From Debt to Freedom: Aja's Van Life Story

In this episode, Aja Villacrez shares her inspiring journey of her van life, living and traveling full-time in her self-converted camper van. She discusses her nomadic family background, motivations for choosing van life, and the financial independence it has afforded her. Aja also delves into her experience as a YouTube creator, focusing on empowering women in the van life community and the personal growth she has experienced through this lifestyle.

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Transcript

Less House More Moola podcast (00:05.974)
It takes a brave and independent mindset to go tiny. If you are trying to figure out your tiny pivot, this podcast is here to inspire and connect you with the other unconventional, gritty, inspirational people within this community. I am Laura Lynch, your tiny house friend and host. On this show, we are always going to come back to money because as a financial planner, this is the question I hear the most. How do I make this work for me financially?

Well, that's my jam, so jump in, let's go. New episodes drop every Thursday.

Less House More Moola podcast (00:43.448)
Well, Aja Villacres, welcome to Less House More Moola podcast. I'm super excited that we are getting to have this conversation after we ran into each other in San Jose at a tiny fest. That was a really fun event. So thanks for joining me. Yes. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm so excited. I think your story is just so impactful and I feel like you're such a gosh go getter and independent.

person out there making your dreams a reality. And so I hope that listeners will really feel inspired by your story. So to get us started, would you introduce yourself and talk about your van life rig? Yes, thank you so much. So like you said, my name is Asia and I've been living and traveling full time out of my self converted camper van. have a 1990 Chevy Astro van that I live and travel out of.

I got her in 2020 and that's just kind of been my whole life since I got her. I love her so much. So yeah, I just live and travel full time in the Astro van. And then I also started a YouTube channel this year documenting my solo female van life journey. I started in January, so we're coming up on one year on the channel.

That's so awesome. You know, it's so many content creators out there in van life. So we'll definitely get into that more as far as the theme of your channel. But when you and I talked before, you mentioned to me that your family is nomadic, which I'm super curious about, not something that we hear so much in terms of prior generations being nomadic. So can you talk about what that was like for you? Yeah, totally. I know,

Everyone is so surprised when I say that my family's nomadic and contrary to popular belief, a lot of people think I grew up that way, but I actually didn't. I grew up in a very traditional, just like American household in a small town in Washington state with my brother. He's four years younger than me. My mom was a stay at home mom and my dad was a full time photographer. We had the family dog, the whole thing.

Less House More Moola podcast (02:57.752)
but we always loved traveling when we could and we loved camping. And my parents always said like, once you and your brother are old enough and have graduated high school and moved out of the house, we're gonna travel full time. That's what we want to do. My parents always said that. And then their marriage kind of fell apart and they split up when I was around 17 years old. And around that time, it was like the split was coming at the same.

time roughly that my brother and I were gonna be graduating high school and moving out. So they're very similar people. They both wanted to travel, whether they're with each other or not. So after the split, they both just post divorce, got their own rigs. So my mom got an RV at the time, and then my dad got an old military truck. It's actually really cool. It's a 1954 Dodge M152. It was a command truck in the Canadian army.

And that's what he lives and travels in still to this day. But yeah, they both just hit the road around 2016, 2017, and they just traveled full-time independently. Totally inspired. My brother and I, my brother got a van even before me. So I was the late bloomer. I finally got a van at the end of 2020. So I didn't grow up that way, but they heavily inspired me. I was lucky enough to travel a little bit with my mom at the beginning of 2020 before I got my van in her RV. We quarantined together.

And that was kind of the catalyst for me to finally bite the bullet because I just, loved it so much. So then I finally got my own. So that's kind of the story behind my family. So that's so amazing. So do you all like rendezvous for special events in your favorite parking places or like, how does that work when you don't have like a, like a specific home base for everybody? It's kind of like coordinating with everybody's travel schedules.

Yeah, totally. We all have each other's locations, so it's kind of fun to just like see where each other is. And it's helpful too if one of us isn't out of service, we can kind of see at least where they were when they last had service. We try and rendezvous when we can, but my brother actually just recently enlisted in the army, so he's not traveling as of right now. He went in to actually become a wheeled vehicle mechanic. So his van is at a family member's house, but...

