Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael G.
Do you feel snowbirds are wealthier than the people that live in TV year around?
They would need:
2 homes.
2 wardrobes at each house.
2 cars.
2 tax bills.
2 heating/cooling bills.
2 yard maintenance contracts.
2 doctors/dentist etc.
And someone to check on each house for 6 months.
We in TV thank you for sharing your wealth.  |
I know people who live here year around who bought the smallest houses here fifteen or twenty years ago, paid cash after selling their houses up north, and are living on small Social Security checks alone and barely scraping by. That will be much harder to do for the people they sell to in the next few years. I also know people who live here year around and live in houses that would sell for a million and who have several million in investments on which they can draw. That’s wealthier than most people, true, but still not really wealthy, and the taxes on their house here may be as much as your SS income. I think that for many people here part of the year, whether they own or rent, they long to escape the cold of northern winters, but they have children and grandchildren they want to see a lot. It’s not cheap, but so it goes. They do what it takes.
It doesn’t have to be too expensive. They may own their northern home outright. (They also may have used savings to buy a less-expensive house here for cash.) They may live in a state that never reassesses real estate until it is sold and so pay very little in taxes. Doctors charge by services rendered, so having two sets costs nothing extra. It’s easy to furnish a courtyard villa for two with used furniture for $5,000. For a couple hundred bucks, they can have their homes winterized and leave the heat off entirely and turn off the lights and refrigerator. They can leave an inexpensive, paid-off car in the garage here or there. They leave their golf cart here and learn to get by with one car instead of two each place. Two wardrobes? Are there no suitcases?
When I bought a home here a couple years ago, I thought I would summer up north. Keeping my little paid-for house in Pennsylvania cost me a total of $1,000 a month, half of which was community fees. (The rest was electricity, propane, taxes.) But I like it here. I’m enjoying being involved in what I like doing, which is performing music, all year around. I realized I don’t play golf, and in Pennsylvania I spent most of the summer in air conditioned comfort, avoiding the heat and humidity there. But I can do that here, too. I don’t often go outside in the summer, either place. I have no grandchildren, and my children lived an hour away from me in Pennsylvania but still never seem interested in seeing me. So I sold the house up north at the beginning of the summer. Now I’m a frog: here until I croak. This saves me $12,000 a year. Nice! Unfortunately, my mortgage, insurance, taxes, and yard care eats up every penny of my Social Security. Fortunately, I have some retirement funds. And an extra $12,000 a year.
But don’t assume that people with two houses are “wealthy.” Most aren’t. Not what I would consider wealthy. They may be wealthier than you if you are scraping by on Social Security, but that isn’t the same thing.