uncomfortable. They want microwaves. They don’t care if the RV needs shore power at all times to function. They don’t care about solar panels.

If you buy an RV with the intention of living the #vanlife, you’re going to need to do a lot of interior and exterior work (removing said TV and heavy cabinets and adding solar panels and roof fans, for starters) to make it reflect your priorities. You’ll probably need to do about 50% of the work you’d need to do for an empty van in the first place.

If you’re buying a pre-owned van that was built for #vanlife, however, that won’t be the case. The previous owners will have built the van with your priorities in mind.

But that comes with it’s own disadvantages: namely, the (probably) non-professional status of the previous owners. Like any DIYer, they are likely to have cut some corners or unknowingly goofed up in the construction of their van. There may be a loose wire or a leak you don’t know about until six months after you’ve purchased it. And since it’s DIY, you can’t exactly take it to Firestone or Camping World and pay to have it fixed. No, you’ll have to fix any cabin issues yourself.

So while buying your #vanlife van pre-owned, you’ll need to be very careful to check how everything was built. Which will be difficult for you to do, since you are also not a professional and there are no professionals around who can check it for you. Firestone can check the engine bay, but they can’t check the cabin wiring.

When I built my first van, I took about six months just to learn how to build one; learning the difference between insulation types, learning how to safely wire things together, learning how to secure hinges and drawers so they were safe, so on and so forth. If you plan on buying a pre-built van, I recommend doing the same, so you can interrogate the prospective sellers and see if they’ve done a decent job.

How much camper vans and RVs cost

We’re out of #vanlife territory here and into RV territory. Premade #vanlife vans or RV’s run about $30,000 and up.

I mean, that’s not strictly true — you can find used RV’s for as little as $10,000 — but unless it was a really good deal, I wouldn’t want to buy one of those. A $10,000 RV is typically at least 20 years old, has been sitting for really long periods of time in its lifespan, and will probably have leaks both in the cabin and in the “car” part of the RV. Not to mention, the floor plans from the 1980’s both waste a lot of space and call for a lot of heavy materials. Either the vehicle is going to fail in five years or you are going to have to do some heavy-duty renovating in the near future.

While I wouldn’t buy a $10,000 RV, I would buy a $10,000 #vanlife van. A used #vanlife van at $10,000 is probably a lot safer than an RV because they’re a lot cheaper to make. There’s far less that can get messed up in the cabin, they don’t sit in people’s driveways, and the build materials are a lot less heavy and more tailored to your needs.

In any case, newer RV’s don’t have this issue. Class B’s and C’s from the early 2000s are sometimes in good condition. But if they are, they’re going to be at least $20,000. Coronavirus has caused a surge in camper van purchases, so probably closer to $30,000.

If your budget can accommodate a $40,000 or up vehicle, it’s probably going to be easy for you to find something nearly new and in good condition in your area.

For A Custom-Built Camper Van

That shit’s for rich people. If you’re rich enough to afford the $80,000+ expense, you already know it and you don’t need me to walk you through it.

This article is thousands of words long, but it still only scratches the surface of the costs involved in buying a van. Everyone’s van-buying experience is different, so there’s only so much I can do to prepare you for yours. Hoepfully this guide has helped.

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