Retire: give it all up at 58 and RV?

tatest wrote:
I retired at 58, to travel. My wife kept working part time (substutute teacher) when we were home. We got a RV for part of the travel, one or two cruises a year, and flights for extended trips to visit friends and family overseas, for more ground travel there (e.g. UK several times, China for six weeks, Rome). On an average, 40% of year traveling, not full time, we still had daughters to get through school and married off.

As for the retirement part, I was in a position to draw about 80% of my last salary, but it did not go as far. Cost of unsubsidized medical insurance, seven years for me, eight for my wife, turned out to be a huge expense, as did uninsured medical expenses treating my wife's incurable cancer the last four years of her life. Thus budget for travel shifted more to budget for medical, and more than half our travel was for specialized medical. I'm saying this because at this age, it has to be included in your financial planning. Until you get under the Medicare umbrella, medical expenses can be huge.

If you are thinking about RV travel because that's what you want to do with your life, and you will have the income during retirement to afford it, I say do it while you have the chance. We never really know how much time we have left.

If you are thinking about RV travel because you think you can't afford to retire in one place, you need to look deeper into costs and options. Cost of living varies quite a bit around the country, for RVers just as it does for permanent stick and brick locations. Where I live, it costs about as much to rent a RV parking space as it does to rent an apartment the size of a really big RV. Moving my RV around costs about three times as much as getting around in my small car. RV living is a tradeoff between costs of staying and costs of moving.

In a few parts of the country there are places where rent can be almost zero, but you have to keep moving. There are other places where there are large RV communities mixed in with permanent low-cost retirement communities, but the cost of living in a RV is not that different from the cost of living in a larger manufactured home in the same place. As locations become more desirable for reasons of climate or urban access, rent for RV parking goes up in step with land values, until it becomes unavailable because a parking space is a money loser for the land owner.

Generally, I don't think it costs much less, or much more, to support the same lifestyle, in the same location, whether living in a RV or living sticks and bricks. In both modes, it probably costs much less than living on boat, although that, like RVing, depends a whole lot how often you move.

Do it, if you think you can afford it. There's a small, but significant, portion of the population of this country living this way, but I think you will find many of them still working to fill in the gap between retirement income and living costs. One of the most popular modes is to work for rental of the parking space (see the Work Camping forum here).