Someone just asked this question on the Full Time RV website; “Does anyone ever get tired of all of this and just want to go home?” Funny you should ask, my fellow RVer. I have been in this mind-set for quite some time now, of just wanting to go home, but I have no home to return to. We happen to be in our hometown area visiting all of our family and friends for the summer, but with no place to call home, other than our RV parked in a local CG. It was always great to return to our sticks & bricks house with its 2 1/2 acre yard for the summer. Sometimes, I still can’t believe that we sold it all and hit the road in the Beast with six wheels down. So, after spending a great deal of time sharing all of our adventures and FT lifestyle, is it possible to reverse the process and go back to a house? Well, I would love to share the reason why I have not been blogging lately with my readers and fellow FT RVers.

If you are a Full Timer reading this, you may want to pay special attention to the financial equation. If you are lucky enough to have endless amounts of cash, this may not apply to you, and God Bless! Everyone else, listen up! Before we sold our house, financially we were very sound. We lived mainly on Roger’s fixed income (Military pension and SS), and we both worked during the summer months at our seasonal jobs (Landscaping & Sales). Our house was paid for, but we had a small home equity loan used for our smaller RV. When we decided to sell the house and buy a bigger RV, we had no problem getting a loan for a motorhome (which is considered a luxury item, similar to purchasing a big boat). You qualify for the loan because your house payment (or equity loan, in our case) shows your payment history is good and we had a great credit score. Roger had plenty of buying power, so this process was fairly easy. They qualify you based on your credit score and debt to income ratio. We put some money down to keep our monthly payment in our comfort zone. But what the banks didn’t know, is we were about to sell our house and run freely all over the country (and the dealerships encourage you to say nothing about that!) There are so many lies in the business of FT RVing, that it kind of makes your head spin! Let’s discuss this for just a moment, and then I’ll get back to my point:

First thing everyone does when they become FT status, is lie about where they reside (domicile)! Mainly to get out of paying higher sales tax on your expensive luxury vehicle! But also, to save money on getting yearly tags and insurance on it. So most people decide to make Florida, South Dakota, or Texas as their domicile states (Tax friendly on income and/or registration of vehicles, but you don’t have to really live there.) If you are not an RVer, and you are reading this? I know, I know! Your head is spinning like a scene right out of the exorcist!! But you need to call somewhere home, or you can’t get a mail service to send your mail to you while you play all over the country! But the reality is, most people are lying! We actually do own land that we park the RV on all winter in Florida, so we aren’t lying. Everything is registered in the state of Florida and we have an actual address, so I do sleep better knowing we are not lying to anyone.

Second thing most people are confused about is the insurance. Do you lie about being Full Time? And what state you actually live in? Because your insurance rates are based on where you live and how much you drive it! This could come back to bite you in the ass if you ever wind up in one of those horrific crash sites! The one where you narrowly escaped death? But now you have to explain to your insurance company that absolutely everything you owned was in the vehicle that just burned to the ground on the highway! Yea, that’s the one. We don’t lie about that either. We pay a lot of insurance, as it is our home.

The last lie I will speak of, is the silent lie. The one where you really don’t say it unless you are ever asked in a group. The one you will cringe over if your spouse or family ever asks, and you definitely won’t want to speak the truth. But when the strangers you run into and meet on the road asks, it comes out of your pie hole in record speed! The answer to the question; “Do you have any regrets going FT?” and you lie thru your teeth and say “NOPE! Never looked back!” Sorry folks. That would be a big fat lie for me! I miss my house! And, you will never know how far you have come, unless you look back now and then!

So back on point, we purchased the luxury RV while we still owned our house. But purchasing a house when you own a luxury RV? Can this be done? Not easily done folks on a fixed income. You have been traveling around the country and having the time of your life enjoying the beach during the middle of winter. Your family and friends send you hate mail after a couple of years of this! You haven’t held a steady job with a steady paycheck that Uncle Sam can verify. Your cars paid for, and the only monthly payment you have record of, is an RV (some are paid for, so that would be another strike against you!) Your residence is an empty driveway on a piece of property in another state, but it is something. For those of you that don’t own anything, anywhere; you’ve got it way worse than us! So here we are, looking for a house to buy as retirees. We don’t want anything big and expensive. Small and quaint will do, but on a decent sized property (1 or 2 acres, perhaps?) We are in a buyers market, but the interest rates are at the lowest they will probably ever be in our home-buying lifetimes. We are in a pocket here in Ohio where there is not enough inventory, so the prices are insane! And then you have to realize now, that you will need to buy everything you once had, and literally start all over again! You want to call all your friends and family and ask “Anything I gave you that you don’t really need, do you want to give it back?” Seriously folks, if I didn’t lose my mind trying to get rid of it when we were purging to downsize into our RV, I will most certainly lose my mind trying to get it all back and into a nice little house!!

And the worst part of it all? The mortgage lender says we have to sell our RV in order to qualify for a home loan! Now, for those that have a big wad of money saved somewhere for just this occasion? Kudos to you! We are just not that fortunate to be able to handle two house payments, along with down payment, closing costs and everything else we need. So we have to sell the house on wheels in order to get a brick and mortar house. And where would you like to spend a few months in the interim? Oh yea! An apartment that will cost more than our future house payment, short term (we can hope!) is about the best it will probably get! Talk about a shock treatment! Take an RVer, and force them to sell it and move into an apartment for awhile. That’s just what we all want at retirement age, isn’t it? And it gets worse.

We found the perfect house in the perfect place recently. We knew better than to offer anything lower than the asking price, and we didn’t ask anything from the sellers. We submitted a “strong offer” and we should have been good to go! Right? Wrong! In this environment, we lost out to a stronger bid (code for higher bid, or perhaps cash offer). No one could have prepared us for what we are now facing to return to the life we once had before the words “Full Time” became our existence. We never thought in our life time that in order to buy a house, you would have to actually pay sellers more than they are asking for in order to have a chance! Imagine your parent’s faces when you tell them that! Ours are probably turning over in their graves! So we lost the perfect house and the search starts all over again. It took almost 5 months to find that one and we are approaching school starting and Fall Season. Inventory will probably only get worse and I’m gonna be like a desperate housewife here! The Campgrounds we are staying at will close down on October 15th, and we better know what we’re doing by then. I really don’t think putting another year on the tires and another year of depreciation on our vehicle is going to save us any money. Do you?

So, to the question of returning to a sticks & bricks life after Full Timing in an RV, and can it be done? Yes! But you better be prepared for the mess you have gotten yourself into. If you are the family that wants to live on the road until the day you die? Sorry I wasted your time on this blog! Move on to “until death do we part!” But if you are the person that knows eventually, all good things must come to an end? You better be planning your course wisely or stay Part Time from the start! You will also be questioning one day what many others have already questioned, because there’s no place like home!

So to conclude this blog, we have just put in another offer on an estate home that we would love to have, but slightly beyond our budget. We have only hopes and dreams to carry us through another agonizing and suspenseful 5 or 6 days. I pictured my Christmas tree in the front bay window of this home (that my Rogie found, by the way) and I do believe in these spiritual things. But you will have to tune in to my next blog to find out if my intuitions are correct on this one!!