By Fred B.
I admit, I’m a dedicated dumpster diver. I’m sure most of you are picturing me scrounging through dumpsters looking for moldy fruit or cheese or half-eaten steaks, but I wouldn’t be caught dead looking for, or touching, any of that stuff. Not to mention, my wife would leave me if I brought any of that stuff back to the RV.
How it all started
Let me explain. Many years ago, I would help my son with his paper route on Sundays, because the Sunday paper was too big to carry on a bike. His route was in an apartment complex. I would pull up to each section and sit while he ran the papers inside. I got curious and started checking the dumpster in each section. Saturday is moving day for renters, and you would not believe the things renters throw away when they move. I found a number of things I could use at home that were in perfectly good shape!
RVers throw treasures away, too!
Fast forward 25 years when my wife and I retired and started full-time RVing. We’ve been to every state at least once and Alaska twice. I’ve developed the habit of checking the dumpster in every campground we stay in. It turns out RVers are no different than renters. They throw away the darndest things! I have saved thousands of dollars on items I needed or wanted to buy. But I’m patient, and eventually found many of those items in a dumpster.
Just in the last few weeks, I’ve found a camo folding chair that compresses up into a long tube shape, several plastic storage bins, a styrofoam cooler, a 2-year-old Dish Tailgater Pro satellite dish, an 8-quart Instant Pot, sewer hoses and connections, garden hoses, and a space heater, among other things.
We have permanently parked our 5th wheel on a lease site in Southern Alabama and have ordered a triple-slide truck camper to continue our travels for parts of the year. In trying to duplicate many of the items in our 5th wheel, I needed to acquire all of the items I mentioned above. None of them cost me a penny. And every one of those items was in perfect condition. Some of them just required a mild cleaning.
Just those items saved me more than $500!
Dumpster diving: Not that dirty
Most dumpsters today are not that dirty. All food and food packaging items are contained in large plastic bags. I look for larger or heavier items that are not put in bags and are easy to spot in the dumpster. Every time I open a dumpster lid it feels a little like Christmas morning. Sometimes I’m disappointed and sometimes I’m really excited by what’s inside.
The good stuff is not just in dumpsters
Kind of related to dumpster diving is shopping for used versions of anything you need. In equipping our truck to handle the new truck camper, I needed to buy around $2,500 worth of add-on accessories, like overload spring helpers, tie-downs, turnbuckles and a rubber bed mat. I found the absolute best versions of all of these items on places like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or the Amazon Resale second-hand site, for under $700. The tie-downs and spring helpers were either new or used, less than 6 months old.
The moral of this story is that you can travel full-time on the road on a pretty small budget if you are just a little bit handy, buy used when you can, and aren’t averse to snooping in dumpsters. Oh, and you’re also helping the environment.
Take my experience and multiply it by several million and you start to realize the sheer volume of useable items our throw-away society disposes of in landfills. I don’t consider myself an environmentalist at all, just thrifty. That thriftiness has allowed us to go anywhere we want and do anything we want, on a budget that doesn’t even spend all of our social security. After 12 years of full-timing, we haven’t even started to tap our retirement funds yet. Our motto, displayed on the back of our RV and front of the truck is “Chasin’ Our Dream Fulltime”.
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