I have forgotten to mention one important part of our journey so far and that has been the transfer of money to our US bank account with Citibank.
Some months ago I spotted an article by Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert about the rip off rates that Banks use to transfer money to foreign banks. Investigated this with our bank and found that on average you lost about 6-7 cents per pound when transferring money to the US. Now this meant we would lose quite a substantial amount when we wanted to move money to buy our RV.
Martin in this article http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/foreign-currency-exchange recommended a company called Transferwise. I can but back him up on this as we have used them and to say the least the transactions have been flawless.
Because our bank had a daily transfer limit we had to do it over a few days but having two bank accounts with different UK banks sped up the process. The way is works is you transfer money to Transferwise (we did a small transaction of £100 first to check it all worked), and then Transferwise converts the money and sends it to your nominated foreign account. It works for all of the major currencies and they are gradually adding more.
We always got the top conversion rate as per the market (we lucked out as over the period we did it £ – $ went up to $1.30!!) and Transferwise make their money by taking a small percentage fee on each transaction. We actually saved thousands of dollars by doing this, so I can heartily recommend Transferwise.