I've listened to an entire morning's worth of conversations about how awesome this CW's new truck is. He traded an F150 worth $25K for a new F250 to pull an RV (also just purchased). He and his wife both drive 20+ miles to work here in the same building.
Separately, because they need time apart.
She drives a van.
That astounds me! OMG.
After a quick search on Autotrader I'm going to guess that the F150 was a 2012 XLT Supercab. That has a towing capacity of 11,300 pounds! The F250 with 6.2L engine has a towing capacity of about 12,500 which doesn't seem like much of an improvement to me, so they probably opted for the 6.7L diesel which has a towing capacity of 13,700 to 16,300 pounds. The new truck probably costs around $40k+, depending on how it's configured. I'll assume their new RV trailer must be more than 12,000 lb and is at least a 2015 model. Looking at RV Trader these seem to run $30k+ and $40k+ looks more common.
The 2012 F150 with 6.2L engine gets a combined 14 mpg, and I think it's safe to say the F250 and van would be worse (they often don't publish these numbers). That works out to about $13 per day in fuel (assuming 80 miles of driving)...
Wow. I think these decisions alone will easily cost them $100k+ over the next decade (assuming they don't buy any new vehicles in that time frame). And that's before they've even used the RV. I also haven't even touched on maintenance and insurance costs either...