Ever since we purchased our motor yacht to start exploring the Great Loop after over a decade of full time RVing – we’ve been asked the question “which costs more?” multiple times.

Now that we’ve had our boat for three years (3 years?!?!), we have enough numbers to do a proper comparison of the typical travel & operating costs.

And spoiler alert.. it should come as no surprise to anyone, the boat costs more.

But the more detailed analysis of the costs is very interesting to dig deeper into.

First, our video explaining things (19m):

We’re going to break this down in to four primary cost categories:

• Fuel
• Dock/Camp Fees
• Insurance
• Maintenance

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But First.. Our Contestants

It’s important to note that trying to compare our boat life to our RV life is like comparing apples to some other fruit of your choice.

Or heck, apples to screwdrivers (wait, isn’t that a squished orange with vodka?).

They’re just so different – not just in the costs, but in how we approach each lifestyle.

The two vessels we’re comparing:

The RV we’re comparing is our 1961 GM 4106 vintage bus conversion that we acquired in 2011 for just $8000. Zephyr came to us already about 15 years behind on general maintenance, and had been sitting in a storage yard mostly abandoned before we found her.

She’s 35′ long, 8′ wide and 24k lbs. A single bedroom and bathroom, kitchen & office combined, and living room with couch & chair.

She’s far from being a typical modern day motorhome to maintain or operate.

Get a tour of Zephyr

Our boat is a 1999 Bayliner 4788 that we acquired for $152,000 in 2017. Y-Not had been maintained & loved by her prior owner.

She’s 47′ long (as per documentation, but really 52′), 15′ wide and 30k lbs. Two bedrooms, two baths (one with a bath TUB), four stories tall, dedicated kitchen, salon, pilothouse and flybridge.

Our boat is pretty ‘standard’ issue as far as motor yachts go – being one of the more mass produced models on the market.

Get a Tour of Y-Not

We own both free and clear (just paid off the boat – woohoo!), so we have no payments on either. And while our boat cost more to acquire than our bus, there are boats and RVs of all price ranges out there.

Differing Travel Styles

Bus Travels

From 2011 – 2017, we traveled full time in our bus typically covering about 6-8k miles a year. We would mix up our stays between boondocking on public land, moochdocking with friends, Harvest Hosts (save 15% with our affiliate link) and stays of several days in public parks (state, county, city, federal, etc).

About once or twice a year we’d take a monthly spot to get caught up on life, and mixed in some volunteer hosting.

Zephyr is now our home part of the year and will be spending her foreseeable future seasonally roaming around the desert southwest, with a basecamp at our Co-Op park in Arizona where we have a lifetime lease to a lot.

Boat Travels

When traveling in our boat, we’ve found a delightful pace of cruising for a week or two spending most nights anchoring out, and then finding our next extended monthly stay at a marina in a cool new city to explore. Thus far, we’ve been covering about 500-1000 miles a year. We intend to cruise from spring to fall, and then return to RV life for winters.

Van Travels

We do also now have a van conversion that we added to the fleet a year ago that we use for short camping trips, as a daily driver, and for transport between our boat and bus seasons.

Those costs aren’t being compared here – but obviously, the van is the cheapest of all our options to operate.

Get a Tour of Coopernicus

Fuel

Or as we prefer to call it – pouring rent into the tank. Fuel to us is part of our housing costs as nomads, not just a transportation cost.

• Our bus, with a Detroit Diesel 8v71 2-stroke diesel engine has averaged about 7-8 mpg.
• Our boat has dual Cummins 370HP 4-stroke diesel engines, and we tend to be averaging about 1.8 nautical mile per gallon.

Certainly not great fuel ‘economy’ for a vehicle, but actually not bad for moving a house around the country.  And comparing just miles per gallon, the bus might be looking like a winner in this category.

But the other way to look at it as how many gallons per hour we burn. Traveling at 50-55 mph on average, our bus burns around 7 gallons per hour. Our boat averages around 6-7 knots of speed, and thus only burns around 3.5 gallons per hour.

And since we set our travel pace by how many hours we’re spending driving/cruising, not how many miles – it’s actually been cheaper to operate our boat (crazy, right?!?).

Score one for the boat!

This is simply because back in our bus full timing days our pace had us more in motion and covering more miles.

Going forward, we expect our bus fuel expenses to go way down as we keep our travels very regional and seasonal.

The boat will probably remain about the same – maybe a bit more if we ever hasten our pace along the Loop.

And the majority of our actual miles will be in our van as we move between the two – which gets about 16-17 mpg.

But overall, fuel makes up a small portion of our overall expenses. I think our wine costs are higher (and we don’t drink nearly 3.5 gallons an hour!).

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Dockage versus Campgrounds

Paying for somewhere to be. This is an expense category that can vary widely by your own style of travel.

For us, we approach boat and RV life differently.

Staying overnight in our RV in a public campground (state park, county park, Army Corp of Engineer) is quite affordable at $20-35 in many places.

But overnights at a dock in the boat can get quite crazy expensive at $1-4 per foot (which means we could be paying $50-250 per night).

We enjoy free stays in both vessel by boondocking or anchoring out – and tend to do several weeks of that a season in between our paid stays.

Our big difference between our two primary homes is those paid stays.

