If you spend any time in van life corners of the internet, you’ll see two questions come up almost every day:
How do you afford this?
What do you do for work?
They’re good questions, and they don’t always get clear answers. Sometimes the answer is a vague mention of “passive income,” or a highlight reel that leaves you more confused than before. And some people assume we’re all living off trust funds. I can only speak for myself, but that’s definitely not my story.
So here’s my answer: I have a full-time job. A regular, salaried 9-to-5 with meetings on the calendar, at a digital marketing agency based in Nashville. I work it from my campsite over Starlink. Then I close the laptop and go stand in a river.
It’s not glamorous, but I think it’s the most useful answer I can give. After that, I’ll share some of the paths that aren’t mine, like seasonal park jobs, camp hosting, and workamping, because those are real options and people I love are living them right now.
It’s Not Quite “Buy a Rig and Quit Your Job”
The version of van life you often see on Instagram and TikTok is: quit your job, sell your stuff, and go enjoy your life. But life on the road isn’t very relaxing when you’re watching your savings shrink. At some point, most of us need an income.
What van or RV life does change is the shape of your expenses.
Instead of rent, you have a vehicle that will eventually need something expensive (currently writing this from a Red Roof Inn while the van is at the dealership!).
Instead of a utility bill, you have connectivity, and it isn’t cheap. The freedom is real (I chose this, and I’d choose it again tomorrow), but for me it comes from the balance between what I earn and what I spend, not from escaping money altogether.
So I think “how do you afford van life?” is really two questions: how do you keep earning while you move around, and how low can you keep your costs? Most people out here have found their own answers to both, whether or not they talk about it.
My Answer: Freelancing + Remote Work
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 22.6% of workers teleworked or worked at home for pay in March 2026. That’s more than one in five American workers. Remote work is pretty ordinary now, so if you’re hoping for a remote job, you’re not asking for anything unusual.
I was honestly terrified nobody would hire me if they knew I lived in a van. I spent a lot of time worrying about how I’d hide it. Then I found an agency that thought it was cool, and I’ve been grateful ever since. Not every employer will feel that way, and I had a few awkward interviews along the way. But you only need one.
On video calls, I just blur my background. You can’t tell it’s a van, and plenty of people on my calls are using a background too. Nobody’s really looking at your walls.
The best upgrade I’ve made to van life is Starlink. When I relied on cell coverage alone, the list of places I could stay was short, and I love being deep in nature, far from people. Starlink Roam opened that up. Outages are rare enough that I hardly worry about connectivity anymore. As long as I have a fairly open sky, I’m all set.
Why The 9-5 Works For My ADHD
I was freelancing when I started van life. On paper, freelancing seems like the perfect nomad job: total flexibility, work when you want, move when you want. For my ADHD brain, though, it was pretty stressful.
Without any outside structure, I’d move campsites for no real reason. I’d feel anxious about a project and then put it off by driving an hour to town to do laundry. The unsteady income rattled me, too. It was exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to people who see flexibility as purely a gift.
The 9-to-5 gave me structure I didn’t know I needed. Because I have to be somewhere stable and connected on Monday morning, I now stay put for a week or two at a time.
It’s saved me money on gas, saved me a lot of decision fatigue, and made my life feel calmer. The structure I used to resent in an office turned out to be what helps me stay nomadic in a sustainable way.
Seasonal work is wonderful for some people, but it was hard for me. As an introvert who struggles with social situations, being “on” for tourists and customers eight hours a day wore me out and made me someone I didn’t much like. Being tied to one place for a whole season made me feel trapped, too. I need to be able to wander, or I start to feel restless.
That’s just me, though. It isn’t everyone, and the next section shows why.
There Are Lots of Ways to Make It Work
Not every job can be done from a campsite, and not everyone wants one that can. These are some paths I’ve seen real people take.
1. Seasonal Work Near or In National Parks
My friend started out working at the employee gym in Yosemite. That was her way in. She’s since landed her dream job, guiding backpacking groups between the High Sierra Camps, and she’s so happy. Her friends in the park work in restaurants, as interpretive guides, as rangers, and in all sorts of roles I’d never have thought of.
In a lot of seasonal work, room and board are provided, so she doesn’t have to think about rent at all. She still owns her van and uses it for weekend adventures. Her seasonal job and her nomad life take turns rather than competing.
Where to look:
- CoolWorks: it’s been around since 1995, and it’s a great place to start. My friend found her first seasonal jobs here, a season in Kanab, UT and then another guiding whitewater rafting in Colorado, with no prior experience.
- The lodges, restaurants, and shops in the parks are run by private concessioners, not the Park Service, so that’s who you apply to. Yosemite’s is Yosemite Hospitality, and their openings are posted on CoolWorks here. Xanterra runs Yellowstone, Grand Canyon South Rim, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Death Valley, and Mount Rushmore, and has a housing-and-meals program for employees. Reviews of both companies are mixed, but don’t let that put you off. The adventure and community seem wonderful (too many people for me, but perfect for her).
