How one couple lived their #VanLife dream and saved for a house deposit at the same time

In the middle of last year, Catherine Coomans, 29, and her partner Tom Low, 32, found themselves on a walk in the middle of the Blue Mountains, accidentally making life-changing decisions about their future.

Their landlord had raised their rent, they were both working full-time, trying to run a business together at home and increasingly finding themselves without the time, inclination or energy to travel.

“One day we were going for a walk in the Blue Mountains and we decided, ‘This just isn’t it. This isn’t for us,’ Coomans says. “We put in our notice to our real estate agent that afternoon and made the immediate decision to go and buy a bus.

“Tom always had a dream to go around Australia in a bus, and we just thought, ‘If we don’t do it now, when will we?’ ”

Rent was equalling about $500 a week for both of them, and with work suffocating their sense of balance, the decision was swift and relatively easy.

“There were four months between making that decision and leaving,” Coomans says. “Two weeks after that conversation, we had bought the bus — it was a really speedy process. We had two weeks in Sydney and then we moved back home to Bathurst to save some money.”

While their decision isn’t uncommon, what with the rise of grown-up gap years and the #Vanlife movement, the way Coomans and Low have managed to save enough money for a house deposit in the process certainly is.

After all, those who decide the van life is theirs for the taking almost exclusively forgo the white-picket-fence dream. The experience is often about balance and perspective, with the inability to save money an inevitable by-product of the adventure.

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“It was about finding a balance [between saving money and travelling],” Coomans says. “We were so stressed, we loved travel and we weren’t travelling as much as we would have liked. We didn’t feel like we had balance and so we wanted to combine things we were passionate about. We wanted to keep traveling, we needed to earn money and wanted save money as we went. So, we found a way to do it all.”

The first thing the couple had to do was spend money to save money. They spent $22,000 on a 1997 Toyota Coaster, and a further $10,000 on renovating their new home.

“There were a few things we needed:  we really needed to have an office area, I really wanted to have a toilet and bathroom in there and a really comfy bed,” Coomans says. “And because we work online, we needed a solar setup big enough to run both our computers.

“The biggest saving is that we aren’t paying any utilities or rent. Our van is completely off-the-grid so we have no electricity bill. Our gas costs us about $17 a month. Rent-wise, we aren’t paying anything so our biggest cost is probably diesel.”

And then, of course, there are the lifestyle factors that mean spending money on frivolous treats is often not an option.

“It’s not that you try not to buy, it’s just that when you’re in a shop and looking at something, you realise very quickly that you actually have nowhere to put it,” Coomans says. “We are getting really used to living with less.”

However, in a year the couple have saved enough for a house deposit in an increasingly difficult market to squeeze in to.

“Meeting a lot of people on the road, you learn that you can spend as much and as little as you like. If you’re eating out and doing every single tourist activity and moving to a different place every day, the cost is so much higher.

“Our week is a working week and we make sure of that,”Coomans says. “We know it’s easy to spend to money because you’re on holidays all the time. Our goal is to try and start looking in the housing market pretty soon in our home area and buy an investment property to get some renters in there as we travel.”

The last 12 months have seen the couple travel up north to Queensland, down the Victorian coastline, across South Australia, up the middle of Australia and, most recently, onto the Western Australian coast. They see the next 12 months as being spent on the east coast of the country before snaking their way down to Tasmania.

“We have gotten really used to change and moving every day and we really enjoy it,” Coomans says, acknowledging the eventual move home will be hard.

“We didn’t know how it would go, but it’s certainly been a wonderful 12 months.”