Just a couple of points here, first off on financing, everyone's circumstances are different, when I bought our RV in 2016, I financed it over 3 years, not because I could not afford to pay for it, but because I did not have the cash on hand to pay for it outright, and I would have been hit with tax burdens higher than the interest amount if I were to liquidate stocks in order to get the cash on hand, this made it effectively cheaper for me to finance than to pay cash at the time, though interest rates today are much higher.
The other thing I wanted to address is that cost of ownership side of things, we are coming up on 10 years of RV ownership, the other day I sat down and spent some time going over approximating our total cost of ownership over the last decade including such things as maintenance, repairs, upgrades, as well as insurance, etc. while it is an approximation and I am sure some thing have fallen through the cracks, I was somewhat surprised to see that I have now spent double the purchase price of the coach on total cost of ownership stuff.
To put some numbers to this, our coach is a 2002 Safari Trek 28 ft Class A , bought in 2016 with 74,000 miles on it at a cost of $22,500 Insurance, registration, roadside assistance amounts to about $1,000 per year, or $10,000 over 10 years, I don't have any storage cost thanks to free to me storage space in a metal shed that was not actively being used on the family cattle ranch. The rest is pretty much actual maintenance related costs, which seems to average out pretty close to $3,500 per year, some years more, some years less, most of it done as DIY projects, though some things have involved paying shops to do jobs I don't want to tackle myself like replacing the lower ball joints. So far no single expense has went over about $2,200, but it seems there are usually a few things to spend money on each year, some examples are a new rooftop air conditioner, new tires, converting to LiFePo4 batteries, adding another 600 watts of solar panels, then there are other potentially lesser expenses, twice I have needed to replace the engine starter while in RV parks on trips at $200-$300 each. Right now I am in the process of changing out about $1,200 worth of worn steering linkages, (tie rod ends, bell crank arm, drag link) after which I will need an alignment that will cost me $250-$350 including fuel to get it to the nearest RV alignment shop, add in another $150 or so in tools I had to buy to complete this project and we are already pretty much half way there on this year's estimated repair budget, all this valuing my time at 0$ per hour.
