When you’re homeless and trying to live something even close to a normal life, the costs are surprisingly high. Staying warm, staying clean, having clean clothes, cooking, and having electricity is the bare minimum for someone who’s trying to come up with a plan to get out of homelessness.

Have you ever wondered how much it would cost to have those things for just one month if you had no home, no apartment, no friends or family to take you in, no shelter space available, and you had to figure everything out the best way you could?

If so, this post will give you some answers.

What Does It Cost to Be Homeless?

It’s going to vary based on how a person is unhoused on the street: doorway homeless, underpass homeless, tent homeless, car homeless, and RV homeless require you to live in different ways.

These are the actual figures of what it cost Irish and me to live in an RV parked on the streets of the city we’re located in.

  • Propane for heat (40 gallons): $160
  • Propane for cooking (1.7 gallons): $7
  • Water (115 gallons): $46
  • Truck stop showers (5): $125
  • Laundromat: $150
  • Public transit: $200
  • Household items, dog food: $250
  • Food (beyond what SNAP covered ): 250
  • Generator gas (155 gallons): $775
  • Generator oil (25 quarts):$25

Monthly total: $1988

What Homeless Living Costs Really Mean

The first time I calculated these figures, I thought it must be a mistake. But looking through saved receipts and my bank app debit transactions proved otherwise. Here’s an explanation of the dollar amounts.

Propane

One 5-gallon propane tank hooked up to our RV’s range lasted for 2-3 months of average cooking and baking — my figures average a tank over three months.

We used a large, free-standing camping stove to heat the inside of the RV for about 8 hours each night. We turned it up to warm the RV after it was cold all day and then turned it down to the lowest setting at bedtime. A 5-gallon propane tank for heat lasted 4-5 days, depending on how cold the overnight temperatures were.

Each propane tank cost $20 to fill at a gas station half a mile from where our RV was parked. We had no vehicle, so Irish carried our propane tanks each way. They weighed 17-18 pounds empty and 35 pounds when they were full. In the winter we needed eight tanks to stay warm for a month.

Water

When we had a running vehicle, we went on water runs to fill four or five blue 5-gallon jugs each week. We knew of a small business that allowed homeless people to get water from the spigot on the side of the building. The owner’s only stipulation was that those needing water wait until night to fill jugs.

One day, I’d like to meet the business owner and hear his story. This sort of kindness toward the homeless is rare.

After our vehicle had to be scrapped, we relied on other homeless RVers with vehicles to either take Irish with them on water runs or bring water back for us. Vehicles ran inconsistently, and sometimes we were dangerously low on water.

When that happened, we had to take public transit to the closest Walmart to buy gallon jugs of water Irish loaded into a large backpack. The bus that ran by our RV community stopped running in the early evening on weekends and holidays. If we missed the last pickup, we had to take the other nearest bus line, which dropped us off half a mile from where our RV was parked.

Those were the walks I hated. Not for myself, but for Irish as he trudged along under the weight of that water.

At one point, our RV was parked behind a grocery store that had a water-filling machine in front of the building. For $10 a week, we could buy the water we needed for drinking, cooking, dishes, hand-washing, and face-washing at night. We took “bucket baths” in between showers, but I dreaded pouring water over me in a cold RV bathroom.

Showers

When Irish and I first lived on the street, we relied on a few people we knew who had apartments and were willing to let us shower at their place. I soon realized there were a lot of problems with this arrangement and began exploring other options. We learned of a truck stop in the north part of the city that charged $15 for 45-minute showers and allowed couples to shower at the same time.

After about a year, the truck stop raised the price to $25 for a 45-minute shower and limited customers without CDLs to showering between 6 am and 6 pm. We didn’t mind the restrictions about the time of day because I preferred showering during the day. But we felt the price hike acutely and reduced our showers to once a week. After we became reliant upon public transportation, we rode 2-3 hours round-trip to get clean four times a month.

When I joined a dog-friendly co-working space in the historic part of downtown, one of the membership perks was access to a bathroom with a shower. Knowing my situation, the owners extended my building perks to Irish as well. We took full advantage of the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week access to time our showers when no one else was at the co-working space.

Laundromat

When we had a vehicle, we had the luxury of going to the more affordable laundromats in the city. Once we became vehicle-less, our options were limited to whatever laundromat was closest to us.

The cost of doing a week’s worth of laundry was $30-$40, depending on the quality of the machines and how many cycles we had to put our clothes through.

Public Transit

One of the things we always considered whenever we looked for a place to park our RV was the proximity to public transportation. Our vehicle situation was always uncertain — there would be days when we had no money for gas or it wouldn’t run because it needed a repair of some kind. If we needed to go somewhere, we’d need to be able to get to a bus or MAX line.

