DO YOU ever feel like, for all the money you spend on rent, you’re hardly ever home?
So did Brandon, a 23-year-old Google employee living in San Francisco, who realised the dead money he was spending on outrageously
expensive Bay area rent could be better used for — well, anything else, really.
Brandon’s solution was simple: he moved into a van.
It started in 2014 when he found out he would be interning at Google. After moving into a four-person share house, he began to notice something “fairly tragic”.
“For all the money I’m spending on this apartment, I’m hardly ever there!” he explains on his blog, Thoughts from Inside the Box.
“I wake up, catch the first GBus to Google, work out, eat breakfast, work, eat lunch, work, eat dinner, hang out at Google, and eventually take a bus home, pack my gym bag for the next day, and go to sleep.”
Rather than spending nearly $140 a night for a place to sleep, he hatched a plan: he would take advantage of Google’s generous perks and move into the back of a 128-square foot van in the parking lot. He eats all his meals at work and showers every morning after his workout.
All he has for company is a bed, some stuffed animals, an Ikea dresser, and a rack to hang his clothes from. He has a 24-hour key card to Google in case he needs to use the bathroom at night, and Brandon says electricity isn’t a problem.
“I don’t actually own anything that needs to be plugged in,” he explains on his blog, where he documents his experience, shares tips for truck living and generally muses on life.
“The truck has a few built-in overhead lights, and I have a motion-sensitive, battery-powered lamp I use at night. I have a small (15,000 mAh) battery pack that I charge up at work every few days, and I use that to charge my headphones and cell phone at night. My work laptop will last the night on a charge, and then I charge it at work.”
For the one-off cost of the $13,861 van, Brandon now saves 90 per cent of his after-tax income. Much of that has gone towards paying down his student loans, which he’s brought down from $31,096 to $22,800 in just four months, he told Business Insider.
“A really cheap apartment in the Bay Area (and I’m talking really cheap), would be about $US1,000 ($A1,386) a month, bare minimum,” he writes. “So over the course of four years, I’d be paying (again, bare minimum here) about $US48,000 ($A66,533) in rent, and have nothing to show for it. No physical property, no equity, nothing.”
His one ongoing expense, on top of the minimal amount he pays for fuel, is $1040 a year for insurance on the van, which works out to about $86 a month. “So for a super conservative estimate, I’m saving about $US33,000 ($A45,740) over the course of four years.”
Besides the cost savings, Brandon says living in the van has given him valuable life experience by pushing him outside of his comfort zone. He wants to travel the world, so will need to be comfortable with “unconventional living situations”.
He also enjoys the health benefits — since he has no choice but to go to the gym on campus to shower, living in the van forces him to stick to a strict daily regimen. “In a similar vein, since I’m eating all my meals at work, it means my diet will be organised into three meals a day during the week, without any late-night snacking,” he writes.
There’s no getting around the negatives, though. First and foremost, social suicide. “I will most certainly be ‘That Guy’,” he says. “No amount of planning or forethought excuses the fact that I’m the psychopath living in a van in the parking lot. People will eventually find out, and it will affect my social life.”
And along with the stress and anxiety of the process, the upfront cost involved and the general inconvenience, Brandon suspects he may also be celibate for some time.
“I can only imagine that it’s going to be next to impossible to get laid when I’m the van guy,” he writes. “Sure, I can get a hotel for the night, but it’s still strange and I still have a bit of explaining and convincing to do.”
Before he took the plunge, Brandon recalls his roommate Zach telling him: “Don’t live in a van. Don’t do it.” He says he started to second-guess himself.
“Was this really what I wanted? Was I actually being insane? What if I went through with it and then decided I didn’t want it? I’d have to deal with all the stress of having to find an apartment while starting a new job, and trying to sell the stupid van on top of all of it.”
He’s been there five months and appears to be going strong.
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