I think a more true picture is purely evaluating cost of ownership purely on the overhead.
By that I mean depreciation, maintenance, insurance, storage, if you can't keep the unit on your property, and any other fixed costs. I did the math like this when I bought the current unit new, which I'm 3 years into a planned 10 to 12 year ownership period and an expected 75,000 miles of travel, an odometer count which I based on depreciation and about the point to expect increased frequency of repairs.
My numbers were: $37,500 of depreciation ($55k new to $17,500 residual); $700 annually for insurance; $800 of average annual maintenance, the bulk which I do myself, tires being the only real item not handled by me; and I park it at home. That works out to $4,625 a year. If I wanted to throw fuel into the calculation, at 7,500 miles annually, 8mpg and $3.50 per gallon that's another $3,300, pushing the total to $8,000.
But, and it's a big one, all those 7,500 miles represent places I was going anyway, and in another thread post I made recently, having this motorhome has actually saved me big buck$ on many trips, like at the Sebring 12 hour where my son and I were in it for 8 days for each of the past 2 years, and any hotel you'd want to stay in is at least $300/night, with an 8 night minimum. And we'd still have to drive there, or fly and rent a car, and instead of eating well on $150 of groceries for the week, spend almost that much per day on track take-out and restaurants. The RV was roughly at least $2,000 cheaper than hotel travel each of these trips, which is typical for how I use it for my total of 40 nights a year.
I acknowledge I'm not necessarily the typical RV camper, but my cost-of-ownership arithmetic is certainly defensible.
Rob
Too Many Toys.
- '11 E450 Sunseeker 2300
- '16 F150 Supercrew 5.0/FX4
- '09 C6 Z51
- '15 VW Golf Sportwagen daily driver
- '86 Civic and '87 CRX race cars
