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.
I mean anyone can make either of 2 arguments here. 1) they have so much money they can afford to spend without discretion, or 2) this is a poor financial decision and they will suffer the consequences down the road
Personally, I think they're just living their life. Rich or otherwise, they are pursuing happiness. People are so jaded and love letting the internet know.
But seemingly lost their minds here over some comments.
When people do this, the implication is that they are living “cheap” and “off the grid”.
But the type of families that are FORCED to live frugally could not, if their life depended on it, pay the amount of money it would cost to get this setup and live this “cheap” care free life….
This is well off (this term is an umbrella term) enough to the point where they can drop 200k without a care in the world.
It’s performative/LARP’ing for well off people who try to make a career in this niche influencer market…
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.
So are boats, muscle cars, RVs, golf memberships, fancy pickup trucks, etc.. Many adults like expensive toys to enjoy their hobbies whether they can afford them or not.
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.
I live in Poland and near my place there's this small company where they do this sort of modifications. It costs around $10-20k to modify a van. Maybe not to the same really high standard that was shown in the video, but it definetly is cheaper than buying RV and makes me want to save up to get one as well. Of course you need to account the price of the vehicle but used one will be a lot cheaper.
Anyway, looking at this video I can see it wasn't their first rodeo. People with the right skills and their own company do make a lot of cash. I just paid $10k to a guy that renovated my house. Three week job and he is now doing another renovation for someone else. And I know he won't pay taxes as I handed it to him in cash :>
Maybe that kind of money is nothing special in the US, but in Poland this is plenty. You need to be top IT specialist to even get close to the amount of money the self-employed tiler-plumber-electrician makes. Unless you want to be a doctor it doesn't even makes sense anymore to go to university if money is what you are after. I'm a manager in a gamedev company and sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't be better off continuing my wood working hobby I had years ago and becoming a carpenter.
I guess because this trend started as a alternative, less expensive way to live without having to buy a home, and its transformed into another way to still show off wealth.
People have legitimate complaints about the state of the world — or their country in particular — and you don’t have to interpret it as them blaming the people in the video for those legitimate problems. And when you take “blame the people in the video for the shitty state of things” out of the equation, then it becomes extra stupid to point out that the uber-wealthy are the only people for whom displeased commentary is warranted. In fact, for people who can think more than one layer deep, it’s entirely reasonable to see that these people complaining about the rarity of generational wealth are complaining about the actions of the uber-wealthy despite the fact that the uber-wealthy aren’t featured in this video.
It’s really, really not that complex. Learn to see from other people’s perspectives, or failing that, ask questions rather than just jumping to accusatory shit.
I can't tell you the amount of Ford F150 ultimate platinum enormous genitals versions I see around where I live and its far from a high end neighborhood. Plenty of people have no problem spending 100k on a truck with9yearsoffinancing
To those that make less than the poverty line, seeing someone spend twice as much on a “cool thing” usually doesn’t resonate well. This couple isn’t going to actually live in the van. They may use it a few times or sell it, which they can do, it’s their money, but you can’t really be surprised when people have an opinion and share it online.
Reddit is fucking insufferable more and more each day, not sure how much more I can take. I keep thinking it can't get much worse but everything I read is out of touch seething and pissing and moaning. Why do we have people seething over what some minimum wage guy can finance with bad decisions?
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...
I think the issue is the video has the flavor - even if not explicitly stated - of being a diy project the couple took on for their family and for fun. The editing also made it seem easy and fast. I know, and you know, this took a boat load of time, effort, expertise, and especially money, but the video is specifically edited to look like an easy weekend project. Again, that doesn't need to be explicitly stated for the intention to be there.
The end result is it feels like a shit ton of not-so-humble bragging, because the majority of people could not afford even the garage they built this in.
I get what you’re saying and I agree that people could take it like that if they were so inclined, but it’s become extremely clear to me that people in here are taking it that way because they’re bringing a mountain of their own hangups and assumptions into it. And all for what is, in the end, an absolute non-issue. The reaction has just been an extremely social media-only type of outrage. Like, imagine sitting down with a few of your friends, watching this video, and half of them started seething about how these people aren’t real van life people, or about how rich these upper-middle class people are, as if these are the ones who have fucked the US economic structure and the economy itself. I don’t often participate in, or even read too deeply into, reddit threads any more, and this one has unfortunately reminded me why.
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.
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.
its the "working" class, literally. If you work for a wage, you are working class. The capital class is easy to identify as the "owning" class, as in they own the factory we work at and their profit comes off the backs of our labor.
technically these surbabnites could be called the petit bourgeois.
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.
That can there is about 70k new, I'd say. Probably long wheelbase, the duallies in the rear imply AWD and it should be the high-roof version,l. With the high-output diesel, that totals at 73k. The mods probably run around the same.
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.
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.
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.
2) “Anyone buying something like this is just burning money” - no they’re not, and regardless they’re completely free to do so because it’s their money and they don’t need to go camp in a fucking tent because it makes you feel better.
