huh? I lived in a subaru outback in the forest for some time. I bought the car for $1500. It lasted ~6 months, I spent a few hundred registering and bare-minimum insuring it and when it died I called a junkyard and they hauled it away and gave me $100. It's not like it cost anything to park it in national forest.
When I was homeless in North Dakota I met a guy with a Ford E350 ho bought for about the same price. He was handier than I was and as far as I can tell he could keep it running indefinitely from junkyard parts for almost nothing.
The grift is overselling what goes into the van, or a new and overbuilt van. The bigger issue is van-life dumps your externalities on everyone else -- you aren't paying property taxes but you probably still avail yourself of local public services and utilities as part of the cheap living. It doesn't scale.
You are an individualist, maybe even a trendsetter. We are talking about a trend that has reached the well-off yuppies (does that word still exist?). A friend of mine was just about to shell out 70,000€ for a small van, without really knowing what to do with it, because some of his neighbors bought one recently..
When I was homeless in North Dakota I met a guy with a Ford E350 ho bought for about the same price. He was handier than I was and as far as I can tell he could keep it running indefinitely from junkyard parts for almost nothing.
The grift is overselling what goes into the van, or a new and overbuilt van. The bigger issue is van-life dumps your externalities on everyone else -- you aren't paying property taxes but you probably still avail yourself of local public services and utilities as part of the cheap living. It doesn't scale.