Less House More Moola podcast (05:18.286)
Yeah, we loved to just rendezvous and travel together when we can, but most of the time we're just independently on the road. Home base wise, we don't have one. And I remember when I first moved out, I moved to San Francisco in 2016. So I was renting for years before I got my van and I always loved traveling when I could, but it was expensive because I had such high rent. And like when I moved out and moved to San Francisco, that's when my parents like...

got their rigs and just started living nomadically. So in the beginning in my early twenties, it was kind of weird and so non-traditional to not have a family home to go back to during maybe holidays or stuff like that because like, yeah, I was renting had a spot in San Francisco, but my parents didn't. There was no family home to go back to. It was so not traditional. And now it's even more non-traditional with all of us being kind of nomadic. But my aunt, my aunt Nick, she has a house that we tend to.

kind of rendezvous and go to during holidays and stuff, but it's just non-traditional. Like we've spent holidays together just on the road, boondocking together, and that's fun too. My parents also, they're still friends and they're still close even though they're divorced, which is really cool. So we can all still as a family hang out, which is really unique.

and cool too. That's so amazing. it sounds like that the rent that you were paying might have been one of the reasons why you chose to get a van and go out on your own. What were the other reasons motivating that choice? Yeah, totally. Rent was a huge one. I've always been a traveler at heart. were a couple, there were a lot of, there were like three or four main reasons I chose to get a van and pursue the lifestyle. Money was a big one. I've never had just a lot of money. I've always been,

a photographer, I've been a photographer for 10 years, multimedia artist, just like a freelance artist and I've tended not to make a ton of money but I've loved traveling and I've traveled a lot solo and with people and it's always been on the cheap like staying at hostels, getting the cheap flights, that kind of thing but I've always, I was always so restless and I got bored easy just being in a regular traditional house and seeing my family doing it and making friends that are nomads

Less House More Moola podcast (07:28.364)
I just really wanted to do that and be able to have the luxury of being able to go and it be relatively affordable with because I don't have to get a hotel and I don't have to eat out all the time. I cook my own food and I stay in my van. So money was a big factor because I knew I could cut rent, be able to travel in the van. My only expense really being just the small bills I had outside of rent and then gas and car insurance and just maintenance on the van.

And then I also was and still am in student loan debt and I hate being in debt. So I thought, well, like why not throw the thousands of dollars I'm throwing at rent at my student loan debt as well. And so I got the van at the end of 2020 and it was around this time I also did the math and figured out like how long realistically it would take me.

for me to pay off my student loan debt with interest compounding. I'd ultimately spend way more, pay way more on it because of interest, because all I could ever afford were the minimum repayment methods because of rent. So that was another huge reason why I got the van. I could throw my rent money essentially at the debt. And that's been amazing and life-changing already for my debt. I've already paid so much off, which is just incredible. And it's all because of me choosing to...

pursue van life really and just throw the money at it instead. Yeah, there aren't very many people I think who go into their, you know, first rounds of debt, you know, whether that's credit cards or student loans or what have you and really conceptually understand how those interest charges are going to impact the trajectory of their ability to pay it off for one or even the full amount of, of what you're purchasing. Because to your point, right, if you,

you know, by a couple of semesters of college with student loans, that interest that you will have, you know, maybe may make the amount due twice as much over the course of that loan. And so you don't even realize, Hey, you think you're, you know, just spending $20,000, but ultimately you may end up paying $40,000 by the time you pay that offer perhaps even more. So I'm so curious, like how did you come to be aware of how that

