Class C Depreciation

winnietrey wrote:
I would disagree, with, pretty much the entire statement. First, your best buy is about a 3 to 4 year class C. Buying new and trading it in every 4 to 5 years is, in my opinion completely nuts. Thing will lose close to half its value in 5 years. (that's like a 30kplus loss every 5 years) Unless you pay cash you will still be way underwater in 5 years.

I would not agree with this statement. We bought our brand new 2009 Greyhawk for $67.7k (marked down from 92k). Our down payment pretty much covered the sales tax and the document fees, etc. so we financed about $67k. It is 7 years later. The low retail value of our motorhome is $40k, the average is $42k and the high is $44k. We are not under water. Our camper has lost $25k value in 7 years assuming average retail value.

If we had traded-in at the 5 year mark, the camper would have been valued even higher than it currently is and we would have owed a good bit less than it was worth. We decided against purchasing this year, but may next year. The value won't move that much in 1 year and we'll make sure that we owe less than what it is worth so it won't be a problem at all.

I personally would much rather buy new and take a depreciation hit versus buying someone else's headache. For us, year 5 saw a bunch of problems. Fortunately, I fixed all of them myself except 1. If you aren't all that handy, that could be costly. Also around the 5 year mark, you may be replacing tires and possibly ball joints. We got almost 7 years and 28k miles out of our tires and ball joints although we probably should have gotten ball joints sooner. The two of those together was $2,400.

If you are buying a 4 to 5 year old Class C, most likely you'll be buying new tires and ball joints soon so figure that into your costs. We looked at lots and lots of used units before we decided to buy new. We did not like the condition of any of them and we didn't look at any unit older than 5 years old.

-Michael