How to take a Van-life gap year

How to take a Van-life gap year

You don’t just wake up one day, book tickets, fly to Europe and pick up the first campervan you see. 

There is a lot of planning and organizing to make it happen. For us, it was a concept that we worked towards over two years and got serious about in the last 6-8 months. 

Van purchase

In researching vans, we learned that we could buy one, but couldn't insure or register it without being either European residents (read: address, bank account and utility bills in the country we wished to buy the van in) or set up a company to own, insure and register the van. Now this is not straight-forward as one needs to be able to navigate the system from the other side of the world and in another language (as vans in the UK / Ireland were considerably more expensive than on the continent).

There are a number of companies who provide services in this space. 

We chose EuroCampingCars, because they are based in France and deal in late model vehicles at a competitive price. They have a network of professional service providers who assist with all the legal and insurance issues. They know the local systems and have both French and English language skills. We researched their reputation online and found only positive results.  We were confident they could make our dream a reality so we decided to buy a vehicle in France. 

This obviously took a leap of faith. Would the vehicle be there? Would it be as described? What if the company we were buying off went bust after we had transferred the money? We decided nothing ventured, nothing gained. The regret of not doing it, would be worse.

The administration for the set-up of our company and the registration of the vehicle took about 3-4 months and required original signed documents posted to France. European standards for responding to emails are different to what we are used to, 10 to 14 days for a reply is considered normal.  

All this aside, we are now directors of a French company that owns our van. When we decide to sell our van, we have the option of on-selling the company to other non-European residents and stream line their experience. 

Our van is 2018 plated and had been driven just 21,000km when we bought it. We wanted a second hand but relatively new van for reliability, condition and ease of resale. 

Finances

Before we even started to look at vans, we of course reviewed our existing finances; read a number of blogs and websites to gain insights on costs that somewhat mirrored how we wanted to travel and developed a realistic and detailed budget with cashflow forecasts. For anyone interested we are happy to share the budget template.

We generally live quite frugally. But we don't skimp on food. We eat well and seek out interesting food. We explore restaurant menus and when we are inspired we eat out.  

We are selective in the museums and galleries we visit; but the opportunity cost of not visiting that museum or art gallery because it pushes today's budget into red is not a consideration. We find the savings over the next day or two. 

We prefer to wild camp as this saves 1/4-1/2 to a half of our daily budget (depending on location).

We saved enough money to buy a van, bikes, flights, etc. and have some contingency if things went wrong.  We had to save enough money to cover our setup.

We moved from Brisbane to Melbourne a couple of years ago. We rented out our 4 bedroom home.  The rent we receive from this house pays our living costs. If you on your own home the option of taking a mature aged gap year is open to you without putting a major dent in your savings.