Recently we had the opportunity to work with two van lifers who have inspired us throughout our journey as a van company. Lovell and Paris of Novel Kulture are true trailblazers when it comes to using van life as a means of gaining financial independence, building wealth, and living a flexible lifestyle perfectly suited to their needs. They met in the Navy and moved into their van nearly four years ago in an effort to pay off debt, achieve more mobility, and take control of their finances while studying at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
When they first moved into their van full time, if you scrolled through #vanlife on social media, you would see an overwhelmingly white community of van lifers living seemingly idyllic lives on the road. There was very little representation for people of color in the community. Now, thanks in part to Lovell and Paris, you will find a robust and rapidly growing community of BIPOC van lifers. Lovell and Paris were and continue to be pivotal in the ongoing diversification of the van lifestyle. Their channels help people understand the considerable upsides of this alternative way of living, but they don’t sugar coat the often difficult realities of van life, including the racial adversity they have faced.
At the end of last year, we invited Lovell and Paris to take over our Instagram account and do a Q&A for our followers. They shared a wealth of valuable insight into their journey and into the lifestyle in general. Check out the transcript of that conversation below, or watch the video here.
Q & A with Lovell & Paris:
Lovell: Hey, how’s it going?
Paris: Hello.
Lovell: My name is Lovell.
Paris: And my name is Paris.
Lovell: And we are Novel Kulture.
Paris: Novel Kulture!
Lovell: And we are taking over Dave & Matt’s Instagram to do a Q&A. We have some questions that you guys have asked, so we’re going to get into the questions!
Q: What was your first week of van life like?
P: My first week of van life? For the most part it was uncomfortable. It was so packed in our van that I did not want to sleep in there. And sleeping was not comfortable either because we didn’t have a nice comfortable bed. It was hard and very uncomfortable.
L: Yeah we had the foam one you get from Walmart, with the bumps in it. We had it folded over, and that was our bed with a pillow. Definitely sleeping is very important, you spend a lot of time in the bed.
Our first week for me, we were moving out of our apartment, we were selling a bunch of extra stuff. So there was no room to sleep in the van when we moved into it for the first day, officially. The first night we were running around LA to houses of people who wanted to buy our lamps, phones, and other things that we were able to get sold before we moved into the van. So it was definitely rewarding when we were finally able to sleep in the van.
Q: What are some of the favorite places that you’ve parked?
L: We have lived in the van in quite a few places. [To Paris] What was your all time favorite spot to park? I think we might have the same answer.
P: No, you go first, I have to think about that. You go first!
L: Ok, I would say my favorite place to park was Pismo Beach, CA. It’s a drive-on beach in between LA and San Francisco. It was great. We got stuck quite a few times but it was basically like camping on the beach in the van. So that was the best place for me.
P: That was amazing. Yeah, I would have said that was my best place too because I enjoyed that. Every time I think about being on a beach, I never think about driving and sleeping on the beach. That was something I had never experienced and Lovell had never experienced, it was amazing. We tried to set up a little fire…
L: Yeah we tried, failed though, failed though. But we’ll get it in the future. But if you guys have any questions, of course, by all means, ask them here in this feed.
Q: What would you like to see changed in the van life community?
P: That’s a good question. What I want to see changed in the van life community are the regulations. I’m a city girl, I like being in the city, and I don’t always want to have to drive out in nature to park. Because we do it full time, we live in the van full time, so I want to see city ordinances changed about living in your vehicle. I know many cities have ordinances that you can’t live in your vehicle, but I think it should be changed because we are city dwellers. There should be things put in place where it can be safe for everyone.
L: Yeah it doesn’t have to be us being “creepy” and having the police called on us. There’s gotta be a middle ground, there’s gotta be a mutually beneficial arrangement as society demands.
Q: Where do you see van life going in the next three years?
L: Well, we’ve been in van life for about four years, if you asked me that question at the beginning, I would not have imagined the vocal attempt to include more diverse individuals in the community. When we first moved into the van, it was very difficult to find a diverse set of stories that you can relate to in terms of looking for van builds, looking for stories that inspire you to decide to get into van life.
And I would say [now] there’s definitely a lot more. Even more than I can catch up on. Being a full time student I hop onto YouTube and boom, there’s all these stories that I would’ve never seen when we first moved into the van. Never thought we would see. We met our first couple who are also van lifers, in Atlanta, the Adventure Allens. So go ahead and check them out.
P: That was the first Black couple we met in our van life journey. We met another couple.
L: They were from Switzerland. I tried to look them up the other day, they must have changed their username.