Less House More Moola podcast (09:51.308)
works in terms of the interest charges and the total amount of the debt. And how did you get like so motivated to tackle that and to make such a severe life, you know, decision or significant life decision in order to tackle that? Because most people are just sort of, you know, passing the buck and dealing with that later, but you were very proactive. Totally. I think it like, to put it simply just boils down to,

bills. I'm like always, even when I was a kid, just always preferred not having huge bills. I just hate huge bills and I just, I think I, I don't know if I was listening to podcasts or watching finance YouTube videos about debt or something, but I was kind of diving into just researching like realistically how long will it take for me to pay this off? And yeah, a lot of my friends are like fine with

just paying the minimum or paying a little bit more than the minimum every month and paying rent and just like staying in that cycle. And it's very, that's just how it is normally, especially for a lot of Americans. That's just what it is. But I don't know. There is just something about it for me that bugs me. I hate being in debt and I'm only in school student debt. And I just want to kick it as soon as possible. That like so much so that I was willing to literally up and move into a van to make it.

go away faster. I don't really know. It's just something about me that I just hate the idea of being in debt and I love the idea of keeping my expenses as low as possible so that I can just travel as much as I want. Ultimately, you know, I love van life and I love traveling and I love international travel too and that can get expensive. and I just, think life is short and I want to

spend my money the way I want to spend it. don't want to keep putting it, I don't know, towards debt. If I can instead make a huge lifestyle change to then get that debt just eliminated, if that makes sense. Yeah, it sounds like you very quickly figured out how hard you had to work for every mile of travel or how hard you had to work in order to live the life that you wanted to and the way that that debt and housing costs kept you from doing the things that you loved doing.

Less House More Moola podcast (12:13.77)
Absolutely, yeah. And I've been on my own also financially since I was about 18. I remember initially hating that and being jealous of my friends whose parents would just throw them a couple hundred dollars here and there or more if they needed help financially. And my parents didn't really do that and couldn't. We were never made of money. And they really wanted to teach me to be independent and to...

understand the value of a dollar and now I'm so grateful for that and I understand like it I think better than some of my other friends it just depends but I just really want to prioritize my money going towards something to benefit my life instead of paying off something. I don't regret going to school I loved it I loved my experience but gosh it was so expensive and I'm still paying it off. I don't even remember I ended up even dropping out and I'm still in debt.

I went to school in San Francisco. I think I dropped out in 2018. So I'm still paying that off, but I've paid off so much more than I would have ever because I moved into the van and just started. literally took what I was paying for rent and just started putting that down onto my debt. And that's just been an amazing change in it being paid off way faster, obviously. For sure. So earlier you mentioned

that you're one year into a YouTube channel. tell us what life is like as a YouTube creator. I know. my gosh. Busy. It is so busy. It's so much work than I realized. I knew it'd be a lot of work, but it's crazy. already work full time jobs and YouTube is also 100 % a full time job. So I'm basically doing full time jobs. I never have a day off. It's crazy.

I post my post-theme schedule is a little more rigorous than some people. Some people do daily vlogs, which is wild, but I only post twice a week. But that's a lot. It's a lot to be creating two full-length videos twice a week. But at the same time, it's super creatively rewarding. Van life can be very spontaneous. I am a very spontaneous person as well. I love to fly by the seat of my pants. But, and sometimes like living like that, there really doesn't.

Less House More Moola podcast (14:29.24)
There really isn't much structure depending on how you're living the van life, you know? But needing to post and keep up my posting schedule twice a week, it's really kept me grounded and very disciplined and has given me some weekly structure which I really do enjoy and I really appreciate. And making my videos and editing them has quickly become my favorite form of art, my favorite medium. I've always been into photography and videography but it's quickly become my favorite outlet.

So that's cool too and I just, I love creating it. I love the idea that I can look back on my travels now. I did this for years before I started the channel and I don't regret not starting it earlier but I kinda wish I did because even now, I've almost hit a year documenting my travels and even now I already look back on old vlogs.

just to remember where I went, what I did, and kind get that feeling back from having been to that specific place. It's fun to look back on. then I also like the idea of inspiring other women to embark on this lifestyle. And if they're interested in pursuing van life, to know that it's more than possible to do it yourself. I want to create videos that prove that and inspire that independence in women as well.

So it's super fun being a YouTuber, but it's a lot of work, but it's, think overall more rewarding than like, there's more pros than cons to it, in my opinion. So I'm glad that you mentioned women because you you focus on the solo woman traveler narrative. So tell us about what advice you give to your followers or folks that you interact with women who are interested in the lifestyle. Yeah, absolutely.

