❌ 5 expensive mistakes to avoid when buying a motorhome or campervan

If you're thinking about buying a motorhome or a campervan, you need to watch this video. I've been talking at shows and sharing tips about motorhoming and van life for years, and unfortunately, I have met plenty of people who have got buyer's remorse because they chose poorly for their first van, purely because they didn't know what to look out for. So in this video, I'm going to be sharing with you 5 of the most common mistakes that new buyers make and how to avoid them. Before we drive in, if you're new to the channel, Hi and welcome. My name is Kat. I run Wandering Bird, which is now a website and a YouTube channel and plenty of social media. So if you'd like to see more videos about motorhoming and van life and cool places for you to visit with your motorhome, then by all means hit subscribe. Right, let's dive into these mistakes. So mistake number 1 is choosing the wrong layout. It's easy to say, but I know how difficult that can be, especially if you haven't spent a lot of time in a motorhome or a camper van before. The easiest way of fixing this problem is to either borrow one if you have a kind friend or family member that will lend you one for a few days, or hire one. Now hiring one can be expensive, so a couple of ways that you can reduce these initial costs are to hire out of peak season, and also you don't have to hire for an entire week. If you can, certainly if you're going out of peak season, you can hire for a couple of nights or 3 nights, and that will give you long enough to get some ideas on whether this layout works for you or if it doesn't, which can be just as important. But this is when you can start thinking about how you use the vehicle when you're going to be spending time in it. So, for example, does a fitted bed work for you, or are you happy to have more space during the day and then have a sofa that turns into a bed, for example, or indeed a drop-down bed from the ceiling, which sounds magical but can really reduce your headroom? I know I'm 5'11, it can be quite tough sometimes when they've got these fitted beds in the ceiling to actually walk underneath it. So that's something to think about as well. How many seats with belts on? Sometimes you can get 4-berth vehicles that have only got 2 belted seats, so be really careful about that because it's impossible to fit them aftermarket. Another couple of really important questions to think about are, how do you generally get up or go to bed? Like, do you all get up and go to bed at the same time? If you're travelling with kids and they go to bed early, where will the adults stay if the kids have got a certain area of the van as their bed? If your partner is a morning owl and they get And you want to stay in bed and have a bit of a lie-in, is there space in that layout for you to do that? You also can go around as many shows as possible. We're coming into motorhome show season now, but go around as many shows as possible and imagine how you would all survive in that space if it was really raining and stormy outside, so you couldn't sit outside, couldn't get an awning out, couldn't have any additional space. Could you cope in that space? space for a day or 2 days. If you want a list of all the essential questions that I highly recommend you ask yourself before you choose your van, then I will drop the link to our Confident Buyer Checklist in the notes for you. Mistake number 2 is ignoring the payload and weight limit of your potential vehicle. Now, I know payload can sound quite terrifying, and if you want an in-depth video on what it is and how you work it all out, I'll leave the link to this video there for you. But basically, payload is the difference between what your vehicle weighs when you get it and how much it can take, how much stuff or how many people you can put onto that vehicle before it hits its maximum legal weight limit. Now, knowing the legal weight limit for your particular vehicle is really important because if you go over it, you could run into all sorts of trouble, not least of which involves your insurance being invalid if you have a crash or an accident and your vehicle's found to be overweight. Your whole insurance will be invalid, which obviously is a really big problem. So it's really important to make sure that you stay underneath your legal maximum weight limit for your vehicle, and that means when you're looking around at different vehicles to buy, you need to know roughly what the payload will be. And sometimes they're not very much, like sometimes they can be as low as 200 or 300 kilograms, which when you think about it— Okay, let's break this down. So let's say you and your partner are going to be traveling on the vehicle. So let's call you 75 kilograms each, that's 150 kilos. If your payload's only 200 kilos, that means you've only got 50 kilograms left for fuel, for water, for bedding, for pots, for pans, for food, for a dog, for whatever else you carry on there. If you're a couple with 2 kids, let's say the kids are 50 kilos each, so that's 250 kilos before you've even started That's before the dog, before the awning, before the spare panel, before bike rack goes on the back, before anything else happens. So you can see immediately how quickly this payload, this difference, can disappear. Now, many UK and European motorhomes are built to stay underneath the 3.5-ton limit, which most people, myself included— I don't have grandfather rights on my driving licence, which means I can only