This week, I’m talking about the decision to rent vs. buy. Anytime you’re contemplating a large purchase, you should always seriously ask: Does it make sense to rent instead? 

Today, I’m looking at the rent vs. buy decision from the point of view of an RV. Now if I’m being honest, I would go out and buy an RV or some kind of camper right now if I knew my husband wouldn’t freak out and have divorce papers drafted in response. He wants a beach house, I want an RV, and unfortunately, I don’t think either of us are going to get what we want. 

Just like buying a vacation home, RVs can often be very expensive and sit unused for much of the year. One big reason why you wouldn't want to buy an RV is because it’s a depreciating asset. I read online that the value drops as much as 40% in the first 2 years - yikes! Then there’s insurance, interest costs to consider since most people take out a loan to buy the RV, storage fees, camping fees, the extra gas costs, etc. 

These all need to be factored in with the expected frequency of use. This is one area especially where I think it makes a lot of sense to rent, since you can also try out different types of RVs, get a realistic picture of how often you’ll actually use it before you drop $50,000 to 100,000+ on something. 

So if you have dreams of travelling the country in your camper trailer, just be sure that you calculate the true cost of ownership and your expected usage, to see if it might make more sense to rent when you need to and leave the headaches and depreciation for someone else to worry about. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening. My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip. 

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