Drop it in the box below, I'm more than happy to answer pretty much anything, and I'm always looking for feedback. That said, I don't really have a way to reply to these questions (yet), so if you want a response, it's probably better to email me. I also have an FAQ for some of the more persistent questions.
This is a tricky question to answer, because there are different sets of costs associated with renting an apartment, and living in a box truck.
One way to look at it would be to see how much money I'm saving on rent. A really cheap apartment in the Bay Area (and I'm talking really cheap, like sharing the room with a roommate and some rats), would be about $1,000 a month, minimum. So every year I live in the truck, I'm saving (again, bare minimum here) about $12,000 in rent.
But that's not taking into account the cost of the truck. The truck cost $10,000 (which I paid up front). Yearly, I pay about $1,000 for insurance, $500 for gas, and another $500 to renew my registration in California. Taking all of that stuff into account, I probably save $10,000 a year. If you want to get really fancy and add in the losses from not investing that $10,000 (even though I would have had to spend a potion of it on security deposits), at 5% return, you can take off an additional $500 a year in savings, so $9,500.
Even as detailed as we're getting, it still doesn't account for differences in lifestyle. I'd probably own a lot more things if I lived in an apartment, like a TV, some furniture, probably a gaming system. But at this point we're just speculating, so I'll leave it at that.
The short answer: I have no idea. The slightly longer answer: Whenever it stops making sense. For a less garbage answer, check out this post.
Well, a couple of reasons, but mainly because RVs just kind of weird me out. I don't like how an RV just screams "HEY, LOOK AT ME, I CLEARLY LIVE HERE". The truck was a bit more…subtle. I was considering a sprinter van or something similar, but I decided that while I wanted to downsize, I wanted to be able to stand up and walk around a bit too. Thus, the box truck was born. I have a more thorough answer in this post.
My life is not an episode of Man vs Wild. I do have 24 hour key card access to any building on the campus that I work at, so I could use the facilities in there if I really needed to, but thus far it's just been about planning. I try not to eat or drink anything after about 7:30 PM, and I wash up and go to the bathroom right before I head out to the truck at night. When I wake up in the morning, I head to the gym and go to the bathroom there. My schedule is pretty consistent at this point, and my body rewards me by being predicable. That means that Mother Nature calls on a very reliable schedule.
Nothing, I live like a total Luddite.
I don't actually own anything that needs to be plugged in, everything I own is battery-powered. As far as lighting goes, the truck has a few built-in overhead lights. As far as charging stuff goes, I have a small (15,000 mAh) battery pack that I fill up at work once a week or so, and I use that to top off my headphones and cell phone at night. I always keep a little juice in my laptop for any random bedtime blog posting/general internet-surfing, but that's generally rare for me.
Yes, no, yes, no, no, no, and definitely not, respectively. Those are personal accounts though, I don't maintain any truck- or blog-related social media, just this blog.
The site doesn't use WordPress or any other standard content-management solution. It's an artisanal, hand-crafted web application written in Go and deployed on Google App Engine. The frontend was originally built on Bootstrap, but switched to Skeleton after a rewrite. More details about the site can be found here.
If you're looking for something, you can search by keyword here. I can't guarantee it'll work, it's kind of a best-effort thing.
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