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View Poll Results: Where would you like to move in the good old USA or Internationally | |||
I would never move I live in paradise. (Where do you live) | 13 | 20.31% | |
i would never move out of the USA but I could see myself living in? | 12 | 18.75% | |
If the country has problems I would consider moving internationally. My points of interest are? | 12 | 18.75% | |
I would love to live internationally at some point. My points of interest are? | 27 | 42.19% | |
Voters: 64. You may not vote on this poll |
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07-22-2020, 10:43 AM | #226 | |
NFL's #1 Ermines Fan
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: My house
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Quote:
If I was retired I probably wouldn't worry about reputation as long as the living environment was nice. I'd just wear a t-shirt that says, "I'm retired so I don't care". But are you saying the perceptional difference impacts Corona and not Orange, or both of them? Living on the coast would certainly be nice, but it's just not in the cards due to real estate costs. I go to Newport Beach regularly, and you made a good call living there. |
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Posts: 142,657
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07-22-2020, 10:45 AM | #227 | |
NFL's #1 Ermines Fan
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: My house
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Quote:
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Posts: 142,657
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07-22-2020, 10:46 AM | #228 | |
NFL's #1 Ermines Fan
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: My house
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Quote:
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Posts: 142,657
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07-22-2020, 11:00 AM | #229 |
Supporter
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Missouri
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Posts: 5,247
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07-22-2020, 11:21 AM | #230 | |
Would an idiot do that?
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Arizona
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Quote:
The area has snow-capped mountains, temperate rain forest, a lot of coastline... a lot of area to explore. |
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Posts: 56,568
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07-22-2020, 11:38 AM | #231 | |
Supporter
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Scott City KS
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Quote:
Now I just need to find $45M + operating. |
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Posts: 57,702
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07-22-2020, 11:52 AM | #232 |
Would an idiot do that?
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Arizona
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Posts: 56,568
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07-22-2020, 01:14 PM | #233 | |
NFL's #1 Ermines Fan
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: My house
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Quote:
It's nice, but I'd want a large ranch that's more convenient to shopping. Maybe a large ranch in the city. |
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Posts: 142,657
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07-22-2020, 01:38 PM | #234 |
Supporter
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Scott City KS
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Posts: 57,702
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07-22-2020, 02:41 PM | #235 |
NFL's #1 Ermines Fan
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: My house
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Rankings 26 through 30. It's getting serious now.
Sample houses: 26 – Pueblo (CO) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-72104?view=qv 27 – Fort Lauderdale (FL) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-52078?view=qv 28 – Delray Beach (FL) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-32452?view=qv 29 – Amarillo (TX) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-42743?view=qv 30 – Taos (NM) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-55148?view=qv Summary (in ascending order) Taos (NM) – My wife is a big fan, and I like it too. You can get a nice house for the money in a charming small town, and it’s a little more affordable overall than Denver. The summers are a little cooler than Denver due to the altitude, but the winters are a wash – notably colder but with only 2/3rd the snow. I think the biggest challenge here is the remoteness. It’s a small town, and to get to Santa Fe you have to go on a really twisty rural highway. That wouldn’t be ideal in the winter. I think this is a romantic pick, but not a practical one. Amarillo (TX) – This is the opposite of Taos. It’s a practical pick, but not a romantic one. It’s notably more affordable, and you can get a nice house for the money. The summers are a little worse on temperature and humidity, and there’s less snow than Denver but it’s still cold. This is purely a financial play in my book. It’s an option, but I see better gains elsewhere. Delray Beach (FL) – I know nothing about this place other than seeing it on a “best places to retire” list. We should talk about that sample house, though. That’s pretty epic. I’m assuming that the pool is screened in as opposed to air conditioned, right? Even so, it’s a very, very nice place. There are no winters here, and the summers are more humid than Denver, though only a couple of degrees warmer. My note of caution, though, is that I saw a number of houses on my home tour that require a country club membership that’s really expensive, in some cases $50k to buy in and $10k+ per year. I don’t see that with this house, but I’d definitely want to check. It’s a bit more affordable than Denver. Fort Lauderdale (FL) – See above. They’re basically right next door to each other. I think I like the Delray house more, but Fort Lauderdale is still nice. And yeah, this Fort Lauderdale house is actually in Delray Beach while the Delray Beach house is actually in a different small city. I'm just looking through the lists when I do the search. Pueblo (CO) – Pueblo is known as the unhippest town in Colorado, but I think it’s got potential. It’s a decent-sized city with restaurants and stuff, and the house is a good value for the money in a slightly more affordable locale. It only gets half the snow of Denver (a little lower and a little more south), but the winters are slightly colder and the summers are slightly warmer. Not sure it would be worth the trouble to move there. Last edited by Rain Man; 07-22-2020 at 03:11 PM.. |
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07-22-2020, 09:26 PM | #236 | |
Would an idiot do that?
