My BIL is buying a new RV with an indoor cabin for his motorcycles so he can start enjoying life and the outdoors. He moved to a country town 2 years ago from the city to enjoy the outdoors. His family has 2 quads, 2 motorcycles, a customized jeep, a customized truck, and other toys I probably can't even remember. Every time they have cash they burn it. He also works 60+ hours a week to pay the bills. My SO advised against the RV because they just refinanced their credit card debt into their mortgage...for a second time since they bought the house. BIL responded they did that to save money, they weren't in a pinch or anything. Um, you had $20k cc debt from two years, yes you were in a pinch.
The DW and I are serious RVers. We have an older motorhome that we paid cash for, and we live in it 60-75% of the year. One thing I have learned in the last 15 yrs of doing this is that RVs can really bring out the worst in decision making in a lot of people. We have older friends who just bought the motorhome you are referring to, it's called a "toy hauler". They bought a new motorhome about four years ago. It was very similar to ours. Ours was seven years old, with low mileage, and had been obsessively cared for. We paid $44K. They bought a new one and paid $106K. They put $30K down and took out a mortgage on the balance. I use the word "mortgage" for a reason. The "car loan" on these things is absurd. They are typically for twenty years. Twenty years for a home is understandable, twenty for a poorly built box on wheels that falls apart and depreciates at an alarming rate, not so much. In shopping for used RVs you constantly hit deals that would be great, but the owner can't get the numbers in the reasonable range, since they have a 20 yr mortgage on the thing. It's now six or seven years old, and they owe a LOT more than it's actually worth. Our friends decided that they "need" the toy hauler to load with motorcycles, and still be able to pull a car behind. They find a 2016 for about $125K. It's built by one of the giant mega-corp RV manufacturers, and compared to their current one, an absolute piece of shit. Truly horrid quality, and a really unusable interior. Very little "living" space, no couch, no actual closets, etc..... They get roughly $60K on the trade, which barely covers the loan, then get a mortgage on the new one. WTF? In reality they borrowed 100% of the sale price for this POS. They will have lost at least $35-40K by this time next year!!!
This is far from unusual behavior.
We ended up at an RV show this past winter. We usually go alone, but traveled with a handful of couples from the resort we were at. Two of the couples had fifth wheel trailers that were less than a year old. Both were fairly expensive rigs
($60-80K) and made by well regarded, privately held, smaller manufacturers. Both wifes were dying to upgrade to bigger, fancier models. A recent facebook post revealed that one couple traded their perfectly nice, quality rig in, for a bigger, "blingier" POS with a lot more bells ans whistles. We were also with a couple who is far more mustashian. They have an older rig, it's now worn pretty hard, and it would be nice to replace. They shopped hard at the show, and decided that taking $40K, or more, out of savings, to upgrade, doesn't really have to happen yet. None of this is unusual, big loans for quickly depreciating liabilities, and swapping them out like you change clothes is what keeps the industry breaking sales records lately. It's hard to image how many people will work until they drop dead, since they "needed" a fancy RV.
My old neighbor has been drooling over ever RV I owned for the last fifteen years. He works at least six days a week in a horrible job in the trucking industry. His wife is a school lunch lady. They can't get away at all during the school year. In the summers, they have roughly ten Wednesdays where he is off for the day, and they can enjoy a day together. Last year he buys an older, but decent $20K motorhome. They have no savings. They use their HELOC. They take a one week vacation in the RV. This became the one, and only, time they used the thing. This year he trades it in for a new $80K motorhome. He takes an $8K loss on the trade in. The new one is a shit brand, low end piece of junk that will depreciate like a rock, and fall apart. His logic is that he needs to do this deal before he retires, and still has the income necessary to qualify for the loan. They recently took their one week vacation in the new rig. They both hope to retire in the next year or two. Zero savings, she has no pension, he has a small pension from an old teamsters union trucking job. I really doubt that they are going to make it.