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Aloha everyone, my husband and I are planning to move to The Big Island, sight unseen in mid May 2020. We are not newbies to islands, as we previously lived on Ambergris Caye, Belize for 5 years, moved from Belize to St. Croix UVSI sight unseen in 2013 and have been here since. We are both in our mid fifties and retired. No pets. We have done a lot of research online on Hawaii as far as the cost of living, health care, etc. Our plan is to have our Jeep shipped from St. Croix to Kona in May, stay in a VRBO or Airbnb or somewhere cheaper in Kona West for 4 to 6 weeks to give us a chance to look at where exactly we would like to rent a condo/house long term. Does anyone have recommendations/suggestions that would help us? Any recommendations as where to stay our first few weeks? Thank you so much.
If you are going to be exploring the whole island, then it doesn't matter where you stay. So finding somewhere cheaper would be to get out of Kailua Kona town where you would be competing with tourists. There are legal vacation rentals further south, such as Captain Cook/Kealakekua area. Or even further south down where I live near South Point. I would not recommend staying in Ocean View as they have a high rate of burglaries and thefts there. Just throwing out some suggestions as I don't know what criteria you have for a place to stay.
The economics will never work shipping a Jeep from the Caribbean to Hawaii. Besides what will be very high shipping costs you'll also have to deal with Customs fees, etc.
Sell the Jeep. There is a Jeep dealer on the island if you really like them. Although, in Hawaii - Jeep usually scream tourist. The downside of that is breakins.
We also don't use the term 'West', nobody is really gonna know where you mean if you use the term. There's 'Kona side' and 'Hilo side' and I suppose 'Southpoint' is probably South, but folks use that as a name and not really a direction. Same with 'North Kohala'.
Check Craig's List for car prices, it's probably cheaper to buy a new vehicle once you're here. There's tons of folks who are "Moving To Paradise!!!" and bring a couple of cars and a forty foot shipping container full of their best and favorite things. They're here for less than a year, then they decide it's not really Paradise after all or the grandkids are too far away, or they can't get a replacement job similar to the one they had that got them to the standard of living they were used to or whatevers. By this time, they usually don't have enough money left to ship everything back again so the cars and contents of the container are sold off pretty cheap so they can get back to wherever they started from again. Which means the rest of us kinda have a stream of incoming cars and things at discounted rates.
...i shipped my jeep wrangler over here from mass, the price was $3,200, that was for what they called, 'covered transport', as opposed to having it on the open deck, but really, who knows if that's just a selling point...of course that was 12 years ago, i can't remember who i used but it was one of the major transport companies, they picked it up in mass at the end of my driveway and twenty days later it was in hilo ready to be picked up...the jeep was only three years old then...obviously there were no customs charges either...i was happy with that price...
Where are you guys getting these prices? We had 3 vehicles shipped with Matson. They were hauled by the shipping company from our home on the main land to Los Angeles. It took roughly two weeks until they arrived in HILO and we were charged $800 per vehicle. If there would happen to be any damage the shippers take responsibility. You’re going to pay more for a new vehicle from one of the local dealers. The used cars from dealers are extremely expensive, way over priced. If and when I decide to buy a new vehicle, I’ll buy it on the mainland and pay the $800 to ship it and save a few thousand bucks.
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