Q: Can you park overnight in a shopping center for free?
L: We tried parking overnight in a shopping center, but we had to ignore somebody knocking on the window. So I don’t know if I would recommend that.
P: If you meant a shopping center like Walmart, we’ve parked at Walmart when we were on the road. I think that’s free.
Q: Where do you hang your clothes?
P: Well I don’t usually hang my clothes but Lovell hangs his clothes annoyingly. We have this window protector that protects against people breaking in, it’s like a gate, and Lovell hangs his garment bag on that. He has his clothes in a garment bag that folds up and hooks onto the window racks.
L: It’s like, if you’ve seen those post office vans, the minivans, or some work vans you’ll see have this grate that will stop people busting in and taking the valuables. It’s very useful to have all of those hooks up there. They’re not really hooks but they’re sturdy and a place to put my garment bag.
P: It works.
Q: What has made you decide to continue living full time in the van after you reached some of your first financial goals?
L: I know there was some thought in asking that question.
P: So we actually went down to LA to do the Dave & Matt Van profile, and we were just sitting in the van and looking at how nice the van was. We were talking and we were like, “You know what? We got some money saved up, and we actually can do this again.” We talked about it during the whole shoot, and it was a long shoot. And we were like, “You know what? We’re gonna do it, we’re gonna get another van and we’re gonna do this van life again.”
L: Our plan was, after she graduates in the summer, we were going to buy a house. But we realized that since we wanted to buy the house cash, we wanted it to be a little bit more than just paint and carpet. We wanted it to be more than an investment property, we wanted to stay there for 3-5 years. It wasn’t like, “Well we can go in and flip it and sell it.” We wanted to live there. And in order to acquire that we wanted to do it cash. We wanted to do it all in cash.
Since we knew it was too soon for us to acquire it all cash we said, “Well, while we plan and look forward to the future that we’ll be doing this, let’s improve our living quality, let’s improve our ability to shoot films and do work on the road and also be students.”
The sprinter we’re sitting in is a 2012 Freightliner Sprinter 170 EXT, and it’s going to be our workhorse until we save up enough to buy the house we want in cash. And we feel that this will be able to do it. Plus we loved doing it for the three and a half, four years that we have, in our low roof Nissan van. Which is now on the market. So check out our Instagram page if you want to take a look. And we are about to put out a tour video with the Black Nomads Meetup. So definitely check that out.
Q: How long do you stay in one place at a time? Where are the longest places you’ve lived in the van?
L: That’s downtown San Francisco. That was the longest place that we’ve lived in the van. Being full time students our school, the Academy of Art University, is not a conventional university. It has buildings and real estate all over the city. So I might have class in one place and she might have class in another. And our van might be in the middle. And we need to commute to and from that place.
San Francisco is seven miles across, so wherever it was convenient for us to park, we parked. We learned valuable lessons of where not to park in San Francisco and some of the most beautiful views in San Francisco. It’s great all through the year. It’s like traveling all the time in such a small place. San Francisco is that place that we stayed for the longest.
Since COVID 19, we’ve been jumping around a little more since we didn’t want to be in San Francisco, and we didn’t want to be in California either without a support group as we were making this transition. I’m graduating next week and we were definitely looking forward to being back on the road in our van.
Q: Aside from owning a van with little to no rent, what was another factor of van life that helped you pay off debt?
L: Rent was our biggest expense in LA. So that definitely did help us. And Paris and I are former United States Navy veterans and are currently taking advantage of our educational benefits. So that definitely helps us in terms of, as long as we’re in school, as long as we’re doing our job, and that is getting an education and not becoming a statistic of an uneducated homeless veteran, our job is to go to school. We picked a career based on what we wanted to do when we got out, and that would also be supported by wherever we lived, and that’s van life, and being digital nomads.
Budgeting is really important. You can be rich, but if your priorities and your budget are not straight, your emergency fund is not straight, then hurdles will come. As we all know, they will come, it’s inevitable. And if you’re not ready for them, it’s like throwing a wrench into your engine compartment. And that’s not gonna be good. So expectations, priorities, and budgeting helped us.
Q: What advice would you give someone transitioning into full time van life for the first time?
P: The advice that I would give someone transitioning into van life, I would say make sure you know your “why.” Because your why is really important. There were times where I was like, “I really want to stop doing van life,” because it was so hard. People were breaking in, we were getting harassed by cops, it was just too much for me to bear. I was stressed, I was depressed. So, I would just remember your why, because without Lovell always reminding us of our why, and saying, “Look, we said we were going to do this, let’s continue to do this, and we’re gonna make it through.” That why was what really helped us. And if you don’t know your why, you gotta figure out your why before you do van life. Because it’s not an easy journey. It’s not easy.