While we both qualified for low-income public transportation rates ($1.25 for a two-and-a-half-hour pass and $2.50 for a day pass), our applications were denied repeatedly. Most of the time, if we requested reduced fare tickets, the drivers gave them to us with no question — especially the ones who knew where we stayed. We could also buy reduced-fare passes from MAX stations.

But had we been asked by transit security to produce the ID card that allowed us to have low-income fare tickets, we’d have faced citations and court appearances.

Unless we had no other choice, we paid the standard fare for day passes whenever we needed to go somewhere. We couldn’t take the chance that our errands would take longer than the expiration time on a two-and-a-half-hour pass. This meant $10 for us to go anywhere.

I didn’t learn until quite late that buying a plastic pass to load money onto was the more economical option. Once you’re charged $100 for rides, you ride for free for the rest of the month. Because there were months when we rode public transit every day, this saved up to $55 per person.

Household Items

RVs need the same things that normal homes require. Toilet paper, paper towels, garbage bags, kitchen items like plastic wrap/aluminum foil/storage bags, cleaning supplies, dish detergent, sponges, shampoo, soap, deodorant, razors, toothpaste and toothbrushes, menstrual items, laundry supplies, first aid items, OTC medications, and dog food.

Occasionally, charitable volunteers included some of these things in the care packages they distributed, but that was rare. There are so many communities of unhoused all over the city that the demand for resources is greater than the supply. When we received things of this nature, we always created stockpiles to get us through the dry spells in our finances.

Then there were things like clothing that was ruined by mold or when Irish worked on the car or the generator. Shoes, socks, and coats that fell apart. After we no longer had a generator, we spent nearly $50 a month on batteries for lanterns we hung around the RV for light when it was dark. Whenever a lantern stopped working, a replacement had to be bought.

Theft is also a huge problem when you’re homeless. I’m still raw about arriving back at our RV one evening to discover someone had forced the door open and filled one of Irish’s large backpacks with new winter clothing and boots I had just bought for him a few days earlier. I know they filled a backpack because it was missing, too.

Food

The food decisions of housed people are very different from the food decisions someone makes when they’re homeless. Because we had intermittent power, our RV refrigerator was useless for keeping anything cold during the warmer months. We replaced condiments every few weeks. We tried using large coolers filled with ice to keep food chilled, but they were no match for keeping up with temperatures that broke 100 for days.

Instead, we had to grocery shop daily, which any budgeting expert would tell you is a terrible idea. I had to cook meals we could eat in one sitting, or we fed neighbors so the food wouldn’t go to waste. We fed a lot of people during our time on the street.

Sometimes I was too exhausted from working all day, grocery shopping, and riding home to cook from scratch every night. After long days, premade frozen meals were all I could manage and we paid the price for that convenience.

Shopping like this caused us to go through our EBT funds halfway through the month. It wasn’t unusual for our monthly out-of-pocket food expenses to be as much as $250.

Generator Power

You saw what happened from 2020-2022 with prices at the gas pump when you needed gas for your car, truck, or SUV, right? Those of us who used generators for electricity felt the pain, too.

Irish and I set a generator gas limit of $25 a day, which bought us 4-6 gallons. Each week we spent $5 for a quart of oil to keep the engine lubricated to try to extend the life of the generator as long as possible.

The average generator gas tank holds between three and four gallons of gas, but how many hours of power you’ll get varies widely depending on the make, model, and engine condition.

The best-case scenario was 16 hours of run-time for newer Predator generator models. An average run-time was eight hours. The worst was one hour per gallon of gas when we had an old industrial model that was passed around from camp to camp.

When we used that generator, it was only at night for lights during dinner and charging my electronics before going to bed. As luck would have it, gas was at its highest price at that time.

In addition to the generator, we sometimes had a vehicle that needed gas. Irish tried to cover those costs with the money he brought in by canning, but it didn’t always work out that way. Gas costs drained our finances every week.

It wasn’t until we gave our last generator away and went without any power that I could start saving money for an apartment. I still can’t believe we lived so primitively within the limits of a medium-sized city.

We Did the Best We Could

From the moment we were on the street, our goal was to figure out how to create the most normal life we could with what we had. It took trial and error to figure things out, and some mistakes were more costly than others. Each time something changed — moving to a different location, losing our vehicle, being without a generator — we had to adapt and make adjustments to compensate.

It was exhausting to meet our basic daily survival needs. Some days, the effort was too much. We felt defeated and hopeless. There were moments when I doubted it was possible to return to traditional housed life. I even believed we’d die as homeless people.

When I look around me now, I’m amazed and grateful that we live in this apartment after all we went through.

And every day I’m afraid something terrible will happen and we’ll end up back there again.