STARTING OUT

My name is Tom and this blog is for our friends who want to follow our new journey into full-time RVing.

My wife, Mary, and I spent about 6 months on the road last year with our 24’ travel trailer and came home to a large tax bill being due on our house.  We asked ourselves; “Why are we doing this?”  We enjoy RVing very much and have always moved fairly often so why not sell the house and go RVing full time? 

If we were to do that however, what would we do with all of our stuff?  Stuff that we have accumulated over 46 years of marriage! 

So we asked ourselves; “What would our kids do if we were to die tomorrow?”, and the answer was simple. They would take what they wanted and sell everything else, so that is what we did.  We told the kids to take anything that they wanted from the house and we did save some things that we were willing to pay for in a 5X5 climate controlled storage space. We would then have an estate sale to sell everything else.  I sold as much as I could ahead of time but everything else went into the estate sale except for some things that we could use in our new 5^th wheel trailer that we would buy.

The best thing that we did was to leave town and go RVing for two weeks prior and during the estate sale.  It would have been torture to see what things were priced at and especially to see them go out the door. This way it was much less painful and when we returned, the house was empty and we received a nice check.

Before having the estate sale, we put our house on the market in the beginning of December 2011 and although we had about 40 showings, we didn’t receive one offer until April even though we lowered the price twice. The market was really down and we had some tough competition from new houses still being built in our development. We decided to take the negotiated offer even though we lost money just to get things going since time was ticking and we didn’t want any more delays. 

Our closing date was scheduled for May 31^st so we would wait until we were sure things were going well for the closing before we ordered the new trailer.

We have had a pop-up trailer, a motorhome, and now a travel trailer but never a 5^th wheel trailer.  Supposedly the 5^th wheel is easier to pull and back up than a travel trailer and is a more stable connection to the truck.  Mary and I prefer a trailer to a motorhome but there are pros and cons to both therefore it becomes one’s personal preference.  We have chosen a DRV Elite Suites for several reasons but the main reason is that it is very well built and has all the amenities of home.  It is built with “full timers” in mind.  

The closing went without a hitch on May 31st and we have ordered our new 2013 DRV Elite Suites.  We are anxiously awaiting its arrival but in the meantime, we are living full time in our little 24' Nash Travel Trailer and doing fine.  By the time the new one gets here however, it is going to feel like a mansion since it is almost 39' long with 4 slide-outs!