It IS a cool idea…but let’s not pretend that “#yolo van life - saving money and living on road” is a thing when they are building a luxury inside what looks like an enclosed, air conditioned, garage that’s bigger than a lot of people’s apartment.
Where did anyone related to the video say that they were “saving money and living on the road”? They massively modded a van to turn it into camper. That’s it. Chill with the salt it’s exhausting to see people comment this shit on every single video that implies any level of wealth above destitute. Be mad at the actual uber-rich.
Yeah apparently the couple does this professionally. I don’t know what i expect when i came into the comments but holy fuck it definitely wasn’t half the comments crying about these unbelievably rich people who can afford to modify a van.
You could pay $150k for a brand new pre-built camper van.
For a brand new barebones cargo van, maybe 60k (80k if you want high-roof w/AWD). And maybe another 25k in materials to mod it if you're doing all the work yourself. That's about comparable to what this couple did. They likely paid far less than that since they do this all the time.
You could easily find a van that's 5 years old for 30k or less and do all the work with reasonable materials and get all in under 50k. Very easily.
Someone else said it’d be $75k, someone else said $100k new. I’m not saying it’s not expensive, but it’s not like they bought a yacht. Plenty of people spend upwards of $100k on a car/van, but people are seething about their wealth as if they’re showing off something upwards of half a mil or something.
LMAO, ya, I really, really need to get off Reddit. It can be so toxic at times, glad it's the only SM I spend any major time on, would prob be better off without it though.
Same here man. A lot of these people would be better off as well - being this immediately upset by people who are comfortably wealthy from an apparently successful small business is not normal, it’s a result of the algorithm feeding them outrage every day. Way more often than I’d like these days I catch myself getting unreasonably upset over some random thing, and when I think about why I often find that the algo has been feeding me that shit for months, training me to be angry about it.
Its because of the pent up rage people are feeling. We are very close to an eruption right now-- too close. It is frightening to see humans turn into angry mobs, knowing that nothing will be done about the COL, and it will get worse. We dont have to go this way -- but I guess I wouldnt be the first person saying that...
It's Reddit dude, a large majority of the user base are nothing but sad Losers who spend all their time raging at anyone who has more than them And immediately jumps straight to "evil generational wealth rich people". My wife is a nurse practitioner and I work in sales, neither of us have a nickel of generational wealth, but we do well and we live in a cheap area in the Midwest, so I have no doubt if Reddit saw the house we own, these comments would be saying the exact same shit about us.
It must be exhausting, spending so much time caring about what other people do and have.
Seriously. I shit you not another commenter said to me that these people are “basically setting their money on fire because they could camp in a tent basically for free”. Imagine grasping so hard for a reason to be upset with how some upper middle class people are spending their money that your criticism is that they are spending money on hobbies at all.
These are the same mfs who claim they only hate the ultra wealthy billionaires. they see some upper middle class shit and lose their little minds. Fucking pathetic
Class war is doomed to fail because 9/10 people you press on their "eat the rich" stance consider rich asshole to start at $5 an hour more than whatever they make.
This is what they do so they got it at cost, but a custom mod like this would be $50k easy. I don’t begrudge them for it but this is like the Ritz-Carlton of sprinter vans.
it's cheaper than that. You buy the base model and then mod it yourself. My uncle bought one, had a company do the mods. All in he was 150k, but that's paying top dollar for everything. The people here modded it themselves and saved a lot of money. I could see it costing 80~100k all-in for them.
Those vans are $50k new at the low end. Which is what you'd start with considering you're tearing out half the things to replace them anyway. The mods are on top of that. But you're still looking at a net outcome of $70k tops if you do the custom refit labor yourself like they did.
I don’t know if they claimed it anywhere, but it is a big part of the #VanLife movement that influencers push. The idea that you can be a successful remote worker (ideally, an entrepreneur) while driving around the country and living a dream life.
People love to fucking project. Video was great then you get these clowns on here saying nonsense. I love this idea and may tackle it myself, for my family. I have no "generational wealth" and I'm pretty confident I can do this.
The van alone is $75k, the conversion turns it into a $150,000 luxury vehicle. You can camp in a tent for free, anyone buying something like this is just burning money. Hard to watch when so many are struggling with basic needs.
