Attitude Is the Key to Enjoying the RVing Adventure

When I think about attitude, I think about the story of Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence.

Whether it's a dreaded chore or a fun thing to do all depends on the attitude of the person doing it.

We don't have a lot of control over what happens in life (some, of course, but not much). We do have a lot of control over how we react to what happens to us. With practice, maybe we can have even more control over how we react.

Your Attitude Toward Maintenance Is an Example of This Concept

With most insurance policies you can either pay your insurance all in one annual payment, or you can pay monthly.

That's the way to look at RV maintenance expenses. Things may go bad a little bit at a time, but you usually don't know it until all of a sudden when something totally fails.

In other words, most maintenance problems hit you all at once but put some money in your maintenance account each month, and when something expensive happens, you've already paid for it.

Of course, this money is in addition to your emergency fund, which should be for a true emergency and not just for predictable expenses. Every mile you drive you're using up your gasoline (or diesel fuel). You're also using up your tires, but you pay for tires every few years not a little for every trip. Even if you took a 500-mile trip and didn't have to spend anything on maintenance, that doesn't mean you didn't get that much closer to having to spend some money on repairs.

One RVer told me that every time he puts $100 worth of gas in his rig, he also puts $100 in an envelope that he keeps for maintenance expenses. My maintenance doesn't run to nearly that much, but his technique may not be a bad idea.

In my case maybe putting aside $20 for $100 spent on gas might cover my maintenance costs. I guess it depeneds on how much of the work you do yourself.

That way it's not a stressful situation when something breaks, and you have to spend money all of a sudden on repairs.

It's not like you had bad luck on this trip or this month. That would be like saying that you had bad luck when the gas gauge got down close to empty and you had to spend $100 on gas.

You've been using up those tires and your refrigerator all along; it's just that all of a sudden it's time to pay for what you've been using.

This is just one of the ways to keep RVing from being stressful.

When you have an unexpected problem, if you have an emergency fund there's no problem--and no stress. You just take money from your emergency fund to pay for the repairs and on you go.

Of course, if you have an emergency and spend some of the money in your emergency fund, you need to immediately start making arrangements to put money back into your emergency fund to replenish what you took out.

Random Events are Random--Period

I've seen intelligent people say that, since it's been a long time since they've rolled a 7, they're due to roll a 7. Duh?

Yesterday I was talking to a guy who was cleaning up after a flood. He said that this was a 100-year flood, so he shouldn't see another flood like this during the rest of his lifetime.

Don't get caught looking at situations this way. Don't think that, since you've already spent money this month repairing your air conditioner, you're less likely to have a tire go bad.

If you find yourself thinking like this, spend some of your maintenance money and go buy a rabbit's foot. By the way, I'll go into more details about maintenance in Chapter 9. Maintenance is an important subject and a big cause of stress. It needs its own chapter.

Bottom line: The right attitude is important to fully enjoy your RVing adventure. Don't let random events change your attitude. Remember that random events are random--period.

By the way, if you're wondering what the picture at the top of the article has to do with the article, the answer is nothing. This is a picture of a sunset that was made standing in front of my motorhome. this week.