Marilyn: It's not like we had never heard of living in an RV -- in fact, my parents had lived the retiree's NJ-to-FL snowbird life for several years. It was just something that didn't apply to us. We'd been there, done that years ago -- in a tent, a pop-up camper, a 22-foot trailer, and finally a sickly green VW camper van. Camping is for vacations, right? For two weeks in the summer, or for occasional long weekends. You can't live in a trailer any more time than that! Guess what? We have discovered that, yes, it's possible to actually live in your RV, and love it, much to the amazement of our friends, co-workers, and ourselves!
Tom: When retirement looked like a possibility in another six years or so, my downsizing federal employer offered early retirement/buyout packages and I grabbed their offer. Marilyn and I had already planned to sell our home and travel around the US for a year or two, looking for the perfect retirement location. We would store our furnishings and settle down after finding our 'spot.' RV living was not a part of this plan, until an old friend came to town and, in one day, innocently threw our lives into turmoil!
We hadn't seen Hank for nearly 20 years, and we had lots of catching up to do. We shared our retirement plans, and Hank's plans sounded so much more interesting than ours! A fellow camper in years past, Hank told us all about the 40-foot luxury 5th wheel trailer (what's a 5th wheel?) he wanted, complete with washer, dryer, and dishwasher! Wow, trailers sure have come a long way since our 1974 model!
Marilyn: You might have seen light bulbs and fireworks going off over our heads that day! We asked Hank how he found out about 5th wheels (he reads Trailer Life), and why he chose a 5th wheel over a trailer (easier to back up) or motorhome (no 'road wander' from trucks). Bringing our temporary home with us as we toured the country sounded like a great idea! We could stay as long as we liked in any place that interested us, and pick up and go whenever we'd seen enough! If trailers were as comfortable (real beds!) and as well-equipped as Hank described them, surely we could stand a year or two in one!
How can we find out more?
Hank generously gave us a gift subscription to Trailer Life on the spot. But we couldn't wait the 4-6 weeks for the first magazine to arrive -- we were pumped! We visited every newsstand we could find, but no one carried the magazine. Next we tried RV sales lots, and finally found the prize. "Well, since we're here, let's look around. It can't hurt to look." Have you ever seen little kids at Disney World for the first time? I guess you could say they saw us coming!
Tom: "Just looking" a few more times, and we became the delighted owners of a like-new 18-foot Prowler travel trailer. It was to be our "practice" RV, since we hadn't camped in over ten years. We wouldn't be retiring for another 18 months, so it was too soon to buy the real trailer. We don't regret having leaped into this purchase, because the trailer was great and we were very lucky. However, now that we have completed many more hours of reading, research, and shopping, it's obvious that we definitely did everything all wrong the first time! We hope we can encourage other new RVers to take the plunge -- the water's fine -- but only after you know what's in the pool!
Marilyn: Read, read, read! Shop, shop, shop! Network! Talk to other campers, tour their homes (we love to show off), surf the Net -- all the sites! In our next article we'll tell you what books, papers, and magazines we've read, suggest some books that you should buy for your library, and give you some more sources of great information about the RV life.
We must warn you though, after reading several books written by fulltimers, you may catch the bug, too! We did, in a big way. Instead of planning to travel for just a year or two, we began to think, 'What's keeping us from fulltiming indefinitely? Why restrict our freedom to a set number of years?' We decided that, for us, fulltiming would be an open-ended adventure that would end when it stops being fun!
Tom: After devouring every book and article on FT living for nearly a year, we became anxious to begin our own journey. The summer weekends and vacations spent in our little Prowler confirmed our decision to fulltime -- the sooner the better. We had to reconsider storing our furniture, tools, yard equipment, sports equipment, artwork, knick-knacks, kitchen appliances, and all that other 'stuff' we took nearly 25 years to accumulate. We decided to sell out everything, replace the Prowler with a new fulltiming rig and move into it a year early so that we could:
Marilyn: We put the house on the market January 1 and three days later got the Blizzard of '96. What an omen! It took four months before any offer came in, but when it did, the buyers wanted to move in within the month. Now we were faced with unloading ALL our furnishings in three weekends. We couldn't go the Yard Sale route and carry all our furniture outside, because our Spring was very cold and wet, and there was no way for the two of us to police the movements of shoppers in our 3-level townhouse. What in the world could we do?
Tom: Our solution, and it was a good one, was to contract with an Estate Sales company that handled the whole thing for us. Estate sales are very popular here and are a breeze! They do the advertising in the paper, put up signs, price every item, display it, and provide security on Sale Day(s). They take the checks, and if they bounce, it's their problem, not yours. They take what's unsold at the end and bring it to your favorite charity, and give you the donation receipt. They vacuum and sweep the entire house. They actually take the pictures off the walls and kitchen stuff off the shelves!
We didn't have to do anything except stay away! For all this, they take 25%. Look for these helpful folks in the Yellow Pages under "Estates" and ask about commissions, services provided, and book them early if you can. You might like to go this route if you have a lot of stuff and don't want all the bother.
People ask us how we could give up our 'stuff.' It's amazing, but we were actually glad to see it go. We kept a couple of really nice prints and hung them in our 5W, and kept some collectibles for the entertainment center curio shelves. As for the rest of it, we're just glad someone else can enjoy it now.
It's funny, you spend the first half of your life accumulating possessions, and then you find out that they possess you! After 'psyching' ourselves for this big step for almost a year, downsizing our household was a very liberating and positive experience for us.
Next time in this space: "Educate yourself!"
Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of articles by Tom and Marilyn Clark, who are among the very first to join us with "RVers Online". We had an opportunity to meet Tom and Marilyn last summer at the "Conference on RVing" at the University of Idaho, and learned of their extensive and well organized plans to start full-timing when Tom retires in the summer of 1997. We thought they would be the perfect couple to share their experiences in "getting ready" for the full timing adventure, and it is all of our good fortune that they accepted our invitation to document their experience in a series of articles, of which this is the first installment. We're confident that any RVer contemplating full-timing will benefit from Tom and Marilyn's well written contributions.
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