I did the van life thing for a couple of years and had enough money saved up to put a big down-payment down and fix up my used Sprinter. I work remotely so I continued to make a decent tech salary the whole time. I lived all over the US and feel like I really got to know the country.
When I was done, these vehicles had actually gone up in value so I made a little money selling mine. Since I was paying less monthly than my previous rent, I was saving even more the entire time.
I hit your numbers pretty closely, although mine was more of a complete build-out when I bought it for around $140k and put around $10k into it.
I sold it for $165k. I could have done this whole thing on half my salary pretty easily.
Anyway, it's not always a money pit if you plan things right. Even if I had lost $20k on the sale, I still would have made up for it with cheaper monthly costs overall. I know people that have spent way more on booze over 4 years than it took to get my trip going. Also, I was almost 30 and had been working since I was 15.
The only really privileged thing I had was remote work and enough of a salary to save a little.
There's the people that can certainly afford these rigs for family weekend trips, but there's a lot of us that just use them full-time and sell them after a few years.
If it's an AWD it's closer to 85/87k $.
I would be fine with a video like it if there where price tags popping up for everything or a sub total at the end including labour, because I doubt that all the cRaZy #vanlife folks diy this shit.
If you're so poor that seeing a tradesman spend 125k on a custom camper project triggers you, you should probably get off reddit and go make some money. Elon takes like 9 million a day in taxpayer money doing drugs and jacking off. An upper middle class small business owner is not your enemy dude. You aren't competing with him. He took nothing off your plate.
fr and I wonder why my mood is depressed lately...probably because I can't scroll Reddit without mfers always complaining about shit. Always gotta be envy, jealousy, and shit news.
I feel like this really contributes to depression from social media. People already get depressed seeing others posts thinking it’s that person life 24/7, and then you have these which put themselves out there as normal people doing these amazing things.
Wile I can’t afford something like what they have I still appreciate what they built. Maybe it’s annoying that some act like van life living is better than it is. I enjoy looking at Zillow listings for homes that I couldn’t dream of living in but it’s still fun to see the nice ones. Why get annoyed? They still saved a boat load of $$$ doing it themselves and who knows how long it took. Generational wealth is relative. I have friends that have inherited a million+ dollars and seen how not not-rich they are. The people to be annoyed by (or really fucking pissed off at) should be the billionaires. Not getting down on you just some perspective.
I don't disagree with the points you're making, but there's a great chance they spent more doing it this way than just buying one already done. Obviously wouldn't be fully customized.
Dude, I got happy I found a plain old penny from 1932 still in circulation. Happiness is where we make it.
Sure, they have a fuck ton more money, and not a care in the world, as far as I know. But that doesn't change my day to day, so why let it bother me now?
It’s called envy and jealously and somehow they have become virtuous traits within miserable, internet culture. You all know nothing about these people and no it doesn’t take “generational wealth” to convert a sprinter van into a tiny home.
I can't afford it either but I don't get why it annoys you. I bet you could do something comparable with 25k or even less, so it's solidly in the reach of the upper middle class, not generational wealth. I know a guy who has a van like this is afforded by living and working from his car for years.
Or maybe they just earn well?The attention to detail that is evident in their work here, tells me that they must be also perhaps very good in what they do in their day to day jobs.
Feel like I'm taking a crazy pill here lol, in terms of van building video, this is pretty tame and not even that crazy, why are people going crazy calling them rich motherfuckers and all that. If this video pisses you off, you probably need to stay away from the internet for a while to clear your head.
Yeah, the van itself seems somewhat reasonable. It's the garage that gives "generational wealth".
But hot damn, we really have a toxic crab bucket mentality where everyone who is 6 to 7 figures rich is portrayed as the enemy while there are people running around with 12 figures.
And you think the guy who can spend $150k on a hobby is the enemy and not the ones spending millions on elections and shit? Good fucking lord we are never going anywhere
That's what happens when inequality gets so bad. You probably don't live next to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. You might live near a dentist with a 3 million dollar house on 6 acres. And it's easy to be mad at that guy when he buys a new Porsche GT3RS. Because fuck man you could've paid off your house with that much money.
I have to constantly stop myself and my friends from calling those people "rich". They're a lot better off than us but on the wealth scale they're right next door and Elon is 1000 miles away.