drive A vehicle up to 3.5 tonnes. If I want to drive a heavier vehicle than that, then I need to do a C1 test and get that added on to my licence, which isn't particularly difficult and plenty of people do it all the time, but it is another expense and it's another thing that you need to consider when you're buying your motorhome or your campervan. It's also really important to acknowledge or realise that not Every vehicle, particularly campervans, are rated up to 3.5 tonnes. Some of the smaller ones could only be 2.9 tonnes or 3.3, so the payload might be, oh yeah, the payload's only, I don't know, 2 tonnes for the sake of argument. You think, ah, I've got loads! Yeah, but if the maximum weight is lower than 3.5 tonnes, you don't have anywhere near as much as you think, so it's really important to understand that. It's also important to know when you're buying a secondhand vehicle that the previous owner may have added extra bits onto the van, which means that what the manufacturers say the payload is, is possibly not the case. So they might have added a bike rack, an external storage unit, an awning, extra solar panels, an extra battery, all of these things which add up and eat into your payload, and the only way that you can know for sure exactly what your vehicle weighs is to take it to a weighbridge after you've bought it, so you'll get an exact weight limit, and I try and do this before I put any stuff in the vehicle, so you get an exact idea of what you and the vehicle will weigh, and then you'll find out what your maximum weight limit is. That's on your paperwork, and there will also be a plaque inside the door somewhere which will say what the maximum weight limit of that vehicle is, and then you'll be able to know the difference so you can figure out the payload. It is possible to upplate most vehicles, and that's something that you can talk to about with your dealer or the DVLA, give advice on that. But again, remember, if you don't have your grandfather right on your license to go over your 3.5-ton limit for what weight vehicle you can drive, you'll have to upgrade your license to be a C1 or something like that. So that's really important to understand before you buy your vehicle. Mistake number 3 is not paying enough attention to storage. Now, when you first walk into a motorhome in this showroom and it's all lit up and it's all beautiful and it feels so Spacious, there is a reason that these things feel spacious. It's because they don't have very much storage. One of the ways that manufacturers are trying to make vehicles lighter to keep their vans under that 3.5-ton limit so that people like me can buy and drive them is they are removing loads of storage. So a lot of vans now don't have wardrobes. They will only have a few lockers. So when you're trying to then store stuff, especially if you're going to go off and do quite a long journey, so you want to take a fair amount of stuff with you, you'll find it incredibly difficult to find homes for all the things that you want to put away. So in order to avoid buyer's remorse for all this, have a look at what exactly you'll want to store and where you can store it. A really good example of this is if you've got a bed that needs to be made up and taken down every night, Where are you going to store your bedding and your pillows? Where are you going to store pots and pans? Is there space to store crockery and plates and glasses? How about things like muddy shoes or wet towels or all of these things? So what I tend to do is look for every space, what you might use it for, and then figure out where you would store whatever things go with that space. So food around the galley area, clothes around the bedroom area, dog stuff— well, dog stuff goes pretty much everywhere— but these things are really important to look at and just see if there's enough storage for you on that layout that you like. Mistake number 4 is not considering overnight storage or where you're going to park the vehicle once you've bought it. Now, a lot of people hope to store their vehicle on their driveway, which makes perfect sense, it saves on storage costs, but Is your driveway the right length, and has your driveway got appropriate access? So I know there was a place that I stayed at where I was like, oh, I can park the motorhome on the drive, but it turned out the drive was slightly sloping, so as soon as you got the back wheels over, it actually ended up scraping the bottom of the vehicle along the curb, which was really not good. So I couldn't park the motorhome on that driveway. So that's something to be really, really aware of. If you're not going to park it on your driveway, can you park it on the street around you? Loads of places now require permits or have some sort of regulation about on-street parking in residential areas, so you need to check your local council and just find out if there are any restrictions. And then the last option is a storage unit or storage site. They are plentiful, but a lot of them have got huge waiting lists, especially as motorhoming, campervanning, and caravanning has got so much more popular, it's getting harder and harder to find a spot in a storage site, particularly a good one if it's like a CASOA approved and it's got 24-hour access or it's got 24-hour surveillance. All of those kind of things will make a site much more desirable, and therefore getting into it is going to be a lot more difficult. So ways that you can avoid this is, first of all, to measure your driveway, especially as well if