A 26 Year Old Who Quit Her Job As VP At A Marketing Agency In LA, Bought an RV, And Hit The Road While Running Her Own Business
Earlier this year, Hannah Monroe decided to quit her job as the VP of operations for a marketing agency in Los Angeles, buy an RV on EBay, give up her expensive apartment and hit the road as a full-time RVer while running her own business.
Monroe is 26- years- old.
“Being a location-independent entrepreneur has been a dream of mine since I was 19, when I began reading blogs by people like Tim Ferris,” she said. “I wasn't sure what form I would achieve this in, but it's been in the back of my head for a while and it's a big reason why I left college (UCSB) early. I thought, why should I get a piece of paper to work for someone else if my end goal is to work for myself?”
Which is what she does from her 27-foot Class C, 1991 Fleetwood Jamboree Rallye.
Monroe is a digital marketer with a focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and her company, the Harvest Firm, LLC., helps all types of businesses grow online. She mostly works with local businesses who want to rank for services in their city and large eCommerce stores/brands with complex SEO situations.
“Leaving my job combined with my musician boyfriend touring regularly meant I was home alone a lot,” she said. “Once I figured out I could work from wherever I wanted -as long as I had internet- it didn't make sense not to travel. Especially because my apartment in LA was so expensive. I figured out I could be spending that same money on travel each month. After talking it over with my mom and boyfriend, I took the jump and started looking at cheap RVs. I ended up finding the perfect one at an auction about an hour from me.”
To find her ‘dream home,’ Monroe searched Craigslist in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Seattle. She set up filtered searches on RVTrader.com , and scoured http://rvs.oodle.com/used-rvs/for-sale/. She searched for a rig with less 100k miles and in a span of ten days, she found a few potential picks and called three owners within 2-hour drive from Los Angeles. By the time she got to them, the motorhomes had sold.
She started to think the RV life might actually be out of her budget, but then she found http://www.motorhomefinds.com/ , which seemed to aggregate all of the best deals by location.
“I found my RV through Motorhome Finds on eBay. I was pretty worried about the idea of buying a vehicle to live in from a freakin’ eBay auction,” she said. “Thankfully the RV was only an hour away in Anaheim, which meant I could look at it first. So I waited and watched the listing for a few days until the day the auction was ending.”
After bidding against other potential buyers, Monroe ended winning the RV by outbidding by one dollar. Her winning price was $5001.00 for an RV with only 23,000 miles on it and in excellent condition.
“When I got there, I couldn’t believe how great the RV looked for its eBay price,” she said. “Of course, I had done my research and knew some of what to look for in an old motorhome, namely water damage related issues and it looked great to me. Mechanically, though, I’m clueless, so I called around to find a mobile mechanic to come check it out, and he said it was the best condition RV he’s ever seen at that age. He said a pump needed replacing, but that was no big deal. Everything else looked great and it had even already had a hefty piece of maintenance that these models are known for requiring already done, according to a sticker he found under the hood.”
Unfortunately, on her maiden voyage first trip from LA to the Seattle area to her parents' house - where she spent the summer sprucing up the rig- she and her brother broke down only an hour into the trip. The smog pump seized and a belt broke.
“Thankfully we found an amazing mobile mechanic who helped out,” Monroe said. “While we were waiting, my brother Ubered in to Bakersfield from the side of the freeway to buy pizza and other food for us. It was pretty crazy, but 17 hours later and after staying the night at a truck stop, we were on the road again.”
This fall, Hannah, her dog Trixi and her boyfriend have traveled to Glacier National Park and Yellowstone, and from there, the marketing business owner isn’t sure, but she plans to continue driving and working down the road.
“I plan to keep doing it for as long as I enjoy it,” she said. “Not paying rent has been pretty awesome. If I get sick of the RV life, I might put it in storage and travel internationally before settling down. That's something I've never done. I don't even have a passport.”
Candice Reed
A graduate of Kelsey-Jenny College in Communications as well as a certified grant writer, Candice has written for The Los Angeles Times & The New York Times. She loves entertaining and all things French.
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