- For Park Service jobs themselves (rangers and other federal roles), look on USAJOBS. Individual parks also list opportunities directly. These jobs can be harder to get, but it’s worth applying. After the Appalachian Trail, a young woman I hiked part of the way with became a National Park ranger, and she’s still one today. The AT was her only experience.
Apply earlier than feels necessary. Summer hiring often happens in winter.
2. Camp Hosting
You live at a campground, keep an eye on it, answer questions, clean up, and in exchange you get a site, often with hookups, and often a wage on top.
Camp host jobs come in two types, which can be a little confusing.
- Volunteer positions are posted on Volunteer.gov, the shared portal for federal land agencies.
- Paid positions usually come from the private companies holding concession contracts on Forest Service and BLM campgrounds, the biggest of which is American Land & Leisure, which hires camp hosts directly across a lot of states.
If you have a specific campground in mind, look it up on Recreation.gov, find out who runs it, and contact them directly. These jobs are great if you’d like hookups while working remotely, and I know people who keep their costs low enough to live on camp hosting alone.
3. Workamping
This is the catch-all term for trading work for a campsite, usually with some pay too: campgrounds, RV parks, farms, attractions, and seasonal rushes like the sugar beet harvest, pumpkin patches, and Christmas tree lots.
Workamper News has been the main hub for this since 1987. The full job board is behind a paid membership, but you can preview featured employers for free, so take a look before you pay.
4. Teach What You Know
My boyfriend, Alex Noriega, is a nature photographer who teaches one- and two-week workshops, often in national parks, every two or three months. In between, he’s free to roam the country in his truck camper, and he’s been living this way for six or seven years now.
I think this approach doesn’t get enough attention: instead of spreading your work across every week of the year, you gather it into focused stretches and leave long stretches of open time in between. It works for photography, and also for teaching, consulting, guiding, trades, and anything else where people value time with someone who knows their stuff. It does take building something people want, but it doesn’t take a huge audience.
5. Remote Job Boards, If You Want My Path
I got my start in tech and digital marketing by freelancing on Upwork. You may have to take lower-paying gigs at first, but once you have a few 5-star reviews, it gets much easier to stand out. There are a lot of freelancers out there, and that’s okay. Being consistent, doing good work, and caring about my clients led some of them to offer me long-term contracts.
For fully remote work, We Work Remotely is a big job board and free to browse. It’s worth searching the everyday boards like LinkedIn too. So many fully remote jobs never get labeled “digital nomad friendly.” Mine wasn’t advertised as a van life job, just as a job, and I found it on LinkedIn.
Let’s Talk Van Life Expenses
I don’t feel like I’m scraping by. I actually feel pretty rich. But I’ve thru-hiked two long trails living out of a backpack, so it doesn’t take much for me to feel comfortable, which helps keep my costs low.
My biggest fixed costs are phone and internet; connectivity is my largest monthly expense. I pay Verizon $100 a month for unlimited data, and Starlink Roam is $175 a month (as of this writing). I plan to switch to Visible next month, which should bring my phone bill down to around $30. It’s still a lot, but it’s worth it when my office is a quiet, wooded campsite on a mountainside.
Then there’s gas. My first year, I drove all over the place and easily spent $500 to $1,000 a month on it. These days I stay put for a week or two at a time, which saves a lot. I probably spend around $300 a month at most.
Beyond that, most of my spending goes to hobbies I picked up out here and really love: a gaming laptop, a MacBook Pro for photo and video editing, and a Canon R7 with a 100-500mm lens for wildlife photography. For other van lifers, it might be climbing gear, boats and paddling gear, backpacking equipment, or even dirt bikes and ATVs. Whoever you are, you’ll probably find a hobby that eats into your budget, and it’ll probably be worth it.
None of that would be possible if I were paying two thousand dollars a month for an apartment. For me, the difference isn’t a clever income stream (even with my 9-to-5, I don’t earn a lot; message me on Instagram and I’m happy to tell you what I make). It’s that my costs are so much lower. Low overhead is what lets an ordinary salary cover a life with a telephoto lens in it.
Don’t Listen To Them!
For most of my life, people told me what I’m doing now wasn’t possible. What a lot of us out here are doing.
People said it about my friend, who now gets paid to guide hikers through the High Sierra. They said it about Alex, ten years into his career in nature photography. They said it to me, and I believed them long enough to be scared of applying for jobs I was fully qualified for.
There are lots of paths to a life spent outside. Remote work is one. Seasonal park work is another. So are camp hosting and teaching in bursts. What they share is that someone decided the usual version of life wasn’t the only option, and then found a way to make their own.
The logistics are manageable, and if this is the life you want, I hope you give it a try.
Boudica and Pooka contributed nothing to this article but were present for all of it.
Sources:
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 22.6 percent of workers teleworked in March 2026
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