 By Betty Fitterman http://adventuresinthebettybus.blogspot.com
While millions of baby boomers are starting to check out active adult communities, college towns, and cities as their retirement destination, a sub-set of young-at-heart retirees has a much more adventurous approach. These folks have adopted a mobile lifestyle, and for them, the entire continent is their community. We’re talking about the permanent and semi-permanent RVers, many of whom have sold everything – homes, condos, cars, furniture and all – to live as turtles, as one friend described it, carrying their homes on their backs for as long as they enjoy it. It’s not an easy decision, especially when it comes to friends and family left behind, but the rewards are many. It’s exciting, educational, and freeing, and if you do it right, a great way to conserve your finances for the long haul. This writer made the decision to liquidate everything and move into a luxury mobile home only after a couple of years of vacationing in, first, a rental RV, then a mid-size Class C Mobile home, the kind that looks like it’s been built around a truck cab. Although I enjoyed these vacations immensely, I could not for the life of me imagine moving into one full-time, and it took my husband three years to convince me to abandon my successful advertising business, say goodbye to friends and family for the time being, and sell everything we owned. I’m a nester. I loved my beautiful home, but the cost of running a six-bedroom home on two acres was killing us. I knew we’d have to do something soon, or we’d be living in a double-wide in some backwater town, working at the local WalMart and scraping by to stay alive. We wanted to travel. We wanted some semblance of the luxury we’d worked so hard for. We wanted to retire without money worries. So with the housing market dropping into the basement, we put our dream house and our investment condo up for sale, sold three of our four cars, and went shopping for a mobile coach. We were lucky. We shopped around and found a like-new Class A Mobile home, the kind that looks like a rock-star bus and has a spacious, comfortable interior. Ours had been owned by a poor soul who purchased it then became ill and couldn’t drive. We profited from the collapse of his dream, I’m both happy and sad to say. It was an incredible bargain, a 2004 with only 4000 miles on it.  On the plus side, a mortgage of $100,000 was immensely preferable to our current million-dollar noose, and wh... |
