All About the Math
I will be honest. I hate math. In fact, I went to law school because I wanted to grow my career and I didn’t want to be in a management or executive role doing things like writing budgets. True story. I was appalled, in law school, when algebra actually came into play… I never could solve for ‘X’ and don’t plan to start now. Anyhow, I digress.
Math becomes important when you realize that all you are doing is working to pay bills, and you worry that at some point you may not have enough money. Especially if you work for yourself and have no ‘guaranteed’ income. After I was off work with a neck surgery, then after a year in Alaska when I took time off to help my mom recover from a hip fracture, I realized that I was way too stressed about making money just to support a huge house and live in a high tax location.
My Maryland mortgage payment, including the usual taxes and insurance, was about $3,000 a month. This included the over $6,000 a year property tax. Granted, I lived in a huge home on a half acre. But still, that’s a lot of money for a single woman who works for herself.
During winter, in a bad, cold, month, my heating bill could hit the $1,000 a month mark. Awful. And even with that, we were still cold at times, due in part to a few areas in the house with the 100-year-old windows allowing nice ‘airflow,’ lol.
I usually paid several thousand or more a year in state income taxes.
Not only that, but we had 4,000 feet of beautiful antique home to maintain, most of the time just my mom and I and 3 cats. That’s a bit excessive, to say the least… of course we didn’t start out just the 2 of us, but that’s where we ended up. So probably half that space wasn’t being used, such as a formal living and dining room, spare bedroom upstairs, finished attic, et cetera, et cetera. We had multiple heating zones, since we had done an addition upstairs to the Master suite and downstairs for my mom’s apartment. So we had multiple heat pumps, mini-split units, two hot water tanks, two gas fireplaces. All these things had to be maintained.
I also had too many vehicles. My first car, a 69 Mustang, was perpetually sitting in the back, looking at me and waiting to be finished with some body work, brakes, and other things. My 2006 Corvette sat in the garage, rarely used, in pristine condition. I only used the little pickup truck for occasional runs to buy mulch, since mom no longer drove it. I used my practical car for everything. So I had insurance on all these vehicles, maintenance, tags.
All that was too much, clearly. And while in retrospect I could beat myself up for being so overloaded with ‘stuff’, sometimes life just goes along and we don’t realize what we’ve done until we are left with a mess.
Lastly, in keeping with the math topic, Maryland loves to tax its citizens. The governor currently has managed to quash some of the insanity (a ‘rain’ tax….really?) but he is not able to run again after 2022 elections. And the state legislature is constantly pushing to increase taxes in any way they can, even though most of us who pay attention wonder what they’ve been doing with the revenue they have already garnered. So, not to be political on this page, but the tax and spend crowd is likely to regain full control for 2023.
I realized that I was working as much as possible but still never had a vacation, didn’t have any extra time or money. Something had to give. So I started researching eastern seaboard states, to the south (I knew I had enough of cold) and the taxes, demographics (read that as politics), and housing prices. Florida rose to the top.
I searched, then, 'various iterations of things like ‘best cities to retire in Florida’ and ‘cheapest place to live in Florida’. I had a long list, and went through the various statistics for each. Narrowed it more. Then went to the top contenders and looked at real estate and location.
As a self-employed person, mortgages can be tricky, my income fluctuates, so I wanted something that would give me a very small mortgage, after selling my house. I knew my house would go for over 500k, with a good amount of equity, so I knew I had wiggle room. I found Palm Bay, in Brevard County, which is 20 minutes from a beach, about an hour southeast of Orlando, centrally located in the state, and a ‘little bit country’. I saw that I could get a very nice house, with a pool, in the 200k range. Wow. Sign me up.
I also knew my property taxes would be about $2,000 a year, and electricity would be minimal.
So, my bottom line, as a non-math person-I cut my mortgage in half, and have no state income tax, no winter heating bill.
It is almost like living for free, after being in MD and working just for bills. That’s the short version of why I moved, of course there are many factors that go into such a decision. And I won’t lie, it was hard. I left behind my son and very close friends, neighbors and a community I really loved. This decision really was about the math, and about the fact that I knew I could never have freedom to live how I wanted so long as I had to focus on earning enough to afford the cost of living. I would never have any wiggle room to take time off. And, God forbid my health went downhill, I would be in big trouble.
I’m not afraid to take a chance, if my gut tells me it’s the right thing to do. I’ve learned that I can survive taking a leap of faith. And now I see that I made the right choice. I am so pleased, in fact, that I decided to do this page to share the experience in case others are contemplating doing the same thing. And also to share my adventures as they unfold… it is a different world here, for sure!