Kiplinger Says You’ll Regret an RV in Retirement. Millions of RVers Would Disagree
A recent article from Kiplinger's that has been making the rounds online carried the headline “15 Reasons You'll Regret an RV in Retirement.“
As someone who has spent fifteen years traveling America by RV, and who has met thousands of retirees who are living some of the happiest and most fulfilling years of their lives on the road, I clicked immediately.
After reading it, I had one overwhelming reaction: Really? That's the list?
Apparently, we should be concerned that RVs depreciate. Fuel costs money. Campgrounds charge fees. Roads have traffic. Popular destinations require reservations. You cannot carry everything you own with you. And yes, at some point, you may have to dump your own holding tanks.
Forgive me if I seem underwhelmed by these revelations.
The article reads less like an exposé of hidden truths and more like a list of observations anyone discovers within about thirty minutes of walking through an RV show. Nobody buys a forty-foot fifth wheel expecting it to appreciate like beachfront property. Nobody sees a motorhome and assumes gasoline will suddenly become free. Nobody stands in front of a campground office in Yellowstone and thinks, “I bet we'll have this place all to ourselves in July.”
These aren't dark secrets of the RV industry. They're called reality.
The depreciation argument particularly misses the mark because it assumes people buy RVs as financial investments. They don't. Nobody walks into a dealership hoping to beat the stock market with a Class A diesel pusher. An RV is not an investment vehicle. It is a life vehicle.
RV in Retirement? What's the Return?
The return comes in sunsets over the Pacific Ocean, grandchildren seeing Yellowstone for the first time, mornings beside a mountain lake in Colorado, and evenings around campfires with people who started as strangers and ended up becoming friends.
If we are measuring retirement experiences strictly by resale value, then perhaps grandchildren should be avoided too. They are wildly expensive, they rarely appreciate financially, and yet somehow millions of us consider them one of the best time investments we ever made.
Traffic is traffic
The article also warns readers that traffic exists on American highways. This is apparently intended to discourage RV travel. By that standard, we should probably avoid grocery stores on Saturday mornings, airports during holidays, and interstate highways on Memorial Day weekend. Traffic is not a flaw unique to RVing. It is a feature of modern life. The difference is that after sitting in traffic with the RV, you're heading toward Glacier National Park instead of the office parking lot.
But you can't take it with you…
Then comes another warning: you can't take everything you own with you in an RV. Again, guilty as charged. You probably won't be bringing the dining room set, the snowblower, the riding lawn mower, or the grand piano. But something interesting happens when people start RVing. Many discover that the things they thought they couldn't live without turn out to be things they rarely thought about once they were gone.
One of the unexpected gifts of RV travel is discovering that experiences take up a lot less space than possessions.
Shocking!
Then there was the shocking discovery that campgrounds sometimes require reservations. Well yes. So do the best restaurants. So do Broadway shows. So does Disney World. Demand is often a pretty good indication that something is worth doing.
My personal favorite, however, was the concern over emptying holding tanks.
I hate to break this gently, but homeowners deal with sewage too. They just outsource the process to pipes buried underground and a monthly utility bill. The average RVer spends about five minutes every week or so handling the job, usually while standing beside a mountain view or a lake somewhere far from home.
I've unclogged drains in houses and dumped black tanks in national parks. The national park wins every single time.
Isolating?
But point number fourteen on Kiplinger's list deserves a more serious response because, unlike traffic, reservations, and sewer hoses, loneliness is a very real concern for many retirees.
The article suggests that RV life can become isolating and lonely on the road. Ironically, our experience over fifteen years has been exactly the opposite. RVing introduced us to more friendships, more conversations, and more genuine human connections than any other period in our lives.
Spend a few days in almost any campground and you'll understand why. Someone notices your license plate and asks where you're from. Someone else stops by to ask about your dog. Before long you're exchanging campground recommendations, favorite routes through the Rockies, and stories about places you've both visited.
The campground may be one of the last places in America where people still pull up a chair and simply talk to each other. We've watched lifelong friendships begin over a shared campfire and a simple question: “Where are you folks headed next?” That sense of community doesn't disappear when the trip ends.
In many ways, that is exactly why Jen and I created RVCommunity.com.
We wanted a place where those campground conversations could continue all year long. We wanted a place where new RVers could ask questions without feeling embarrassed, where experienced RVers could share what they've learned, and where people who love this lifestyle could connect with others who understand it.
If loneliness is your concern, RVing may actually be one of the best solutions available.
There are not many lifestyles that make it easier to meet people, make friends, join rallies, attend meetups, or instantly find common ground with complete strangers. None of this is to say that RV ownership is easy or inexpensive. It isn't. RVs require maintenance. Things break. Fuel prices rise. Campgrounds can be expensive. Repairs always seem to happen at the worst possible time. Prospective RVers absolutely should understand those realities before signing on the dotted line.
But there is a tremendous difference between acknowledging the challenges of a lifestyle and completely missing the reasons people choose it in the first place.
Retirement is not simply about protecting assets and minimizing expenses. It is also about making good use of the healthy years we still have. Money can be replaced. Healthy years cannot. The older I get, the more convinced I become that the greatest risk many retirees face is not spending too much on experiences. It's waiting too long to have them.
So yes, RVs depreciate. Yes, there is traffic. Yes, campgrounds require reservations. Yes, you'll probably learn more about sewer systems than you ever expected. And yet, after fifteen years on the road, if you asked Jen and me whether we'd do it all over again, the answer wouldn't take us five seconds.
We'd leave tomorrow morning.
Life’s Best Chapter Starts Here
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