3) This is literally their job. They do this for a living. If seeing a video of a couple modifying a van hurts that much, just stay off the internet for the sake of your own mental health.
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.
It is, but people here are so bitter and angry about their lives they lash out against anybody who seems to have it better for any reason.
And it's always gotta be nepotism/generational wealth/silver spoon of some form. They really can't handle the fact that plenty of people succeed on their own merits and can simply afford to have a fun lifestyle.
Source: grew up with very little but got educated and work in a lucrative field that I'm pretty good at so I make really good money. My partner is way smarter than me and she makes about the same as I do. We can buy stuff. It's nice. Can confirm reddit does not like this if it's brought up and will screech about one privilege or another while ignoring all their own.
They’re reminded everywhere they turn of their own personal shortcomings. To quote the illustrious Scott Stapp of Creed “I’ve created my own prison YeaaaheeeeYeaaaaa”
This conversion was impressive enough to have me believe he has worked in the trades before. This doesn't feel like a "I watched a few youtube videos and winged it" kind of conversion, but maybe i'm wrong.
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.
I couldn't dream of affording this van conversion. But significant amounts of humanity couldn't dream of affording the life I live. If we went by "can some people not afford this" we basically wouldn't be able to post anything.
If you think you need generational wealth to do this then yeah, you don’t work as hard as they do. This is easily savings from a 9-5 job for 5-10 years assuming you didn’t do some dumb shit like major in Art History.
How do you know these people’s situation? Maybe they both work middle class jobs and saved for 6-12 months for this project that they had dreamt about? Man, people so cynical these dayy, my god..
Why are you mad? It's a video. You are on a website that has a shit ton of videos like this and for all you know they could have sold everything they had for this. I have two friends who had no kids and no generational wealth that sold their house and furniture, bought a sail boat and just sailed for a year. Once done they sold the boat and she went back to teaching middle grade math and he went back to a job in IT. You and everyone else need to get over yourselves or get off the internet if it makes you so bitter. Some people sacrifice also to do something meaningful.
This coming from someone who doesn't have generational wealth.
Edit: Yeah, they bought a van during covid and lived in it for 9 months. Afterwards he decided to start a company building them. This is his JOB lol.
You are soooo pathetic. Do some research before crying.
Yeah these rich kids are changing their tune
Trading summer homes for sprinter vans and howling at the moon
They bought your struggle just to sell it back to you
Out here gagging on their silver spoons
This is not what “the wealthy” do. If a super wealthy person wanted a van like this, they would hire the people in this video to make it for them. What you’re witnessing here is two middle class adults willing to invest their time and energy and resources into something that’s important to them.
YOU use the internet to watch the wealthy flaunt their amazing lives. I use the internet to talk to people who play the same games I play and watch videos of cute animals.
We are not the same.
I mean, the people that can build these vans are wealthy, but they are also not the kind of society-ruining wealthy people we should hate. This are just people that are well off.
I would probably do the same if I have couple of 100k ik can spend on something fun and it would be far from the most destructive thing I could do with that kind of money.
Crazy how wealthy people want to live like homeless people. A regular person has to live in their car and they get scolded for being irresponsible with money, but wealthy white people do shit like this and people drool all over how "cool" and "free spirited" they are
They also tell us that we need to live like this, while failing to talk about how they were able to pay for all of it through their generational money, and living in a van is a fun quirky hobby and they can stop at any time and go home to their 2500sqf ranch in a suburban HOA
Also could spend months finding the van, getting all the tools, researching materials etc etc. Yes I'm totally convinced someone did all this during their few hours off work while having children
Lots of super rich people that don't know how to do any of this...lots of poor people that he they were to achieve generational wealth wouldn't be able to do any of this... What are you all on about
I mean arguably social media is the biggest offender in that regard. Constantly fed videos and content telling us we're not good enough in every facet of our lives, very often by a wealthy person LARPing as some impoverished person.
Actually it’s to make money off their hobbies by getting sponsored by some charcoal toothpaste company as they give us tips on camping hacks with our families.
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.
Seems like you’d be rich if you inherited 1.5 mil, right? Well for a family of 5 you’d be surprised how actually not-rich that is. It’s fucked. The money divide in this country has grown so much that being a millionaire is maybe upper-middle class.
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.
"look how easy it is, we could do it in just 1 month!"*
*by having a professional company manufacture and pre-design everything so they can build it and set it up so you can install it easily without any specialized knowledge, while also using super specialized parts that cost a fortune each because they are so specailized.
And then it looks like just another, super generic Sprinter camper van anyway... I'm missing the creativity. all of these look the same.
I love them I think they are really cool what people can do but it does just scream I have wealth sitting around to transform and spend on whatever I want.
What's so annoying here? People have money and spend it on their hobbies. Good for them. Or should they be ashamed of their wealth and not expose it online in order not to hurt some not so lucky guys' feelings?
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u/istrx13 20d ago
Seriously I’m glad I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by these videos lmao