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Arizona
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Quote:
Maybe the most bang for the buck so far though. |
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Posts: 56,568
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07-23-2020, 06:17 PM | #237 | |
NFL's #1 Ermines Fan
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: My house
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Quote:
I guess the owner needs to review all angles of him/herself for maximum grooming. I'm thinking, though, that this house might be a trap. I was worried about required country club memberships and didn't see it in the description, plus it's got a pretty high monthly HOA fee of $895. So I figured that it wasn't one of those properties. But looking a little more closely, it seems to be in a development that's linked to a country club. The fees are extortionary. This is from a five year old article, so I suspect now you'd have to pay $55,000 up front and then another $12,000 a year in fees. And that's on top of the $895 monthly HOA fee. It's a direct requirement to own the house. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/articl...per%20quarter. New homeowners must pay a non-refundable $10,000 initiation fee and purchase an equity stake in the club, which currently costs $41,450. The equity stake increases in price by $850 a year, but residents who sell their homes get back 70 percent of the going rate for the equity stake at the time they sell the property. Residents also must pay yearly for one of three levels of membership: the golf membership, which costs $10,665; the tennis membership ($9,181) or the social membership ($8,439). Each neighborhood association charges its own fees, which range from about $1,200 to $2,000 per quarter. On a monthly basis, residents pay $221 to the club to cover the cost of common area upkeep and of renovations. So it's a great house and seems like a screaming deal. But I think it's a screaming deal because the developer is pulling a ton of money out of you every year beyond the purchase price, and that drives down the home value. I think I'd need to find a different place in Delray Beach. Last edited by Rain Man; 07-23-2020 at 07:25 PM.. |
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Posts: 142,657
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07-23-2020, 07:24 PM | #238 |
NFL's #1 Ermines Fan
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: My house
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#21 through 25. See the picture for scoring.
Sample houses: 21 – Greeley (CO) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-92598?view=qv 22 – Honolulu (HI) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-99594?view=qv 23 – Bay St. Louis (MS) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-66168?view=qv 24 – Marfa (TX) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-98733?view=qv 25 – Denver (CO) https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-14766?view=qv Summary (in reverse order) 25 – Denver (CO) – This is an option of selling our house and buying a smaller condo in our same general neighborhood. My expected advantages here were that it would free up some home equity to produce income, and there’d be no need for exterior maintenance. In the long run, not having a lot of stairs may be necessary, too. The interesting thing about this is that when you sum everything up, it’s no more affordable than keeping our house, and the condo is a less attractive housing option. (My model builds in property taxes, a maintenance amount, and also income from the apartment in my house.) The HOA fee for the condo is pretty high, so you’re still paying for the maintenance indirectly. It’s a nice option because it’s Denver, so it scores high points on my scale, but other than the lack of stairs it offers no advantage at all over staying in my house. This was a good thing to learn. 24 – Marfa (TX) – My wife wants to visit Marfa and is intrigued by it. It’s a little artsy town that’s in southwest Texas, and it’s not near anything. It’s about three hours east of El Paso, three hours southwest of Odessa, and three hours north of Big Bend National Park. It’s pretty high in elevation, so the climate is surprisingly reasonable. The summers are about the same as Denver, and the winters are ten degrees warmer with almost no snow. That’s a win. The thing that’s not a win is that it’s a small town with a hit-or-miss housing stock that’s surprisingly expensive. It’s a bit more affordable than Denver due to low Texas taxes, and the sample house is reasonably nice, but you’d have to get lucky looking for a house there. It’s a better option than I thought from a climate perspective, though. 