The following is a report from Business Insider.
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.
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.
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