Where to Buy Your Snowbird Home

If you decide to buy a cold weather home, there is one very important factor that you may not have considered. What is the closest airport? I know that since I drove down I didn't consider where we would have to fly into to get here. Ocala does not have its own commercial airport. It has a lovely airport but no scheduled flights come here, it is all business flights and private aircraft. 

What that leaves is Gainesville which is only 31 miles north of the Ocala Airport, Tampa, Clearwater, Jacksonville, Daytona, Orlando, and Orlando -Sanford. We obviously have a lot of choices, unfortunately, none of them are great. Orlando is busy with lots of traffic and $10 in tolls. Tampa also busy with lots of traffic. Gainsville is the best option but it is usually almost twice as expensive as the other two. Sanford is also a better option since there is a little less traffic if one travels in that direction. Clearwater is a nice airport but quite a lot farther as is Jacksonville. 

At this time, we are still driving so it is irrelevant but it is something we need to consider for the future. One option is to just fly into whichever airport is the cheapest and hire a driver to take us home. We will most likely opt for that when the time comes.

To Buy or to Rent That is the Question

When it comes time to be a snowbird, there are obviously two options, you can rent or you can buy. I have always thought that we would rent, perhaps even timeshares by the week so that we could escape the cold and perhaps move around during our time away. There are some good reasons for choosing to rent. 

Rent:

Less expensive up front. You will not have to get a mortgage or deplete your savings. 

You can go someplace different every year. 

You don't need to pay for repairs or upkeep. 


We opted to buy. We had some good reasons for doing this. 

Own:

You can rent the property to others to help defray the cost. 

There are tax benefits from having a rental property. 

You can have your own things around you. 

You like going to the same place every year. 

Once you decide that you want to be a snowbird, you will need to decide which way you want to go. You may want to visit and rent the first year just to see if first of all, you can stand being away from family and friends for months at a time. 

We chose to buy without doing that but we had Al's brother and his wife and all of our nieces here in Ocala so we were not going somewhere without a support system. Having said that I sometimes wish we had taken our time because I think I would have preferred to own a townhouse. Here at Oak Run, townhouses have a higher HOA but it includes lawn care which is one less thing to think about. 

The Unintentional Snowbird

Let me begin by saying, I never intended to become a snowbird. The last thing in the world we ever thought we would do was go to Florida for the winter. But, things change. When Al was diagnosed with Parkinson's we knew that it would change our lives, and so it did. One thing that it changed was his ability to tolerate the cold. This man who used to ski in below zero weather now has hands and feet that feel like an ice cube.

We arrived back to this last year!!

He should have known better than to complain to me. I started looking and got his brother and his wife involved and we found what seemed like the perfect home. We now own that perfect home and are spending three months enjoying an escape from the winter in Connecticut.

#oakrunocala