When RVing staying put for a month at a time is an exception, not a norm. We tend to do more stays measured in days not weeks.

Whereas with boating, we rarely do nightly or weekly stays and optimize for more affordable monthly stays.

And when comparing monthly marina stays to monthly RV park rates – they’re not all that different in terms of costs. We’ve had marina rates ranging from $600 – 1400 per month ($900 being fairly typical) for our 47′ boat.

And that’s for waterfront (duh) locations usually within walking distance of cool downtowns to explore, which is rare for an RV Park.

So, in this category – boat life has been more expensive (yet still mighty affordable) and pretty awesome for us.

Co-Op note: This isn’t factoring in the cost of our lifetime lease and on-going maintenances fees to our Co-Op RV park in Arizona, which we more consider part of our bus storage costs. We also will get most of that back when we sell our lease. Our electricity cost when staying in the park is factored into our average RVing costs.

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Insurance

Insurance costs are definitely higher on the boat, and your actual costs here will be highly individual to your unique factors.

We carry full coverage for both vehicles with higher deductibles and high liability limits, as well as uninsured coverage. Our RV policies include a full-timers rider that gives us personal liability and contents coverage too (similar to what a house policy would include).

Part of the premium difference is the value we have each insured for, the boat about 70% more than the bus with all of the upgrades we’ve done to both. But the biggest difference is just marine versus RV policies.

We’re not insurance experts and definitely don’t want to play them on the internet – so if you have questions about this topic we highly recommend contacting a broker you trust. 

For full-time RVing policies, we love Gina at Epic Insurance. You can also find leads within RVing clubs like the Escapees.

For boating policies, look for recommendations within your boating memberships. We found ours via the MTOA and AGLCA.

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Maintenance

Quick answer, the boat costs a boatload more to maintain. As expected.

And please note – these expenses only include the mechanicals – the things needed to keep our bus and boat moving. It doesn’t include house systems (like plumbing, ACs, awnings/canvas, electrical) and various systems upgrades.

Bus costs

So remember I mentioned that we bought our bus for a song, but with 15 years of neglected maintenance? That means we had a LOT of maintenance costs to gradually catch up on – including a full out of frame engine rebuild. All and all, we’ve spent about $50k since 2011 keeping our girl on the road.

I really don’t know what a more typical modern day motorhome might cost to maintain. And owning a vintage bus does not necessarily mean you’ll need a $25k engine rebuild either (but not a bad idea to have emergency reserves at the ready).

In our years with Zephyr, we’ve also gone through two sets of tires at about $3500-4000 each time around (replacing every 6-7 years). And we’ve had a lot general stuff replaced and maintained – air bags, brakes, air drier, bearings, king pin, valves, etc. etc.

But a typical annual engine maintenance of oil & filters & chassis lubrication typically runs $300-500 in a bus shop (easiest done over a pit). And we anticipate other major projects throughout the year to keep a 60-year old vintage vehicle safely on the road.

Boat Costs

I wanted to wait to share maintenance numbers until we had gotten past some major service items we knew were coming due – like air coolers and turbos. Now that we’ve tackled these, we think our numbers should be fairly standard that others can budget around for maintaining a boat similar to ours.

General Engine Maintenance – Range of $500-3000/year

We have dual Cummins 370s, which are big engines. We’ve had three annual maintenance revolutions now (including oil, filters, impellers and zincs).

• 

  First cost us about $2000 in parts & labor (we hired in a local mechanic who also taught us).

• Our second cost us about $500 in parts and we did the labor ourselves.
• And the third we had done earlier this year as part of other boat yard projects to the tune of about $3000 in parts & labor. This also included belts and transmission fluids.

We’ll continue to balance out pro vs DIY into the future.

Major Engine Services

The prior owner had not serviced the after coolers in a while, so we knew that was pending when we purchased. We had them removed, cleaned, rebuilt, painted and re-installed for $3300 recently at our last boatyard stop.

And a while back we noticed that the seals around our turbos were dripping oil, so another $3300 to remove those, rebuild and re-install those last year.

Bottom Jobs

The bottom of a boat is very important to operating your vessel, and stuff grows on it. Like an entire ecosystem. Overnight.

To keep on top of it you have to have your boat hauled and the bottom repainted every couple of years (depending on where you cruise). And you need to clean it in-between.

We’ve had two bottom jobs already to the tune of about $4500 each (including running gear).

And we spend between $100-200 every couple of months when in salt water to have a diver go under our boat and scrape stuff off (and replace anodes).

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Whew.

Ok – that wasn’t so bad.

And the winner is:

Yup – no surprise. Our style of boating costs more than our style of RVing.

And we were totally prepared for that in thanks to others sharing numbers like these when we were doing our research (and it’s been totally worth it!).

Hopefully sharing these numbers can give others a data point for consideration in their research when deciding if boating, motorhoming or both are within their grasp.  But don’t focus too much on our exact numbers – every RV and boat is different. And every lifestyle is different too.

There’s of course other monthly living expenses on the road like connectivity, health insurance and general life stuff. And we also have storage costs for the vehicle we’re not using in any given season.

Head on over to our extensive monthly cost log that we’ve shared since 2009 if you want to dive deeper into the costs of a full time nomadic lifestyle.

Join us on Sunday – May 10 at 7pm for a YouTube Live Q&A on this topic!