Q: What are your favorite places you have been to?
P: Yeah that was Pismo Beach, that was an amazing place. There are a lot of places where you can park on the dunes. It was basically a dune beach, you can park on it overnight or however many days you want to park. And you’re gonna get stuck probably, but it was an amazing spot. You just wake up to the beach and the water and hearing the waves, and just being alone was amazing.
L: I would say just to add to that, cause we don’t want to give the same answer as the first time. We went to quite a few places irresponsibly. We took a 16,000 mile road trip soon after we moved into the van. We sold all our stuff and went all around the country and got to see many things that we never experienced. And we got to experience it together in the van. So many places. I would say going to Vancouver.
P: Oh yeah that was nice! Going to Toronto was really nice too. Canada!
L: So many places. New York, I went to New York with her for the first time.
P: Yeah that was fun!
L: We roller skated. It was dead of winter and we roller skated through downtown, which was cool.
P: Minnesota. It was -14 degrees, that was amazing.
L: Yeah that was definitely cool as well.
Q: What is your favorite simple meal to make in the van?
P: I would say that’s bagged rice and tuna.
L: Ugh.
P: Lovell may not like it but it’s the simplest, quickest, and cheapest meal. You know those little tuna packets and the bag of brown rice.
L: Yeah we survived off of rice and tuna. I’m talking, we get the rice in bulk, we get the tuna, we take it to school. We put the bagged rice that you’re supposed to boil in a pot, we put it in the school microwave, split it in half into two tupperwares, and we would each get a pack of tuna in a variety of flavors. And we survived off of that for a long time.
So here’s the last couple questions. I like this question.
Q: Are there any unexpected van life expenses that you hadn’t planned for?
L: When searching for van life, you have to find these little niches within the RV and van life community. So the first one has to do with the van that we are sitting in right now, that was an unexpected van life expense.
But not even this one, in the one we are looking to sell, what were some unexpected expenses.
P: I would say that an unexpected expense was paying for deductibles. At times we didn’t have money to pay for deductibles. So when things happened and we had to use our insurance, we had to figure out a way to pay this $500 deductible.
L: One of the things we did was, even though it costs more for the premium, we put our comprehensive and collision deductibles at $50, because it wouldn’t impoverish us in our journey or in school if someone decides to break our window, we don’t have to come up with the money out of pocket. And since our emergency fund at the time wasn’t where it needed to be, we felt it would be a smart move to temporarily put our deductible at $50, so that we could get that window replaced real quick, cause there was no hotel that we were going to sleep in. It was a bag taped around the window until the next week generally, because it was always at the end of the week. And the insurance we had was closed on the weekends. So we had to wait.
And then with this van, within a month of owning it, I put a half a tank of gasoline in the diesel fuel tank, and did not know that I did it. And continued to drive, and it stopped on us. We had to pay $100 for the tow, took it to three shops and it came out to be nearly $6,000. So if you want to check that out go ahead and go to our YouTube channel, which is Novel Kulture, and our Instagram, @lovellandparis, you’ll see some of the posts about it up there.
Really that only applies if you have a diesel. Don’t put gas in it.
Q: What do you use for internet on the road?
L: We have better plans for this van, but currently, and before COVID 19, a lot of libraries, and a lot of Starbucks. A lot of creepy Starbucks stories at four in the morning with the homeless people who frequent the 24 hour Starbucks in San Francisco.
And then the school libraries, the public library, coffee shops and Starbucks. That is what we did for internet and no, it was not fun.
P: And our personal hotspot too.
L: Our phone hotspot is great but when you’re on the wire trying to submit something or trying to upload something, it’s not going to cut it.
We plan on doing a Mobile Must Have, they are for RV’ers and campers, people who have really heavy hitting jobs, they need serious solutions. Say for example you get Xfinity with your home, or ATT Uverse, or whatever you get with your house or apartment, it’s like one of their bundles where you put an antenna up and have a router with a phone plan, and it will give you nearly home quality wifi.
So that’s definitely what we’re looking forward to, being digital nomads in this van and running our business, our production company, and our YouTube channel, from anywhere in the country.
We’d like to wrap it up today, we’d like to thank you. And we’re gonna give DM Vans their Instagram page back. If you have any other questions, you can DM us directly, again, our channel is @lovellandparis on Instagram and Novel Kulture on YouTube.
P: Thank you all for joining, and we’ll see you next time!
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