The first question you ask after seeing a Noovo

$200,000. That’s the answer. And that’s before tax. It is not a wise investment.

If you invested that $200,000 in some boring index fund, you might earn 10% a year (the returns for the past five years have been higher, at about 15%). At the end of ten years you’d have $386,000, after you adjust for inflation. You’d almost double your money.

If you buy the van instead, paying $200,000, after the end of that same ten years, after you adjust for inflation, you’ll have a ten year old van. It will not be worth $200,000.

A camper van, unless you are renting it out as a business, is not an investment. No matter how you squint and massage the numbers, it is a straight cost, and that’s not even including insurance, repairs, campground fees, gasoline, and all the other expenses of traveling. There is no break-even point. Not even close.

Quite frankly, most people who buy a camper van should not have bought a camper van, and the same goes for RVs in general. It’s nothing specific to vans. Go check out the used RV listings and marvel at all of the listings for RVs that have been barely used, with only a few thousand miles on the odometer. Note all of the RVs with the original tires, still with plenty of tread.  Drive around your own neighborhood and shake your head in wonderment at all of the expensive RVs that never seem to leave the driveway. Depreciation, like rust, doesn’t sleep.

Why should you buy a caper van? I speak from no experience at all. But my view is that you should buy a camper van for one reason and one reason only. For fun. Call it personal fulfillment, call it a well-deserved reward for a life of working, call it something you need, a getaway so that you can be rested and ready for your working life. Buy a van because you want one. It’s all the same.

Financial advisors are, by and large, risk-averse people. Your retirement advisor will never tell you, “screw it, put everything you have in Apple stock and see what happens.” They’ll advise prudent financial moves, index funds, Roth conversions, deadbeat bonds, and careful spending and saving. They will never advise you to buy a camper van. Financial advisors, and I’m speaking very broadly here, don’t seem like much fun.

A Noovo Plus is about $200,000 before tax. That’s a lot of money, I don’t dispute it, and there are many, many less expensive options, including travel and camping in other kinds of RVs, or just plain tent camping, or forget the camping idea entirely and stay at hotels (it takes a lot of hotel stays to equal the cost of travel in a camper van). 

But a Noovo sure seems like it will be an awful lot of fun.