Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
My elderly aunt gave up (sold) the townhouse she and her late husband owned in western Mass, Lenox.
She maintained the house they owned in Naples, Florida, and she lives there 10 months a year. She rents an apartment for the summer season in Lenox.
Different approaches work for different people. Owning two residences gets expensive and maintaining the one you're not living in can be a challenge.
The summer rental works for my aunt because she doesn't have maintenance responsibilities for it. The downside is that availability isn't guaranteed and the unit (because of high demand) is never updated.
Between having lived in Florida and Arizona, we have known many snowbirds. Sooner or later they tire of maintaining 2 homes. Then they usually sell the one where they keep the snow shovel.
Your comments reminded me of one of our former contractors. Her and her husband own a beautiful home on the hills of Ventura CA with a view of the ocean. Up until a year or two ago they also owned a beach front home on the North Shore of Oahu. As they aged the Hawaii home became more of a burden. Although fun to visit, they found that they spent most of the time working on the house.
One way around that is to have the money to have someone else take care of your home. A few years back our area had a large fire that went on for over a month. Many people lost their homes. The Thomas Fire was in the news back then. My parents who had lived here for over 40 years were listening to a friend comment on all the people that had lost homes, some of them well known people. My dad explained that the well known people and many others owned more than one private home. A few people he told that to found it hard to believe. Funny thing is we know people that own homes by the beach, another in the mountains, and maybe additional homes in other areas.
My wife and I looked at the cost to add on to our home and found it would be cheaper to buy a home in another part of the nation that we could enjoy as a second home. We are far from retirement though.
I have it there so I can watch it whenever I get stressed. Imagine how much more calming it would be in person.
Made me want to visit! I have good friends who own a really nice RV. Now I know for sure it's not for me. Something is always breaking down or not working properly. Seems like they spend a lot of time and money waiting for repairs. And it is always in the middle of nowhere that one of those slides stop working!
I am sending your link to them. I could see them spending a summer here!
Between having lived in Florida and Arizona, we have known many snowbirds. Sooner or later they tire of maintaining 2 homes. Then they usually sell the one where they keep the snow shovel.
I don't know about that. My neighbors (Massachusetts) own a winter condo in Hawaii. She's 82 and he just turned 80 and they still live between the two locations with plans to 'retire' in Hawaii. They still don't think of themselves as old and ready to settle down.
Can I just say I love the term "Pied a Terre"? Would this actually be in Paris? Since you can now make a lot of money renting one out (via an onsite property manager, obviously), which is my ultimate plan, I'd say buy it as long as you can buy it outright.
I would say rent, unless you're SURE you'll use the 2nd home a lot, and won't lose interest in it, and also unless you have pets. We're early-retired and rented a 2nd home in a very beloved and familiar town where we used to live. It was great having a place all set up just for us, ready whenever we wanted it. I called it our bolt-hole. We used it a lot, but doing the two days' drive about seven times in one year with our senior dog started to get old, and also - despite loving the place and the people in it - it got to feel burdensome to have a sense of obligation to go to this one place whenever we had free time.
So many rentals do not allow pets, so if you're really committed to the place and want to bring your pets when you go, you're likely to find a nicer place if you can afford to buy. (The place we rented was selected primarily because they DID allow pets, but it was sort of skanky, and of course that contributed (negatively) to the overall experience.) But that does not reduce the gradual sense of burden at "needing" to go to your 2nd home when you might feel like exploring a new place.
Last thing: I really LOVED having the customized place, just for me, waiting for me. but I really did NOT love the increasing sense of worry about the place sitting vacant after we'd been gone for over a month. Hiring a property manager might be a way around this. (We had friends who would check, but they all have lives to live and I did not like to ask them to go over there very often.)
This has been a rambling answer, but the upshot is: After our experiment, if we did not have pets, and if I had just one place I wanted as my "second home," I'd just find a VRBO that I loved, and build my visits around its availability.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
