Fulltime Living in a Motorhome UK Style

Since we started our joutrney to full retirement we’ve seen many new places around the UK, mainly England, and can say that we really don’t miss a thing about living in a traditional “bricks and Sticks” home.

We started out on 26th March 2016 when we collected our first caravan, a Coachman Pastiche, from Sussex Caravan Services. Not really knowing that we would make the transition to full time RV dwellers at that time, we set off to a small caravan site in Chichester to make sure that everything was in order and working.

My sister and brother in law cam along with me and Wendy, my wife of 44 years, to offer advice and assistance as they’d been keen RVers for a good many years.

All was well and so we continued our journey, an extended holiday around the UK. You see, we’d been full time careers for Wendy’s parents for about 5 years and so needed a bit of time off to “decompress” and to take stock. When Wendy’s dad died in 2014 we moved mum in with us and then onto a retirement property where we could all live comfortably with all the required facilitied that make life more manageable when nearing the end of live and for us as careers for Wendy’s mum.

The thing that we never gave a thought to was that after mum died we would not be allowed, due to being too young, to stay living at the property we’d bought. A condition of the lease when it transferred to Wendy after mum passed away, was that we would not live there and so we had to sell up.

Being forced to sell up and physically get rid of everything was a very emotionally draining process. So much of mum’s life and memories left behind in ornaments and things that we would never really want to have in a home of our own. Many trips to the charity shop and selling things on eBay and we were ready to sell that flat.
We’d both given up our full time jobs a while ago to enable us to manage mum’s care full time so we had very little income and mum’s pension had obviously stopped upon her passing, so we had only our savings and a very small interim inheritance to rely on to pay the bills.
The largest bill we had was the monthly service charge for the retirement flat, of £589.89 each month. It’s like having a huge mortgage without being able to live in the house. In the end it took about 18 months to eventually complete a sale on the property and to free up all of the proceeds from the flat and other cash from probate.
In the event we were lucky that we’d bought the caravan to live in and were happy to do it. While the flat was on the market we travelled our way around England starting off in Essex on the East Coast which is where Wendy’s mum originally came from; we visited the street and house that she grew up in and other places that she’d mentioned from her childhood. We felt that visiting these places and seeing them first hand was a fitting tribute to her life.

In September 2016 we started to get really concerned that our cash reserves were getting pretty low and that we should really start to think about getting a job to pay our way and we’d seen that couples could apply to be Caravan Park Wardens and so the future for us was to try to land a job on a caravan park.
Having applied to the Caravan and Motorhome Club and been through their interview and assessment process we felt that that particular club was not really for us and applied to the other big UK club the Camping and Caravan Club along with quite a few independently owned caravan sites around the UK.

In January 2017 we were interviewed for the position of Part Time Assistamnt Warden Couple at Blakemere Touring Park in Cheshire, North West England. We were offered the job within an hour of the interview finishing and we decided to accept.

Since then the flat has sold and we have upgraded our trusty caravan for a Brand New Hymer T678CL Motorhome. The new motorhome allows us more freedom to travel when we’re not working and a more pleasant and dare I say luxurious living area.

We live full time in our motorhome and would not want to live in a standard bricks and sticks property. We love the travelling lifestyle and love to share our story on youtube as “The Happy Travellers” - https://youtube.com/TheHappyTravellers/ is our channel if you’re interested in seeing and hearing more about our story.

Our plans for the future are pretty sketchy but include the acquisition of a narrowboat to live aboard during the UK summer and to keep our lovely Hymer motorhome, we call her Jasmin Mya, which will allow us to travel to Southern Europe in the UK winter months.

We have a further 6 years to go before our UK State Pension kicks in but may be able to fully retire before that depending on how the money and investments pan out over the coming few years.