Just drop back a bit and get a used one for... Well if you drop back 5 years you can pick up a used one for 20 to 25 thou. My research has shown that you lose nothing by buying used... They leak just as often new, Your better off letting someone else pay top dollar. Let someone else find the flaws they all seem to have. My Trailer, the one I hope to buy, went for $58,000 new,list price $70,000 sold a year later for $40,000, now 5 years old I'm paying 25,000. Would have been $20,000 but it has a whole big bunch of addons and features. I doubt it has 5,000 miles on it. Trailers don't go bad from being lived in so much as being dragged all over the country. Almost nothing in a trailer is special built to with stand this rolling earthquake. But the trailer you really don't want is one that is parked un- lived in. It's like a house in this one respect...If you see a leak you put something under it wait until it stops raining then you fix it. But if no one sees that leak it can trash a $1000,000 trailer in a single year, Nearly all trailers leak new and used. You have to stay on top of things or they go straight to hell. Trailers require much more maintenance that a house. Very few trailer owners maintain their trailer properly if they don't live in it. They don't see the leak. leaky Trailers are a heaven for black mold. I have no doubt that black mold kills more trailers than wreaks on the road. The ideal used trailer is one that when 200 miles to a camp ground, then after two weeks went home. There it sat in a high top garage for two years protected from the weather. I have a neighbor who found one. Remember it was unused, but well protected. Three years old and he paid less than half the new going price. All kinds of great deals if you have the cash or credit. But you have to remember that these folks just made the mistake of their financial lives buying new. They will want you to change the world to help them out of their debt. This you cannot do! Go blue book. Check out the features see what works and what doesn't. A "fair price" on a new trailer isn't just about the year model. It all about the condition...up to around ten years. After it's ten years old nobody wants it. Just to many liabilities. A trailer can last you 40 years, if you keep up with it. But it's resale value is pretty much gone. Finally, no trailer is any better that the place you park it. I would rather live in a shed in the country side than in a trailer parked in a city trailer park.I know of several that want over $2000 a month for nothing special. In fact about the only use that I can personally recommend is buy a good used one and live in it in the country or wilderness. Move it no more than every two years. Dont move it very far. Just moving my old one two hundred feet oped up two leaks we had to re-calk. Oh yeah, you have to re-calk any seams every 6 months if you want to stay dry. I love how I'm living now. But if Patti were not able bodied it would be a whole lot tougher. If we did not have the knowledgeable neighbors we do we would have failed. One must LEARN to live in a trailer and learning can be very expensive if you don't have a support group.
Yes, there is much to be learned about trailer life. You are SO lucky to have such helpful neighbors!
Do you think I should have maybe gone for more? LOL I think it entirely possible that simply aging has lent it self to my current progress. As we slow down a new approach becomes possible. We begin to see that if we just hold our ground without trying to advance... things come to us un-summoned and yet long awaited. After a lifetime of trying to keep things in their proper place; things begin to hold you in your proper place. I don't really remember this clearly...But the Zen folks have a thing they call 10 bulls centering. It is a brief story describing how a man might better his relationship with his inner self. The story is told by 10 wood block carvings that make block prints. At first the man chases the bull and the bull flees. The the bull chases the man and the man flees.. For nine prints they encounter one another representing the stages we go though to unite our self's. the last print displays a sleepy old man quietly riding his sleepy bull to home. I think some things just come to us, though we be completely and entirely undeserving of such grace. Your time will come.
I strongly suspect that Buster Brown and his dog tide really upped the trailer game by living together in a shoe. (What a flat tire was Froggy who never did nobody any good!)
Well I do try from time to time. You did not always make it easy, but you always made it interesting.":O}
For those who have spent a lifetime acquiring money and have yet to learn that there is no where to go with that.
Buses and coaches. If you have a 45 foot trailer deprecating faster than the great depression, why not have 600 horse engine designed to do a million miles sitting inside it rusting? Or why not take it on the road. You won't be able to get off the road except at truck stops, state rest areas or hey! A trailer park! Where you can expect to pay a rent that would make a Trump blush. Let's go off road! No one who pays $50 thou for a paint job worries about a few dings! It's beneath them! I know! we can go in search of a place to park it! It is after all a recreational ve-hic-al! We can't have it loitering about in our drive way! (Because our neighbors would sue.) But barn storage can cost as much as a modest rental and they offer no assurances as they don't employ watchmen. But if professionals don't worry about what might happen to your bus, why should you!? Besides when you tire of it, you won't have to look at the biggest money whole of your rich life. Maybe you can dry doc it like your yacht? Sarcastic? Sure. but don't say you weren't warned. But there are those who buy these things to travel. Travel where? The road is the only place they are welcome. Can't park at the beach. Can't make a quick run in at the store. Truckers hate you and don't like seeing you at truck stops. They consider you an ignorant lot full of liabilities! So you can drive 'em, store 'em or park 'em in a trailer park. all three cost way more than you think. Basically you just traded a trailer park for an out door garage. One that offers you a wondrous view of buses and trailers of every conceivable make and model. In order to avoid giving you offense no bus or trailer older than ten years is allowed. Think how just one old trailer can completely ruin your view of new trailers, all side by side and back to back stretching out for-eve-er. Why do they live like that? Stress. You must realize that driving a 54 ft bus can wear on one's nerves. trying to park it can be good for a coronary. Once you have it parked you have to be drunk to consider moving it!! Air conditioner stopped working in Yuma? Why just take it to the dealership in Texas! With what you paid for your "rig" they are going to bend over backwards to "Make things right" There are 400,000 new RV's released into the wild each year. They all, each and everyone of them leak. If they only leak you are blessed above all other consumers. So one can expect on average a 30 day to 3 month wait your turn. At the appointed time you will go to pick it up. Only to find that a rare and unusual event has transpired! The parts that they most certainly, hand to god ordered didn't show up. But we couldn't just tell you that on the phone. It would have been to impersonal. Besides you might want to give up on air conditioning, it's that or we can make another appointment. Car dealers have been wearing customers out forever rather than doing low profit repairs. You may have spent a million, but they don't make beans off your repairs. You want the attention you paid for? Buy another one. Of course you can try driving it to Oklahoma and have the factory throw a fix at it. That works one in five times, you might get lucky. Or you could buy another one that still has air conditioning. I'm pretty sure I could drum up a bit more sympathy for your plight if you weren't knowingly killing my only planet. So I jest at you and laugh at your wheel base! I offer you a verbal spay painting of your completely tasteless and UN-notable paint jobs that "Help you fit in" in trailer parks. your just ten years away from being trailer park trash! I'm sure I'll like you better then.By then you will know better that to take it on the road to adventure.