And yet he still sits far, far closer to the lower 99% than to the top 0.1%. If the poorest person on earth is the base of Mount Everest and Elon Musk is the top, that Dentist is like 50 paces from the bottom. And yeah, that gap can still feel massive when you're struggling to survive. They are still worlds apart. But that dentist is not the one furthering wealth inequality and siphoning off the worlds wealth.
You can own a 3 million dollar house, 6 acres and a gt3rs without being in the 1%.
Top 1% is $800k yearly income. The house, land and car in many areas can be afforded at less than half that (a quarter of that in some areas of the US!). Yes it's a lot of money, but it's around top 5%-10% depending on your local land costs.
It maybe stop a d realize that the wealth discrepancy between what people think is wealth, is simply that large?
I know I will never be able to afford a car, a house or even basic dental checkup, so how else am I suppose to feel, seeing something like this van-lifestyle?
I understand things are rough now but you're really barking at the wrong tree here. This camper van thingy isn't something that can only be done by the super rich yet you're lashing out at them. You feeling upset from a nothing burger because your situation is shitty is such a sad way of living a life.
Jesus Christ this is the top comment, just how fucking salty is reddit. If you get so offended watching this, maybe get some time off internet cause you need some mental peace.
I love how there’s zero room for the possibility that they just worked hard for their money. Nope, had to be a handout. Anything to subvert your own failures in life. Just broke and delusional lmao.
Simple. If you believe that they were given everything in life, it is much easier to ignore your own shortcomings and blame everything on external factors
I’m familiar with that type of person. An acquaintance of mine claims that everyone around him who makes money does so thanks to their parents, connections, or something similar. Yet, he was fired from his last job simply because he wasn't fulfilling his duties—he would just show up and not do what he was supposed to do
You should see how many tools the average blue collar person has. Just because you spend most of your pay for a 600sq/ft box in your walkable city, doesn't mean everyone lives like that.
Tbh this is quite modest as van conversion builds i,ve seen go, other than the van itself and the rooftop tent, everything else can be made by hand relatively cheaply, or sourced cheaply like the sink
As someone who’s around the same age and lived in a sailboat for a few years, it’s insane to me how much people spend on these things just to sleep in parking lots and poop in a bucket.
Here is a fact: the no.1 reason for families declaring bankrupcy in the states is medical bills. Just think about that for a second? How on earth is that a choice?
I get that you're a pampered, special daddies boy with a trust fund and daddies credit card - but have some self-awareness or do a LICK of research before spouting off such awful, selfish, uncaring nonesense.
Well done, you've just discovered the Cost of Living Index. Your coworkers would be able to live significantly better on their current wage in the other 80% of the world than they do in the US.
They would be able to save money if they just lived at the same standard of living as other countries.
No need to have an apartment twice the size of other countries, financing much more expensive cars instead of a basic one. Eating out constantly versus occasionally.
Truth is Americans just consume way more than other countries causing themselves to be paycheck to paycheck and not a lack of wages or high prices.
Or they could just not be idiots and stop spending theit money in stupid ways. I get that some people in the US literally can't save anything, but this is not true for them they are just bad with money.
The bitterness on so many of you is actually sad, how do you even know they have generational wealth? and if so you dont know how hard there family worked for that. not everyone with money is jeff, mark or all the other billionaires taking advantage of of the system.
it's actually not that expensive, my coworker did it (he did it himself cuz we make small money) and said it costs around 5k€, and you get everything. Definitely cheaper than a house and it's a great investment if you like going outside and just chilling in nature but you want the comfort of a house with you.
I did it without generational wealth! I put myself in debt and financed a van and then put more money on Home Depot credit cards lol. Finally paying it off now at 32!!! But man those 5 years in that van were great lol
A friend of mine did the same thing with normal salary. But the guy doesn't drink, doesn't smoke or party, doesn't eat junk food and never orders from outside, he doesnt spend money for women, doesn't game or buy related stuff. All his money goes only to food, rent and electricity. That's it. So he saves every once in a while and either goes to travel the world for 2 years or do stuff like the one above. He did it with one of the older german minibus and it looked sick.
23.5k
u/Genetic_Heretic 16h ago
It’s good to have generational wealth so that you can do this quirky fun stuff!