Where would you go to live temporarily while finding a new rig?

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Katt

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Hello again, friends. It's been an interesting year. I just lost my job today and the tiny home community we have been living in for the last 18 months is going south, so to speak. We are still looking for a new rig, but as we are currently in PA and our housing situation is uncertain to say the least, we are looking to temporarily stay somewhere in a cheap apartment or *something* while we search for new wheels. Our debt is paid off and we have a few thousand $$ in the bank. Our lease for the tiny house is over $1600 a month and we definitely need to pare that down now that we are down to one income at the moment.

I have already started the RVTI Level I & II training courses in the hopes of being able to get some side work/workamping gigs while my VO and other income streams build. I am NOT going back to my career industry ever again. It's dying and you get worked to death on call 24/7/365, for starters.

I have never been to Quartzsite or anywhere out west other than the Bay area briefly, but I figure AZ or NV would be the best places to maybe find a cheap place to lay down for a bit while we get a new rig together.

Any ideas and info would be appreciated!
 
We need a better picture of your situation. Are you able to work remotely? Are you building or buying a rig or both? Do you need to go to someplace where there is a surplus of rust free RVs or vehicles? Do you have pets? Without answers to these questions I would look at the Incredibox tiny homes with financing and free rent in Tennessee or go to coolworks.com for a possible seasonal job with housing. Best wishes! Arizona and Nevada are not very cheap if close to an urban area.
 
Your best bet is to find seasonal work that includes housing if you are planning on making future changes in your living situations that are going to take some months to resolve themselves. Look on the work camper websites. Those jobs with housing are out there.
 
The housing rental market has been insane for the last couple of years. That may (I hope!) be peaking now, but it's still scary as h3ll, and some things (like corporate ownership of housing stock) will probably never go back to "normal." So when you say
lay down for a bit while we get a new rig together.
it's worth asking yourself: how long do you expect that to be? and is it worth upping stakes, purely to find cheap housing, for that length of time? The answer might be "yes," but think it through. Travel to a new housing market has its own expenses and risks.

Speaking as a serial renter who has covered 2000 miles in the last 16 months (and God knows how many in the last 20 years), here are a few carrots to throw in the soup pot:

It might be worth looking at some of those "10 cheapest cities" lists -- which you can find dozens of online -- but don't take them too seriously. Like any other "10 best X" lists, (1) the main ingredient is often fantasy, and (2) if you found it that easily, so will a zillion other people.

As far as I can tell, newspaper ads are pretty useless for rentals anymore. The main sources seem to be Craigslist and various real estate sites like Zillow and Rent.com. Craigslist is infested with scams, and the real estate sites are often out of date or run on some stupid algorithm that doesn't work right, so you have to be careful and plow through a lot of junk to get to the gold.

If you have ANY contact you can exploit for housing clues -- your sister's wife's hairdresser's boring third cousin used to be a plumber there -- do reach out.

A rental market might be expensive or cheap on average, but you only need one place, and your personal luck and timing will play a big role. So don't get too complacent, but also don't get too easily scared off from someplace you really really want to be.

In my opinion, your odds are better renting from a small landlord, if you can find one, than from a large property-management company.

Possibly crazy but I'll throw it out there: If house-hunting in a new area -- especially if it's not a big, homogenized city -- consider getting a burner phone with the local area code to make your house-hunting calls. In one place I lived, I had rental agents jerking me around like we were 15 years old and they were hoping someone better would still invite them to the junior prom, and I speculate that it's because I was not from there. You'd think the whole world would be acclimated to cell phones by now, but no.

You're not on the tightest of all budgets. You might want to look into extended-stay motels, like Motel 6/Studio 6 and whatever Value Place turned into (Woodspring? Windspring?). They're more expensive (and imo less nice) than they used to be, but if you can afford them, they give you the most flexibility as you're only committing for a week at a time. If you go this route, check the reviews -- but also check for advice on how to evaluate the reviews. There are plenty of bogus reviews, but there are also good tips on how to weed out the bad 'uns.

Random vicarious fantasy thought: when I was planning my next move, I thought about Tulsa. Cost of living looked relatively affordable, and it looked like a pretty cool city, especially if you like outdoors things. Worth a look, maybe?

^^Those are about the mechanics of it. From a bigger-picture angle -- and I can't stress this enough, because I would love for other people to be able to avoid some of the face-plants I've made -- PRIORITIZE. You're working on three things right now -- getting a rig together, changing careers, and changing locations. Each alone would be huge. You probably can't do all three at once. It will feel like you can, but that feeling can be misleading. MAKE A PLAN to tackle these things one at a time -- or at least to control how much time and energy you allot to each, if you do them simultaneously. Any time you start to get that "yeah, I could probably have my cake and eat it too here, let's just wing it for awhile" feeling, stop and think it through. There's a reason they say "one step at a time."

