Nerd Nomad

A fellow named Noah, who is also wanting to try out living in an RV for a while, sent me an email yesterday asking about how long it took me to buy my RV, and whether 30 days would be enough time. I rambled quite a bit on the subject, and figured it’d be worth posting that reply to the blog, as well. So, here’s how I replied, with a few minor edits and additions.

I gave myself a deadline of one month.

It was a pretty hard deadline, too…I gave my 30 day notice to my landlord, though I ended up staying an extra two weeks because moving and getting rid of stuff took longer than planned. I maybe did this faster than is rational. I decided to do it at the end of November, gave my notice a day or two after, and had purchased the RV by the end of December. There wasn’t really any “think it over” phase for me; it just clicked as being the right choice for me right now. I’ve blogged about why I’m doing this and what triggered my decision, so I won’t go into that much.

One month would have actually been plenty for just buying an RV, but I got side-tracked for about two weeks trying to get a loan for a slightly newer/nicer RV than what I ended up with (now I’m really glad I couldn’t get the loan, as the one I did get is still bigger than I need), and I mostly stopped shopping during that time. It was also around Christmas which meant many dealers were closed and individuals weren’t available to show their coaches. If you plan to get a loan, you should talk to a lender early in the process; I couldn’t figure out how to get a pre-approval without having a seller and a vehicle model/year, but I think if you deal with a loan broker, you can get some sort of pre-approval before shopping. Knowing how much you can/want to spend can narrow the field way down.

I did have to do some serious driving to find my RV; densely populated areas don’t have RV dealers or RV storage (where you’ll find RVs being sold by individuals, in many cases), and I have a flexible schedule, so I spent maybe 10 days driving from dealer to dealer, all over San Jose, Roseville, Sacramento, and several other places, and checking out promising eBay/craigslist listings. Find the area with a lot of RV dealers, and you’ll also find that a lot of individuals are also selling around the same area. RVs tend to cluster around service centers, RV parks, etc. and so that’s where they’ll be for sale, either on a lot or in storage. I found my RV in Sacramento, and when my deadline arrived I drove to Sacramento knowing that I would own an RV by the end of the day, even if I couldn’t get the one that I wanted (I had three lined up for checking out that day, and happened to buy the first one as it had no major issues).

Here’s some advice that I heard before buying, that I wish I’d taken more heed of: Your first RV will not be the perfect RV. You’ll make a list of all the things you want, size, class, and all that stuff, and then you’ll find that it doesn’t perfectly fit the way you end up living in your RV. I heard this over and over again, but I thought I knew my own tastes and needs really well (we clever software developers think we know everything and can figure out any problem by searching the Internet). So, when you have a chance to spend less or get a better deal (one that is well below NADA), while still being a reasonably good fit for what you think you want, do that. Don’t stretch your budget to get into a super awesome seeming rig…buy one you can afford to treat as a learning experience. I ended up being forced into doing so by the inability to get a loan, so I was lucky. Now, when I sell this one, I’ll have less depreciation (cheaper/older rigs depreciate less each year, assuming no major problems crop up during ownership), and I have no debt to get paid off before buying another rig. This one also happened to be a slightly better deal than the “perfect” coach on a pure NADA price comparison (87% of low NADA retail vs. 90%), though the other one was in somewhat better condition.

Another bit of advice: Don’t buy a fixer-upper. You can’t afford it. No matter how cheap it looks, the cost of repairs and refurbishing an old RV are astronomically high. Everything in an RV is a specialty item, and costs two or three times what the same thing in a permanent home would cost, these big chassis/engines are really expensive to work on, even replacing the tires costs well over $1000. So, if you have to replace any major appliance or perform major engine or chassis work, you’re already in the hole (possibly deeply). RVs already have a ridiculously rapid depreciation rate (20% first year, 10%/year, or more, in the first few years; it’s like cars, only moreso), so you almost certainly can’t buy an RV in need of repairs that is a better deal than one in perfect working condition. And, of course, shit breaks all the time, even on an RV in great shape to start with. I just did a slew of minor repairs and my RV stayed “perfect” for about two days a couple of weeks ago, and then shit started falling apart again. I’ve got four or five outstanding repairs right now.

I seriously considered getting an old Airstream Argosy motorhome and fixing it up, as they are beautiful and I’d located one nearby for a few thousand dollars with reportedly no chassis or engine issues. I’m pretty handy, and don’t mind getting my hands dirty, but when I started doing the math on refurbishing an old coach, the costs simply exploded. It would have cost more than a much newer/larger unit to bring it up to modern standards, even without counting my time in the equation (and, these days, my time is pretty expensive). I had to remind myself that I needed a place to live, not another project to work on.

Also, I found that a lot of dealers haven’t accepted that RVs aren’t selling very fast right now…so they’re still charging high end of NADA retail, or even more, and they aren’t negotiating. A few were downright haughty when I asked about their lowest price, and pointed out that they were asking several points above NADA retail. Walk away from those dealers. There are incredibly good deals to be had right now…and, since I’ve decided that I want a different RV, I’ve continued shopping craigslist, and the deals seem to continue to get better. Don’t pay more than low-mid NADA retail (pay mid for a flawless coach, less for anything less than flawless), and you’ll be fine. The trend I noticed in my area was that dealers that mostly carried new inventory were less willing to deal on their used inventory (I guess because it would make the new inventory look really expensive…which it is, and they make a lot more on a new sale than a used one), while dealers who only sold used tended to have good prices to start with, and were often a bit more flexible on price.

Anyway, I set myself a deadline because my cost of living in Mountain View was so high that I could afford to make a mistake of up to a couple grand and still come out ahead by buying more quickly. Since I was paying $2145/month for the house, plus a couple hundred in utilities, and I knew RV living would be dramatically cheaper, I just trusted that even if I really screwed up the purchase and bought something that needed work, I’d still come out ahead over staying in the house for another month or two. If my housing were cheaper, I might have taken longer. I was also going stir-crazy living in Mountain View, and it was cold and dark, and I hate the cold, so I also rushed for that reason.

So, to distill this down to some bullet points:

• Spend less, accept that the first is a learning experience and not your forever RV
• Do your research; NADA provides retail price information for free
• No fixer uppers; you probably can’t afford it, and it’s hard to live in a place that has been gutted for refurbishment
• You’re going to have to drive to get a good deal, unless you happen to live in an RV-dense area
• Loans are hard to get for RVs right now; so line up credit in advance, if you plan to get a loan, because it can take days to get an answer, and sellers won’t hold a coach if you don’t have some sort of pre-approval