23 – Bay St. Louis (MS) – I’ve never been here, but a longtime friend of mine lives here and I thought it was kind of interesting. It’s on the Gulf Coast about an hour’s drive east of N’awlin’s. It actually stacks up very well. It’s very affordable, and the winters seem pretty darn nice. The summers are similar to Denver and notably more humid, as one might expect. The town leans heavily right politically for however you value that. I can’t say that I’m wowed by the architecture there, but there’s a good selection of houses that would work for me. I really wasn’t expecting much out of this place, so it surprised me positively. And by the way, what’s the deal with the big open space in that sample house? It looks like it’s a small auto showroom or something. I first thought it was a patio, but it appears to be indoor space. 22 – Honolulu (HI) – Okay, I’ll say up front that I’m kind of suspicious here, and it turns out that my suspicion was correct. Honolulu should be ranked a lot lower for a reason that’s unique to the locale. I’ve always heard that Honolulu is expensive, and you may recall that Hilo, HI, was a non-competitive #74 in the rankings (though it too graded out as being affordable and it’s big problem was housing stock). So something was amiss and I found it in the fine print. Obviously the climate is a winner here other than humidity – the January lows are 65 and the July highs are 85. So back to the pricing. The condo seems very reasonably priced, and I figured out why. In the fine print, it says it’s a “leasehold” condo. Doing a little digging, leaseholds date back to the days when the King of Hawaii owned all of the land. They would lease the right to build on the land, but at the end of the lease the landowner owned whatever was on the property and they took it all. So if you buy a leasehold property, you own it, but essentially the value goes to zero when the leasehold ends. Your house or condo goes free and clear to whoever owns the land. So the reason that this property seems affordable is likely because there’s not much longer on the leasehold team, so you’re essentially paying to buy it when it’s really just rent and you’ll lose the entire investment in a few years. Apparently a lot of times the landowner will negotiate a new lease when it ends, but that’s a cost that you have no control over, and if they want your condo (or house), they just take it. (Southern California has a similar but slightly different system on a lot of their coastal real estate, which is why it’s so high. But in their model you pay a monthly “land lease”.) I looked at some other places and they would often say how much longer was on the leasehold because that's a massive driver of the value. This place is a little skeezy in not mentioning it. My initial thinking is that this system is a complete and total ripoff, and it is. But in thinking about it more, there’s a weird advantage to it for someone like me (or rather, someone 15 years older than me). I’ve got no kids and I don’t really care about leaving an inheritance to anybody, so someone like me can buy a condo with a relatively short lease as long as it’ll last the rest of my life, and I'll pay a discounted price for it. If I’m in my 70s at some point and want to move to Hawaii, I just find a place with a 15-year leasehold term remaining (with the appropriately discounted price) and make a bet that the leasehold will outlive me. So in looking at it, it’s a terrible deal for somebody under age 60 or whatever, but it’s a pretty good deal for a person who’s elderly and doesn't care about leaving an estate. Very weird. I will tuck that information into my back pocket for a couple of decades. 21 – Greeley (CO) – It’s notably more affordable than Denver, primarily due to inexpensive housing. But the climate is a slight downgrade with slightly colder winters and hotter summers, albeit with 1/3 less snow. I had to compromise on the housing sample and pick a house with a basement, so the housing stock’s not a great fit. While this ranks pretty high, the advantages of moving there from Denver are purely financial, and everything else is a bit of a downgrade. Not really worth it, in my opinion. Last edited by Rain Man; 07-23-2020 at 07:38 PM.. |
Posts: 142,657
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07-23-2020, 07:28 PM | #239 | |
Would an idiot do that?
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Arizona
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Quote:
Most HOAs are scammy enough.... even if I had that kind of money, I'd really be curious where the hell all of that was going. |
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Posts: 56,568
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07-23-2020, 07:37 PM | #240 |
Would an idiot do that?
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Arizona
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That Honolulu condo sold for $402k only six years ago... certainly looked like a steal when I clicked on it.
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Posts: 56,568
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