you've got gates That open. A lot of people forget about this. So yeah, you've got to be really careful if you're going to park your van on a driveway, and also think about things like, do you need extra security measures? Like, a lot of people want to get a fitted bar parked or put in so that when the motorhome is parked, you can't just drive the van off your driveway. So it's really important to look at things like that. Like I said, check any council regulations for parking, and you might even want to start putting your name down on some of your local storage units or storage sites before you buy the vehicle, just so that hopefully you can get a spot when you've actually got it in your possession. Another common mistake is underestimating the ongoing running costs of owning a motorhome or a campervan. Obviously, it's not just the price that you pay to buy the vehicle, it's also the cost that you pay for things like insurance, road tax, maintenance, repairs, General habitation checks if you do those on an annual basis, which isn't legally required but is always a good idea just to make sure that everything is okay with your vehicle on a regular basis. Then obviously you've got things like fuel and breakdown cover, campsite fees, MOTs, storage costs if you're going to be parking your vehicle in storage, tracker costs if you're getting a tracker fitted and you want it with 24-hour monitoring on it. There are a lot of hidden costs which you might not fully appreciate before you buy your vehicle, so I'm going to do a quick breakdown here. Forgive me while I read. So just as a bit of a guide for you, you can expect to pay around £1,000 a year for servicing, MOTs, HAB checks, all of those kind of things. Insurance is getting more and more expensive. I cannot believe How much my insurance premium has gone up. Now, I use the vehicle a lot. I have a lot of mileage, but I'm paying around £1,200 a year for insurance, which is insane, frankly, when a few years ago it was like £500 or £600 for the year. Now, I don't obviously live in the vehicle anymore, but when you do live in the vehicle, it can be even double that. So make sure that you shop around and get lots of different insurance quotes. Yes, it's a pain, But it will really help you, and you can actually look at it driving away down the premium by perhaps playing them off against each other. If you are going to look at motorhome clubs, then make sure you're actually going to use them. It's pointless paying to be part of a club if you're then not going to use their campsites or facilities or whatever they offer. Talking of clubs, actually, the Wandering Motorhome Club trip to Europe is now full, but we are going to be doing another one later in this year. So if you want to join us, thinking the Black Forest in Germany, then I will leave a link for you to come and join us inside the Wandering Motorhome Club, and you can get involved in that next trip. But make sure when, like I say, when you are totting up what your ongoing expenses are, that they're not going to be prohibitive, because otherwise you're not going to be able to use the vehicle in the way that you want it to. It's also really important if you're buying an older vehicle that you have some sort of budget for repairs or checking maintenance And I would highly recommend that you get a habitation check done before you buy an older vehicle for checked things like damp or mould issues or things like that, which, especially if it's got a wooden frame, that the more modern vehicles might not have problems with in the same way. So there you go, that is 5 of the biggest mistakes that new buyers make when they are buying their first motorhome or campervan. So to recap, check your layout and think really carefully about how you're going to use the spaces inside the vehicle. Number 2, make sure you check your payload and your weight limits and that there is adequate payload for you and the people that you want to travel with. Number 3 is make sure that the storage inside the vehicle works for you. If you've got enough of it, is it in the right kind of place or the way that you want it to be? Number 4 is make sure you know where you're going to keep the vehicle when you're not traveling in it. Is it going to be on your driveway or on your street or on a storage unit. And then number 5 is obviously making sure that you know what the ongoing costs of the vehicle are. But I think the biggest mistake that a lot of people make is they rush and they get sucked into the, oh, I've got to buy it now, and the salesman's doing a brilliant job, and they all get anxious about losing this amazing van that they found. My biggest tip is don't rush. Work your way through a checklist or list of questions. Like I say, I will drop the Confident Buyer Checklist and Decision Matrix in the notes for you. You can print that out. You can take it with you to the showrooms. I cannot tell you how many dealers I've met and spoken to going, "Yes, we had another one of yours going round with their little checklist." Good. I'm glad. I want to help as many people as possible make the best decision for you because what is my perfect van? Might not be your perfect van, and that's okay. But I want to help you figure out and learn what your perfect van and layout and everything is. So that's the whole point of that checklist and decision matrix. If you want to see around some more cool vans, then this video is for you. As always, thank you for your time, and I'll see you on the next video. Take care. Bye.