We've actually had people question our generally low overnight expenses as not being accurate because we do a lot of boondocking so our overnight expenses appear as artificially low.
But my explanation has always been that we have no idea of what the true costs are until we actually sell the vehicle that we're using.
This was difficult when we had our motorhome Sherman because we had him for 13 years and of course there were a lot of repairs and maintenance over those years, and to be honest I just never sat down and figured it all out!
Our motorhome Sherman.
But with Bundy and Joyce in Australia, we had got such a good deal when we bought the rig that we were able to sell it for a profit when we finished with it, so our overnight expenses actually turned out to be even lower than what we had reported on a monthly basis.
Our truck and camper combo, Bundy and Joyce in Australia.
And so that brings us to our most recent motorhome, Max.
As most of you know, we recently sold Max but we never disclosed the details. That's because we didn't received the final payment until yesterday, and due to fluctuating foreign exchange rates, we wouldn't know the exact total of how much we received in Canadian dollars until it was all finally in our Canadian bank account.
Our motorhome Max.
And of course we paid for Max and all of the accessories in Euros back in April and May of 2020 and the exchange rate between Euros and $CAD has fluctuated a lot over that period.
We paid €56,054 in total for Max and all of the accessories we bought along the way. Which at the time was $84,417 CAD. This was a great deal at the time because we had made the agreement in the earlier part of the Covid time frame and motorhome prices had not yet begun to increase. Also, the German government had reduced the VAT from 19% to 15% as a way to stimulate the economy. So our timing on the purchase was just very lucky.
Fast forward to when we put Max up for sale. Motorhome prices have increased substantially in the two and half years since. And in Europe, if you want something new, there is still a minimum one year delivery time frame. Also, Max was the last year of an 8 year run of producing this popular model and there aren't many available.
When we decided to sell Max, we contacted the dealer we bought him from. They offered us between €55,000 and €57,000 as a wholesale price to sell him back to them. We advertised Max at €60,000 which was still a great deal for the buyer, and a fair deal for us. We may have been able to sell him for more if we advertised him in Germany, which we never did.
The buyers are from the U.S., and they wanted to deal in U.S. dollars. It was getting complicated trying to figure out a price when taking into account the euro, the $CAD, and the constantly fluctuating foreign exchange rates! We ended up selling Max for $64,000 USD, and dated the deal August 30th which at the time was about €58,600.
But the $USD appreciated in our favor by 1.3% over the past two weeks! It could have just as easily gone the other way. Our final transaction was yesterday, and that brought the total received to $86,466 CAD.
So in $CAD, we made just over $2,000 profit, on top of being able to use a brand new motorhome for two years and three months. Certainly interesting times that we live in. And, the buyers also got a great deal based on what was available at the time.
So there was no additional cost to our overnight expenses as we reported them over the past two years and three months.
Motorhome/campervan travel remains our favorite form of exploring the world, but we will be doing some senior backpacking style of travel for at least the next eight months. It will be interesting to see what our monthly expenses are during that time.
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And in Canada...
Based on our trip to Spain, we see that rving is very popular and affordable as well. We enjoyed our visits in Sherman over the years and thought that was a great deal. Max, even better although we didn't get to visit him. That was a wise thing for Germany to lower the VAT during the pandemic. I wish that would have happened in North America instead of wasted stimulus money.
ReplyDeleteYep. Although, Germany also gave out loads of stimulus money. It's one of the reasons we have such high inflation right now.
DeleteSince you document your motorhome costs separately anyhow, I wouldn't really catagorize that as overnight cost. In that case, it seems like you would be doubling and expense... just my opinion.
ReplyDeleteWe look at it that way because we hardly ever spend money on overnight expenses and if we were to travel normally we would have some kind of overnight expense. Good friend of ours that have bought and sold a number of motorhomes before said that even if you lose money if you work out the loss over the time that you have had the motorhome and it works out to be $10 a night or less then you have still done well. These are the reason that we look at it as an overnight expense, whereas in this case it is actually a credit to our overall budget.
DeleteI appreciate how transparent you are with your finances, other blogs and travellers make it a little more fluffy and tend to ignore some of the costs to make it more attractive and less realistic :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Karyn-Lee we have always been honest with where our money is spent when we do our expense reports right down to the last penny, nothing is left out. We want to let people know that travel doesn't have to be expensive and if they find that our expenses are too low for them, at least it gives them a base of where to start and know what categories they will most likely spend more in.
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