Old or Older?

[Pete Masterson]

Rich,

Having had some experience with rental properties (as a landlord) over the years, you might want to consider a rental management company to handle your home. It might cost 5 to 10% of the revenue, but it will solve a lot of trouble while you're on the road.

Our original plan was to sell our home and go full time. Unfortunately, we put our house up for sale just as the bottom fell out of the market, resulting in zero offers. Real estate agents who'd had "hot" clients, got the response "we'll wait to see how far the prices drop." In our general area, only 3 or 4 houses have sold (not counting foreclosures) during the past (roughly) 3 years. Prices are down by 40-45%.

However, traveling in our coach for 3 to 5 months per trip taught us quite a bit about the lifestyle. For us, we found (1) that are tolerance of the smaller quarters tended to fade after about 4 months. The desire for a larger shower and a larger kitchen (from my wife, especially) started to build strongly at that point. (2) Weultimately came to the conclusion that, despite a variety of dissatisfactions, there is no place quite like "home." We've seen some beautiful areas (along with some of dreadful lack of redeeming qualities). But, we're both native Californians (we live within 10 miles of my birthplace) and there is simply no place where the year-round weather is more appealing to us. (This is not to say that others may have different opinions about weather and natural beauty of the landscape.) (3) I was not as productive at working while on the road as I had hoped. It proved more difficult to work on projects than expected, unless we were stopped somewhere for, at least, several days. (I am a book designer -- the desk I had installed was designed to carry a full-size desktop computer (Mac G5) and a color laser printer.)

The ramifications of our experience is that we're now just as glad that our house did not sell (though it created a significant financial complication for us) and we will be selling our coach. I already offered it earlier this year but removed it from the market and based on the feedback, I've removed the file cabinets and re-installed a sofa and I'm doing some other minor maintenance and some cosmetic fixes. We have a trip for about 3 weeks planned for June -- then, after clean up from the trip, the coach will go back up for sale -- I will sell it for whatever I can get for it. (Honestly, I wish my finances were such that I could hold on to it, but that is simply not the case.) Take a look at the photos (link in signature block) and see what you think.

PS. your photos and web site are very nice. One suggestion (in a role as a marketer) is that you create something interesting to entertain a visitor as the web site loads. Even though I have a very fast cable Internet connection, the loading time for the site seemed quite lengthy. Something to look at while it loaded would have distracted from the lengthy load time.

Pete Masterson

'95 Blue Bird Wanderlodge WBDA 42

El Sobrante CA

"aeonix1@mac.com"

Photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Bluebirdzoom/PeteMasterson#

On May 17, 2009, at 5:56 PM, richafranco wrote:

Pete,

This is exactly the kind of answer I'm looking for. I've just joined Vintage Birds and that seems like a great site too! Part of my decision to look more towards the vintage birds is of course, money, but I won't let it limit what I think we may need if we can pull this off. Thanks for the great advice and I'll keep checking in to see if you or others can add to this discussion.

What's behind my thought process, what little there is left, is to maybe rent our home in the Orlando area, we could get 3-4 times what ourmonthly mortgage amount is and travel the country, getting time to visit some of the places I've always wanted to photograph. This would accomplish atleast 2 things. 1. In a year or so the real estate market should improve(down atleast 30% here) and if we decided we liked this lifestyle, we could sell our home, hopefully back where it was before the crash. 2. I could be out harvesting new images for my gallery(www.richfrancophotography.com)when the economy does start to kick in, rather than waiting to see it go up and then try and get out and take photos.

I'm really, really just at the beginning of this process and all the info, talk me in, talk me out, will help,

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