Community Forums

cpt_majestic · 08-25-2017, 06:20 AM

It was more just hypothetical not to touch it, you could always just bank it and just live off the work camping "salary". I was just questioning if a couple could live off of 30-40 hrs a week x2 at minimum wage full time in an RV. You wont be living like Rockefeller, but it does seem feasible.

jbrv · 08-26-2017, 12:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cpt_majestic

It was more just hypothetical not to touch it, you could always just bank it and just live off the work camping "salary". I was just questioning if a couple could live off of 30-40 hrs a week x2 at minimum wage full time in an RV. You wont be living like Rockefeller, but it does seem feasible.

From what we have seen most workamping positions that pay...........pay is min wage and then they will subtract a site fee off the top so the take home pay is less than min wage. They also tend to limit the hours to maybe 24 or so per person. I do get a laugh when min wage goes up and instead of having the employee make more money they just adjust the host site fee up to keep the employee pay at the level they want to keep it.

Could a couple with no debt live on that? Prolly but there would be next to nothing left for things like maint and gas for the rig when it is time to go somewhere else. We have seen this case at a location we workamped at. At least two of the couples were trapped. They did not have any savings. The little bit of pay they made was used for food, maybe a cell phone, and some other very simple and cheap things. They could not leave the gig to go find something better because they could not afford to fill up with gas and do some maint on their rigs things ike new tires to replace the ones that went flat because they had been parked in the same spot for two years. One couple had not started the rv in at least 18 months, They were not sure if it would even run.

A little off the point but i do get rather annoyed when workaming or volunterring that a lot of people just assume i am a well paid fed employee with great health insurance and bennies..............No!!!! at best i get min wage before i pay for my site or i am volunteering for a free site and i am lucky if i can get 30 hours of paid work that week.

Arizona · 08-26-2017, 01:12 PM

Some people just like to stay busy. It's nice to offer a perk like free rent but not really set up to pay like a job would. I guess you can double the amount of free rent given if you aren't paying taxes on it.

jbrv · 08-26-2017, 04:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arizona

Some people just like to stay busy. It's nice to offer a perk like free rent but not really set up to pay like a job would. I guess you can double the amount of free rent given if you aren't paying taxes on it.

The proper way to do it is to pay the wages and then collect rent. The company we worked for has now changed to that method (laws and such) instead of the way they used to do it which was deduct the rent from the paid wages so folks report a lower wage than they really earned.

In our case.....and others i am sure.....we wanted the full wages to report as income even though some went straight to rent. There is a complicated reason most rvers wont get because they can get medicare.......some us dont get that perk. We then had to purchase health insurance using the ACA. We are residents of the state of florida which choose to not expand medicaid. If we made less than a certian amount a year we would not qualify for subsities for the aca ( this is the reason we wanted a paid camphost job) because we would then fall below the income level to be able to get medicaid.............except medicaid has means testing we would fail (no income does not mean poor, and medicaid is for the poor) so it would be back to the aca........aca would be glad to sell us healthcare at full price which was not affordable only making the little bit we made.....in fact the cost of the aca plan with no subsity would be more than our camp host income. We almost got screwed big time because the company was reporting the lower income not the real income........They say but all the camphost we have all want it that way to show less income. Oh so you want to help them all defraud the govt? Of course all other camphost have medicare, and social security and a lot also collect disability. The next year they started doing it the proper way. As all who use paid workampers should. If i had know they were doing thing the way they were i would have not taken the job. It was explained to me at hire it was we pay you, then you pay rent not we deduct the rent and then pay report what is left as pay. Turns out those managers were really bad managers and when i talked to the owner of the company (i shall not name here) he was very sorry abot the confusion and offered to do whatever he needed to do to fix it if i did endup getting a giant bill for my health insurance because my reported wages ended up to low. We made it, by 20 dollars thanks to some tips i made and reported as wages, all worked out well in the end

Stickdog · 09-19-2017, 11:36 PM

We have 10,000 volunteer hours between the wife and myself over the last 8 years. That's a lot of campground fees that didn't come out of our pockets. We also did jobs that were more fun than work.

grindstone01 · 10-27-2017, 09:58 PM

We have a 12 year plan to volunteer in all lower 48 states and are 5 years into it with 19 states checked off. This includes mostly camp hosting, but we have done events and Habitat For Humanity also. We also work the sugar beet harvest and sell christmas trees which pays for most of our year expenses. By saving our pension and eventually SS, we should have a nice nest egg to pay for a retirement condo or house when we decide to settle down.