If You Have Retired to, or Snowbird in, Balwin County.... (Birmingham: for sale, real estate)

[nebloke]

If you have retired to, or snowbird in, Balwin County please share your experiences here. Would love to hear what you like and what you don't like. Your experience with real estate, taxes, insurance, etc.

I am very familier with the Gulf Shores area and have been visting there at least every other year for the past 50 years. My family has owned a condo on the beach there since 1979 and I have strong family ties to south Alabama. We live in the NYC area and plan to retire to Baldwin County someday for at least about half the year. Ideally, we would like to spend Sep, Oct, half of Nov, and then Feb, Mar, and April in Baldwin County and the rest of the year in the northeast where we both grew up and also have strong familiy ties. We really like the Craft Farms community a lot and think that it would be ideal for us.

Any feedback from retiress or snowbirds in Baldwin County would be greatly appreciated.

[ronrutmr2]

Sounds like you have already spent more time here than most do before moving in! I've lived in extreme north Foley for a little over three and a half years now, and I still love it as much as the first day. Like you, I had vacationed off and on for years at Gulf Shores, and when retirement came, the only problem was convincing the better half that this is where I wanted to move. We're originally from the Birmingham area, so it was not near the cultural shock as it could be for someone from up north.

We moved at basically the bottom of the housing bust, so what we "lost" on the prior house, we mostly made up on this end. Insurance costs kept us looking above US98. If current selling prices in this neighborhood are any indication, houses have roughly appreciated 10% since late 2010. When we moved in, this little subdivision had empty new houses, partial builds and many empty lots for sale. There are a total of 78 lots, and today there are only 6 lots available, and all the houses already built are sold, and the ones being built are sold before completion.

Property taxes are some of the lowest in the nation. I base that on my experience of having lived in Alabama, New Jersey, Texas, and Mississippi. We do have a state income tax, but only on earned incomes. They do not tax social security or qualified pensions. Homeowners insurance can be pricey depending on distance from "big water", and flood insurance very expensive. Near the coast you can get typical insurance like for fire, liability, etc., but to get water and wind coverage, you have to go into the high-risk pool like a Lloyd's of London would handle. I'm north of US98, so I consider my insurance to be fairly reasonable. North of I-10 it would be even lower. I'm not worried about flood events. We just had over 22" of rain the other day, and there was no problem at all here. Most of the long-termers down here said that the rain event caused more flooding than any hurricane has.

You probably already know of the traffic we have on AL59 during tourist season, but if you know the back roads, it's not that big a deal. Plenty of great restaurants and golf courses. If you can't find what you need here, Mobile and Pensacola are only 45 minutes away in opposite directions.

Hope my rambling makes some sense to you...

Ron
Foley, AL