To have a home base or not.

We have a 1400 sq ft highrise condo in Bangkok where we stay April to October. Maids are cheap here, so she stays on fulltime watering the plants, feeding the fish etc. The electric and water goes down to 10 dollars a month, just have condo hoa fees. Tickets roundtrip to Seattle around 1,000 each. In April, we travel all over the US until October. We have enclosed storage for the coach plus storage space as it is 15'X60'. Toad we park in storage in Seattle. Works for us as we didn't care for the winter on the road.

I think it's important for both life partners to be on board for major life decisions. Sounds like one of you wants to take the full-time plunge wholeheartedly and the other is more cautious.

That being the case I'd go into compromise mode. Maybe try it out for a year holding on to the residence whilst seeing the sights in the RV; capital gains taxes are a real eyeopener if you let the time go by.

We went full-time and rented our house because the market at the time was horrible and the house didn't sell. Will never rent a house out again, but when the market got better we sold it. Never wanted to keep it as we knew we would not want to go back to MI or own a home in MI again. That was 6 yrs ago and we are still traveling. We love this life! We do eventually want to at least buy an rv lot somewhere for either summer or winter use. When we can no longer travel we will reassess and see what we want to do.

I'm on your side to begin but seems to me most full-timers do end up with some sort of "home base" eventually. Maybe just an RV lot. Of course there's a financial issue; very expensive to maintain a house if you aren't there much.

We had planned on full timing. Sold our big house and the wife gave away the china, sterling silver, and a lot of jewelry to the daughter in laws. I in turn went out to the garage and discovered I could not part with my tools.

We bought a small (970 sq ft) house in a 55+ community. I call it my storage shed. This allows us to have a home base, doctors etc and a place to stay when we come back to visit the family. It also meant we did not have to pay to store items we did not want to part with.

In the last 10 years the wife has had open heart surgery and I have had a total knee replacement. During the recovery times I don't think either one of us could have negotiated getting in and out of our motorhome.

There is no one size fits all answer. You just have to weigh your options and go with your gut. We are satisfied with our choice and now that we are cutting back on long range travel we have purchased a park model and lot In Yuma so I am happy I still have all my tools to remodel it.

We hit the road to go/see/adventure/experience a NEW lifestyle.
2006 sold everything -----no ties left behind.
We knew when we left we were NOT coming back to same area so no reason to hold on to anything
Invested proceeds from selling.

Spent 7 wonderful years roaming around like a couple of drunk sailors.....traveling weekly/bi-monhly.
Small town USA via secondary/back-roads.

Life threw a curve and we could no longer FT.
Bought a small house with RV parking in rural Central AZ with GREAT neighbors.

I learned years ago the old adage Happy Wife....Happy Life. We sold our home and don't own property, but we were both on-board. If you can afford it, I'd keep the home base for a year then let her reassess. In our case our family and kids are spread all over the country, so it didn't matter to us. We'll land somewhere someday, but we've been traveling for close to 3 years and still love it.

We are FT & sold our home when we hit the road. We are finding that our ideas of where we want to settle some day are changing as we see more areas of the country. We also won't need as much space & won't want the maintenance. Get out while the market is high!

We basically did it the way OP suggests vs the better half's described way. Sold our MI home and invested the $. For health reasons, we wanted a home base where we could create relationships with the medical specialists needed and where we could go on a moment's notice to be near them. For climate reasons we wanted a home base where we could totally escape cold weather without fighting for reservations. We had a history of liking FL so we bought a RV lot in a S. FL RV resort. Over our 14 yrs of FTing, we did end up buying and selling a few of those lots and moving home base from parks on the Atlantic to a park on the Gulf side.

Meanwhile, as we traveled through the years, just short of 400,000 miles, we kept our minds open for a final 'landing spot' for when we gave up FTing evaluating the areas, the climate, and the housing markets. Our favorite picks changed over the years from AZ, Las Vegas etc but when push came to shove and we hung up the keys, we found that we liked Naples, FL as "home" and bought a condo. The sale of our luxury resort RV lot paid, in full, for our nearly new empty nest waterfront, Gulf access condo. We always had a nice storage building on our lots where we could keep the 'stuff' and the records that we couldn't part with and where we could keep the golf cart in the summer.

FWIW

Sell out now while the market is strong. Put the money into some form of investment account and go. No need to be pating for something to sit empty for months on end. Most full timers have an exit stradigy, and you should too. Heck, even if you did decide to retire to the same area whats to say you would want that much house.