I just, want to be an inspiration to other women who are interested in doing it, especially solo like you said. And as far as like advice goes, especially for women, I always say just like watch as much solo female van life for nomad creators on YouTube. That's like been a huge inspiration for me. And even now, even now that I'm doing it and have been doing it.

Less House More Moola podcast (16:43.956)
I love watching them on YouTube and even if they're not making necessarily educational content for solo female fan lifers or nomads, just simply watching their vlogs and seeing how they live their life, how their build is, that can be inspiring and can kind of show you how to live that life. And then another piece of advice that I like to give people and women especially if they're curious about the lifestyle but don't know where to even begin.

is to, if they don't have a friend or family member who has a rig already, to rent one. Rent a fully built out camper van for a weekend minimum, but the longer the better. I always say if they have a remote job, just do it for a month. And that'll really show you, in my opinion, what you like about it, what you don't like. It'll really put you out of your comfort zone, which is a good thing, because if you're interested in it, it is so...

non-traditional and alternative that it will put you out of your comfort zone and that is a good thing. And it'll also show you depending on what you rent, what you like about that build, if you would want a bigger rig or a smaller rig depending on your needs, that kind of thing. I looked it up too and there's a couple like good renter campervan renter companies. There's Outdoorsy and Turo. T-U-R-O.

I guess those are good ones that I might recommend. then local ones, at least if you're in the Bay Area, would be wander vans and Indy campers. But yeah, I'd say just watching and listening to people that already do it would be a good first step, at least. It reminds me of that expression, you can't see or you can't be what you can't see. And so many times I think back on all the things that I could have been or could have done now that I know myself better.

But nobody showed me a woman version of that and so it didn't, you know, occur to me like, you know, when I was in the military and, you know, my highest score on my, you know, military required test was mechanical, but I didn't know any, you know, sort of female engineers or female mechanics. So it wasn't something that ever even, you know, occurred to me, right?

Less House More Moola podcast (18:49.962)
So I love that you're showing women, you know, a version of themselves so that they can aspire and move in that direction because they can see themselves in what you're doing. I think that's one of the biggest pros of YouTube. That's just been so amazing for women to make channels or videos for other women to see that you can do it too for anything. Really, YouTube is amazing that way for showing anything and everything and that you can do it and learn so much.

YouTube is like a college. It's amazing how much you can learn on there. Yeah, for sure. So you have probably learned so much as you have been traveling. You know, I talk to people all the time, right? And they start off on their nomadic journey and all the problems that they encounter, right? You learn so much about your own ability to deal with problems and to solve problems. And you have

you know, learned how to work on the road and make money while being nomadic and save money and all of the things that you've already mentioned. But what are some of the other things you've learned about yourself as you've been out there on your own? I'd say it's proved so much independence in me. I feel like I was already pretty independent and self-sufficient. But my gosh, once you're on the road and you're really out there,

in the middle of nowhere with no service and a problem occurs or something's happening and you don't know where to go, like man, does that force you to become independent and a problem solver? And it's proven to me that I can do that and figure it out on the fly, which is just amazing. It's given me, also this lifestyle has given me so much more confidence in just who I am and...

in meeting other people too. It's such an alternative lifestyle and so many people are so interested. Like I don't have the most obvious camper van ever, but still when I pull up to just new places, people are curious and want to talk to me. And I feel like if you didn't have a camper van or you just flew into a new spot, that might not necessarily happen because you're not pulling up in a camper van or a van. So it's really.

Less House More Moola podcast (21:01.24)
pushed my comfort zone in a good way to get to know and talk to just the widest variety of people. I'm also super curious in ghost towns, abandoned places. I'm obsessed with the desert and areas like that tend to have some of the most unique people ever in good and bad ways. Some wild experiences I've had too that have really forced me to grow into becoming a more confident person and setting boundaries and just...

Living life totally by yourself and especially on the road makes you more vulnerable but has in turn made me more confident too in just different scenarios.