If you don't have a ton of stuff (I'm guessing, since you live in a tiny house already, you don't), I'm sure you can find something for <$1600.

Good luck!
 
For areas with low cost of living, and I mean VERY low cost of living, look into the affordable rural areas of southern NM and west Texas.

Small towns, sparse traffic, low crime levels (normally) and mostly friendly people.

In the small towns out here in the sticks, you wont find ginormous sports venues, international cuisine, trendy bistros, huge shopping malls, virtual reality complexes, nascar tracks, 16 lane highways, multi level parking garages, or mass transit systems.

But, you will usually find some modest homes and apartments close to a few grocery stores, a few locally-owned clothing and hardware stores, hamburger stands and Mexican food trucks, sprawling pastures with cattle and horses, rolling semi-arid terrain, and occasionally, depending on where you look, even a few mountains here and there.

We do have some wild weather at times, and yeah, it can be cold, or windy, or cold AND windy, or hot, dry, and dusty, but the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, for the most part.

Worth looking at, if you don't mind living 'in the middle of nowhere'.
 
We need a better picture of your situation. Are you able to work remotely? Are you building or buying a rig or both? Do you need to go to someplace where there is a surplus of rust free RVs or vehicles? Do you have pets? Without answers to these questions I would look at the Incredibox tiny homes with financing and free rent in Tennessee or go to coolworks.com for a possible seasonal job with housing. Best wishes! Arizona and Nevada are not very cheap if close to an urban area.
agree big time with bullfrog here. not enough info to 'know where ya wanna land and how you want to live' truly on this first post.
So sorry tho your job got evaporated!!

------------so you are in a rent tiny house community with no ownership kinda? confused on this one LOL but need way more info on it all.

wishing you tho only the best way forward for you!!
 
Hello again, friends. It's been an interesting year. I just lost my job today and the tiny home community we have been living in for the last 18 months is going south, so to speak. We are still looking for a new rig, but as we are currently in PA and our housing situation is uncertain to say the least, we are looking to temporarily stay somewhere in a cheap apartment or *something* while we search for new wheels. Our debt is paid off and we have a few thousand $$ in the bank. Our lease for the tiny house is over $1600 a month and we definitely need to pare that down now that we are down to one income at the moment.

I have already started the RVTI Level I & II training courses in the hopes of being able to get some side work/workamping gigs while my VO and other income streams build. I am NOT going back to my career industry ever again. It's dying and you get worked to death on call 24/7/365, for starters.

I have never been to Quartzsite or anywhere out west other than the Bay area briefly, but I figure AZ or NV would be the best places to maybe find a cheap place to lay down for a bit while we get a new rig together.

Any ideas and info would be appreciated!
You have to be in a location where there are plenty of RVs for sale as well as RV companies to work for. Quartzsite works for that as does Lake Havasu City. But that is only good for your purposes until mid March due to the majority of businesses shutting down as the RV customer base leaves the area due to very hot weather. If you want year around stability for employment you need to be in an area with a more moderate year around climate. Easy to research locations using that parameter as there will be lots of year around RV life activity.
 
My trailer got damaged last Aug. and then I got laid off. So I took a temp job at DigiKey in MN. Bob Wells has a video about the job, which includes housing. I started in October, found a nice trailer at a great price (a buyers market in the MN winter!) and will be heading south at the end of January. Lots of RVs on Facebook Marketplace.
 
Keep an eye and an ear out for housesitting jobs. The financial and time-length arrangements can vary -- sometimes you just live there for free, some will pay a bit.

Good luck!
 
Worst case is to move into a shelter. I have done so, and was the better for it. Just make sure you NEVER drink with anyone, and staff will also respect your sobriety.

You can get by without a vehicle in Quartzsite, but it’s a long way to travel for something that will still have challenges.
 
...temporarily stay...*somewhere*...while we get a new rig together.

Any ideas and info would be appreciated!
.
a1)
Acquire a used box-truck or walk-in van.
Toss in some car-camping gear.
Go have fun.
.
...and/or...
.
a2)
Acquire a used cargo trailer.
Toss in some car-camping gear.
Go have fun.
.
b)
Might you be over-thinking this?
.
c)
The east coast of the Pacific Ocean.
My preference would be at least a couple-three hours south of these united states of America.
Cheap rent, cheap food, cheap sunsets.
 

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