And now a word from my sponsor: (I'm trying to get started as a "presenter" or at least an "Influencer" When I think of all the time a money professional drivers wasted on school when all they needed to now was how to scribble on their windshields! So hell yeah! Let get graddad behind the wheel! What could go wrong!?
Good God, the ENTIRE interior is one icky tan color. WTF, over? And where are the quarters for the help? Do the rich have time to learn all that's needed to occupy and run this beast? This thing is truly a rolling obscenity. Uugh! And the non locking low slung cargo spaces, guess this means that you need mobile security to protect your stuff. And a tv in the cargo space, it must be used to entertain the security guards. I never realized how ridiculous these things are. These things are meant to intimidate the little people, how fortunate that the ordinary people realize what kind of folks own these things. Whaddaya wanna bet that these monstrous palaces on wheels are equipped with air horns? Out of my way, peasants!
Come to think of it there's a purposely engineered housing shortage. As you have found the way to live well for far less, it's probably good that more "inexpensive" housing is being built! 400,000 new monster things per year? We Americans are foolish beyond measure. Watched a movie called "Golden Years" last night, it's a story of English oldsters that have their pensions ripped off (it's called "The Economy" to ease the pain of the theft NOT). A couple of the Ripees (not the Rippers) accidentally rob 50,000 pounds from a bank. They decide that stealing money from banks is simply replacing what the system stole from them. How right they are, imho. Anyhoo, they buy a travel trailer. What's considered a big one in Britain barely makes it on this side if the ocean. I mean 1 One axle. Puhlease. It's a fun flick.
Try just skipping though them, I do!! Really I'm just gathering information that I cab sift at my RV leisure.
For those who have wisely skipped much of the posts in this thread I'll break down the life of a trailer, which does not often span 20 years. This applies to any thing that has a trailer hitch and can't be left in your drive way, which now a days is any drive way is suburbia. First a new trailer scent is released sometime in early June to early July. This is a powerful attractant to nearly every kind of insect that feeds upon money and produces a mobile waste that is evenly spread across the continent. At first only the most powerfully affected gather to rub their oily bodies all over and through the interior. This process can take form two weeks to several years depending upon how hard it is for the oily ones to give it a lived in and perished by naked abuse look. Once the oily ones have have pumped enough fuel though it's planet eater they grow tired of the three or four scratches left by the envious with keys that somehow always fit lesser trailers. Their weariness expresses itself at first in small ways. An 8X10 sign in the window, a two line ad in the news paper. As inner pressures mount a page on Ebay. This is a time of great metamorphosis, When opulence transforms itself into out raged petulance that eats away at any expectation of a decent resale value. By late July the transformation completes it self, the Road warrior is replaced by a hermit trailer crab. Widely despised by the oily ones for being unable to pay a decent price for their cast off trailer casings. The confrontation can be a horror to see, The oily ones pumped up on all the places they have been.but were not allowed to stay begin the wild jesters dance as they wave the original bill of sale right in the face of the hermit trailer crabs looking to acquire a better fitting shell to live in. Though very much smaller than the oily ones, the hermits have a cunning strategy that plays right into the oily ones delusions. The Hermits pretend not to be able to read the original bill of sale! They out right tell the oily ones they paid to much and will never see a single one of those dollars ever again. as the oily ones try to recover the Hermits move in. It a common attack but brutally effective. One hermit will lean in close and whisper, "This is all the money I have." The oily ones going into a complete catatonic state. The hermits have cleverly used the oily ones one inherent bias against them!! The oily ones KNOW they are richer than you, THEY have a trailer or coach!! But they want you to pay as if they weren't. Finally in the end the close association with hermits wears on the oily ones as they accept defeat at the hands of the lesser class. The Hermits quietly wait for the oily ones to depart and ease themselves into their new shell. Talking quietly among themselves they cordially agree that nothing can beat screwing the rich and stupid.
If only rich and stupid went together more often. I think that a good Shark Attitude requires intelligence to make it work. I never bothered with a sharky attitude after I became smart enough to know that others out-sharked me by miles. Avoiding dealing with such people is a goal I've made good on. When you're poor this is much easier!
