New or used 5th wheel?

Thank you!

In the RV park we live in, there are 4 Jayco Designers of various ages. I think ours is the oldest. Jayco makes a solid unit if you buy a Designer. This park is right off the interstate, and it's rare we can hear the traffic. The 5er is well insulated and well-set up. I'd recommend a Jayco Designer anytime for full-time use!

We bought used for our foray into fulltiming...and she's a 1998. Solid as can be. She needed cleaning badly, but other than that, this 1998 Jayco works like she is brand new and I didn't pay $55K for her. We paid about a tenth of that.

2005 GMC Sierra 2500HD Ext Cab 4x4 6.0L
1998 Jayco Designer 2930RKS

MookieKat wrote:
Can anyone tell me if the Jaycos are good enough for full-timing?

There's an RV park in Austin, can't remember the name of it, that I stayed in a couple of times by accident and still drive past fairly frequently on the way to the Hill Country.

That RV park has every make and model of towable you could think of in it with many of them being lived (as in a replacement for a house trailer) in and others being used for full-timing. Jaycos are in the mix.

Going through this RV park (and several others that one can find with a bit of snooping) makes a mockery of the "full-time" rated nonsense. Again, there's every make and model of towable being lived in as well as every age and condition. Makes range from POS to Jayco to KZ to Shasta to Holiday Rambler to Thor and that's just the makes that were on the side nearest the road the last time I drove by.

Can anyone tell me if the Jaycos are good enough for full-timing?

We have bought three, always used, I did not have the money to buy new, same as our vehicles, have always bought used.
First one was the best, it was a 1986 18.5 foot prowler lynx we bought in 2005, then wife decided in 2009 it was not big enough and we also needed A/C, so bought a 1989 21.5 Coachman Catalina which was good, but ended up with some rot, but traded it in and our 1989 21.5 coachman in on a 2004 Wilderness lite 24.5 with A/C and one slide which was a great feature, in 2010, and it has done us well so far.

As said before, used or new is a personal decision.

For my $0.02, I invest in stocks, some bonds, CD's, precious metals, and quite a few mutual funds. I don't view an RV as an investment, although nothing wrong with looking at it that way.

So in my personal choice, the depreciation hit doesn't matter since I figure that's part of the cost of enjoying the RV: I've bought 3 new and will likely buy the next one new. Prefer not to follow someone else and like to have a warranty, however illusory the benefits of that may be.

When I (or particularly the DW) goes into a used unit and smell dog, cat, "old" or "musty"...there's just no way to calculate enough benefit to offset that visceral gut reaction against "used."

Hmmm.....after seeing more used ones, I can see that in some of them, the used prices are not very far off from the new. I see some Crossroads new units farther up the road that we could stretch our budget to purchase. How are they in terms of quality? Could we full-time in these?

New ones that we may possibly get down to our budget...the Jaycos. How are they in terms of quality? Is it anything that we might be able to full-time in if we should decided to do so?

Shopping used.....ugggh!!! What a disappointment it has been so far!! 95% of them have moldy smells, so much so that I can't even go into them! Saw a Heartland Landmark today....the ones that I really like, but could not even enter due to the strong odor!!

Then the other 10% of the smelly ones have doggy odors...some stronger than others!!! Even the one that we liked today had a doggy odor!