Yeah, I would think that that would either force you to become that or force you out of the lifestyle. Like you either grow or you get out. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not for everyone. hear that. Yeah. So glad that you took the growth route. Thank you. Well, that's also why I recommend people rent a van and just force yourself out of your comfort zone for like a month, especially if you work remote because you

You technically can, like work in cafes or libraries or get mobile wifi routers or whatever, just to see if you can do it. Even a month is like maybe not enough time, but that's a really big reason why I recommend renting a van before doing it. Or travel with someone like I traveled with my mom. Just kind of get a taste, know, because it's so... You would have no idea, as you know, like you would have no idea what it's really, really like.

I always say too, the highs are so high and then the lows can be so low where when you're in that low, it's like, I kind of want to quit. Like it can get so bad. Like when your rig isn't, I mean, I've had my rig break down and I'm quite literally homeless and have no money for days on end because it's just in the shop. I'm just living in public spaces because when it's out of service and in a shop.

Less House More Moola podcast (23:03.286)
I have to get a hotel, but if you have no money, like what is happening? I ended up, thankfully last time that happened, I broke down in San Francisco and have a lot of friends here so I could just stay with them, but they work full time. So I was just in public spaces all day until they were off work. And then I spent the night, then they were at work at six or 7 a.m. So I'm out too. So the lows can be so low, but again, the highs are just amazing. So it is quite a roller coaster. Yeah.

So you were saying that the highs are very high and the lows can be very low. I know this high and low feeling from so many of the adventures that I've had in my life. was telling another guest about how I used to sit at work and I would look on Google Maps on satellite and find the most remote road ever. wasn't even like a road.

Let's go there. And that can be, that can be terrifying and exhilarating. And yet it makes for the best stories, right? have the best life stories and the best memories. And if you're taking great photos, you can go back and say, my gosh, I learned how to deal with XYZ and that trip. And I saw the most amazing.

bend in the river that nobody has seen. found some old mining gear there out in the middle of the desert or old mine or whatever. It's just amazing that process of discovery of yourself and the land that we live on. Absolutely. I could not agree more. What other great thoughts do you have to share with us?

Man, you describing that just totally, I feel the exact same way. My favorite app is Google Maps. Just zooming in and out and seeing where remote roads, like you said, I love Death Valley. And so that's like one of my favorite places to zoom in and out and see where I could go and then actually go. So I think it's like a personality type because I think a lot of people who live on the road are like that too. But.

Less House More Moola podcast (25:11.894)
Also, I have so many friends who've never traveled like this that are so interested too. So that's also another reason I think my YouTube channel, people love it because I also get comments from people who are like, I would never do this, but I think it's so cool. And that's why I like kind of living vicariously through you and seeing where you go and seeing you go to super remote spots. gosh.

I'm so honored that I'm an inspiration to some people because other solo female fan lifers and nomads on YouTube have been an inspiration to me before I started and even now after I've started the channel too. I think that I've always been kind of...

an advocate for pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. And I think that that will always, almost always, depending, I mean, there can be a fine line. It can almost always be a beneficial thing for just anyone and especially for women, think, proving to ourselves that we can do it and we can do it alone. Doing it with people is also fun and should just be an added benefit, but you don't need anybody else necessarily to go and do and see the things that you want to see around the world.

or even in your own backyard. Yeah, for sure. Aisha, you've been, you know, so inspiring with your story and thank you for sharing it. Where can listeners find and follow you? Yeah, thank you so much. My YouTube channel is Strange Days Diaries, so I'm most active on there. You can find me there.

And then I also have Instagram, it's my full name, Aja Villacres, no spaces, also in the link, in the link, or in the bio in my Instagram is a link tree with my website and other links, but mostly I'm on YouTube and Instagram.

Less House More Moola podcast (26:55.778)
Well, thanks so much for being here today and for sharing your story. I love that you're working at it both because you're passionate about the lifestyle, but also because it's helping you accomplish your personal goals and so glad that you figured out early how to bring those two things together. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. This was so fun. Hey, thank you for taking the time to listen to Less House More Moolah. I have another free resource on my website for you.

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Please see the show notes for important disclosure regarding the tiny house advisor LLC in this episode.