Trolling lots of RVing forums and articles, there is a lot of debate about “how to fulltime.”  There’s advice on having businesses on the road, saving up for awhile and disappearing into the wild, managing retirement/fixed incomes, selling houses, fulltiming in spurts.. the list goes on.

For me, I’m lucky to be working at a liberal company, in a position where my location is not particularly important, where travel is encouraged, and where I can manage my own schedule.  I’m also lucky to be working somewhere that has offices all over the globe, many in interesting places that I actually have a business reason to visit.

In other words, there were almost no barriers to entry for fulltiming besides getting over the idea of what I was about to do.  This might be the biggest hurdle, though, and I’m not sure I have a lot of advice — I think this is a personal thing you have to decide for yourself.

So, I lack any good advice on how to do this for 99.9% of people, but for those of you who are in situations similar to mine, here are some tips:

• Read Tim Ferris’s book, The 4 Hour Work Week.  While my work week is closer to 55 hours, there are a lot of techniques/tactics in here from detaching you from your office.  Most of it is geared toward working from home, but it translates well to fulltiming.
• Ignore what everybody else tells you about your ridiculous plan to live in an RV.  It’s great.  Besides a tiny shower and scary toilet, it’s like living in a small apartment with ever-changing views.  Your friends are all trapped in what society expects of them — disconnect from it, it’s killing your soul.  You know I’m right.
• Ignore the whole “rent an RV for a week and see if you like it before you take the plunge” advice.  Don’t do that.  Especially because the RV you rent won’t be the RV you will buy anyway, and you won’t get to experience the actual lifestyle in a short time.  The first night I spent in an RV, ever, was in my Airstream, in a truckstop somewhere on I-40 1000 miles away from the apartment I used to live in.
• If you plan to work mostly from the road (rather than from various offices), get as many redundant communication options as you can.  RV park wireless is often sketchy — 3gstore.com sells various amps and antennas (get EVDO cards and phones with antenna ports!), and there supposedly are various satellite options that I haven’t done yet.  It’s also worth picking up an analog phone for places that have half decent wifi (but not good enough for VOIP) but that do have analog phone hookups. (most do)
• If you plan to work from an office, don’t commit to a park for longer than a couple of weeks without checking it out first.  Reading about a California park from New York might seem fine, but things are often much shadier when you arrive.
• Get a reliable permanent address, preferably with someone to monitor the mail and send you info.  There are forwarding services, but they’re a pain.
• Figure out your tax situation.  Figure out your permanent address, tell your accountant, change your withholdings, etc.  The interest on your RV loan is likely tax deductible, too.
• Most RVing books aren’t very good (internet resources are generally better), but the most motivational thing I read about fulltiming was actually a book called, “The Cruising Life” by Jim Trefethen.  It’s about boats, not RVs, but as Mcconaughey says — the highways are rivers, and airstreams are canoes.

Get out there, it rules.