What I haven’t talked about is what got us to this point. I grew up in a small town in southwest GA, moved to metro Atlanta in 1996 and stayed there until last year.
We had a house built in 2016 in the northern burbs and thought we had our “forever home”. All the time from 1996 -2020 I bumped around between 7 jobs as a journeymen “enterprise dev”.
My wife had lived in metro Atlanta all of her life. We got married in 2012 (both on our second marriage).
Everything changed in 2020. Our youngest son (my stepson) graduated from high school, Covid happened (didn’t fatally affect anyone in our inner or outer circle) and I fell into a remote job at BigTech.
When things got back to normal around 2021, we both realized that life is short and we wanted a change. That’s what caused us to blow up our life and we are both happier now that we really can’t acquire “stuff”.
When we left our condo in March to start our six month trip, we put it in the rental pool, it gets professional managed like a hotel room and we get half the rent to cover our mortgage.
We don’t own a car. We take Uber for six months once we hit a city and we have a Sixt subscription and we rent a car by the month when we are at home.
Are you documenting/journaling your interactions and experiences in the various cities that you visit with a view to drawing any conclusions? Or just enjoying the ride?
Hotel nightly rates are generally much higher than the daily equivalent of monthly rent. You’d need more info to know which is a better deal.
But you don’t understand the other part. I’ve done the landlord thing before. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever be a landlord again. The entire purpose of it was never to make money. But to have a place to stay for six months, a legal residence in a state that didn’t charge taxes, and for it to pay for itself when we are not there.
When we leave every year, we pay a one time $110 cleaning fee and don’t think about the place again until we come back in six months. The income comes in the same account where the mortgage is paid automatically.
The other option, something like AirBnB, will result in lower overall fees but almost certainly higher vacancy than having the hotel manage everything and allow people to book it on e.g. Hilton.com or Expedia just like nay other hotel room.
It’s Florida so it’s very seasonal. But we live there during low season.
I liked the model but the numbers didn’t work out to make it an investment. Sounds like the one you found does, so congrats!
We also had to pay 30% down since it is considered a commercial property. But you buy it just like you would any other commercial unit through a bank. On top of that, we took a HELOC on what was our primary home to get the 30%, just as interest rates were rising. We rent our home out to our grown son and two of his friends that we have known forever.
The HELOC isn’t covered by either rental income and that only makes sense because it is offset by the state taxes we don’t pay.
The only time this makes sense for most people is if their primary home is paid off and as a vacation home and for retired snowbirders.
Also people do it to avoid taxes on real estate sales using a 1031 Exchange.
Even knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t do it under any other circumstances besides what we are doing now or as part of 1031 exchange if had taxable real estate capital gains.
Because $Life, we haven’t really traveled that much until last year.
The end game is to sell our house in Atlanta after our son moves out (he pays rent with two of his friends). Because I never want to be a traditional landlord again. I did that a decade ago, pay off our Condotel and it will be cash flow positive without a mortgage and then find some place to live the other six months. It will be another tax free state just to keep taxes simple. We are thinking about either Las Vegas or some place in Tennessee.
Packing and unpacking isn’t that bad once every three or four weeks. I have one suitcase that never gets unpacked except when I travel for work.
We usually stay at an extended stay with a full kitchen. Finding things to do is part of the fun. I book hotels ouf a year in advance since you don’t pay until check out.
Even then considering that we did a HELOC on our primary home (which is now rented out) , we still lose $12K a year that is only offset by moving to a state with no income taxes.
We also didn’t live in a state that thinks they have the right to tax you on all of your RSU grants that you got when you lived there even if you moved by the time the RSU’s vested.
Got it.
Just in case someone finds this "profound".
But my former home is rented to our son at a discount to its market value to help him out and it offsets most of the holding cost. But I still lose money. That’s the only thing that the extra money is going to - offset the mortgage.
Honestly, my fixed costs are actually lower than they were before I started working for BigTech when I was working as a journeyman CRUD developer making less than a returning intern got at my current company.
I was making $120K when I had my house built in the burbs in 2016 and paid 3.5% down with an FHA mortgage. I was the only one on the mortgage.
If I had still been making that, I would have sold my house that doubled in value over the past six years and paid cash for my place in Florida.
My total expenses including mortgage and all utilities is less than $3000 where I live now. I was paying more for my mortgage, utilities, maintenance.
Even without that, my 1250 square foot condo I bought in 2022 was the same price I paid to have my 3200 square foot house built in 2016.
The amount we pay for Uber or SixT is about the same as we paid for one car note + maintenance on an older car + car insurance.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/business-travel-statistics/
and selling miles to credit card companies.
https://airlinegeeks.com/2021/12/17/here-s-why-airline-loyal...
If main cabin dropped by half, they would still fly the routes.
What rental pool service did you use?
I keep my monthly hotel stays around the same amount since my mortgage is covered e-bike we are traveling. I stay at more expensive places to “vacation” by using hotel loyalty points earned.
I also don’t have a separate “vacation budget” like most people. It’s spread out for six months. My goal was always to keep my budget to the same as it was when I was just a regular old “enterprise Dev”.
You can (and most people do) use the onsite property management company. All of the individual owners make their units available as inventory to the property management company when they are not staying there. The property manager should have an algorithm to ensure units are occupied equitably.
It didn’t take being “rich”.
My budget is lower than it was when I was making $135K (the median college educated couple in the US makes that much) when I had my house built in 2016.
The only thing different that I’m doing based on my income now is subsidizing the rent for my younger son instead of selling my old house and paying cash for the Condotel I bought. It was the same price in 2022 as what I bought in 2016.
I don't really see anything wrong with your reply, I was mostly replying to the person who was whining that you have to be rich to do it. But I do think, if you had less income and fewer assets you would need to go about doing what you did in a different way.
No, it's not. Where they make their money is completely orthogonal to how demand for flights is generated.
All passengers generate flight demand, so yes, they are just as responsible for CO2 emissions as the airline (you can argue about the proportions and degrees, but they still are) The airline is additionally responsible by not pricing in externality costs of CO2 emissions.
For this reason we decided not to wait to live life and moved onto an RV two years ago and have visited 20 states and two Canadian provinces while I work full time and she works part time, both remotely, often over Starlink (as I type this now from a small RV park in the Yukon).
When I fly personally, I’m much more price sensitive than when I’m booking travel in the travel portal for my trillion dollar market cap employer who is flying me out to see a client to work on a deal. I’ve flown out with a couple of days notice plenty of times at prices I would never pay personally. If every single none business traveler stopped flying from SEA, I can guarantee you that they wouldn’t cut flights drastically.
There is a reason that the SEA airport has a special line for check in for Amazon and Microsoft.
On the other side of tech compensation, that’s less than a returning intern I mentored got when they came back - and not as a software developer as a junior consultant at BigTech working remotely where we make 10% less than software devs at the same level
I still posit that it is more about priorities (and lack of dependents) for your average mid careers professionals.
There are people making less who choose the RV life or AirBnbs and cars.
surely that doesn't apply to extended stays? don't they want some money like... after 2 weeks or a month or something? what prevents people from sleep-and-dashing? i guess that's why they have a CC on file but they don't know if it'll go through.