Retire and Move to Florida, They Said: Part Three: The Move

The source image for the Welcome to Florida The Sunshine State sign is a Creative Commons licensed photo from Joelk75’s Flickr photostream.

Here is my final installment in the Retirement Saga.  In Part 1, I made the decision to retire.  I mean really retire.  Like not work retire.  For good.  Permanently.  Part 2 showcases the zany, knee-jerk decision to buy a house in a Florida retirement community.  Of course, this harebrained scheme played out in an atmosphere of incomplete knowledge with a studied reliance on emotion rather than logic.  That said, we plopped a big chunk of money on the table and made the call at the line: like Peyton Manning stomping his cleat and shouting “Omaha, Omaha!”  Now, all we had to do was tidy up our life of 21 years in North Carolina.

On the flight home from Florida, I rummaged in my backpack and dredged out all the paperwork we had signed in a flurry of 48 hours to see just how ill-informed our decisions had been.  My wife and I passed the sheets back and forth as we pondered the state of our family life.  What became evident was one of the many things I appreciate about our marriage: once decisions are made, we move forward with a plan.  There is no sense looking back with regret or forward with fear.  You just make a plan and execute.

Of course, this particular plan would have a lot of moving pieces.  We had just finished remodeling our home in North Carolina.  In addition, we had filled the 4000sq ft space with new furniture and architectural salvage such as antique stained glass pieces.  In a seller’s market like we are experiencing, the major issue wouldn’t be an inability to sell the house, it would be what to do with all this stuff inside.

When you move from a large, suburban family home into the little love nest for two, you have lots of big decisions to make.  Realtors euphemistically call it ‘downsizing’.  So, I sought out advice.  And just like the advice on where to retire, I again reached out to those strangers, randos, and assorted weirdos on social media.  Who else could provide better suggestions?  Instead of the random weirdo, an old colleague of mine jumped into the fray.  A few years earlier, he had also sold a large house to ostensibly downsize into a much smaller space.  His advice was prescient.

“John,” he said, “the first thing you need to do is get rid of half the shit you own.”

“That’s sounds glaringly obvious, but a little short on strategy,” I replied.

“I’m not done yet”, he said.  “The next step is key.  You then need to dispose of half of the shit you decided you need to keep.”

“Well, that’s interesting,” I quipped.  “Is the change really that dramatic?”

“You have no idea,” he said as he rang off.

As it turned out, that was better advice than even the words I got in the confessional as a Catholic school boy.  I took Mike’s admonition to heart and we started clearing out.  Everything.

We sold almost all our furniture – even the new pieces.  They went for a song.  Fortunately for us, we had started this process a decade earlier.  We had decided we didn’t like our house cluttered with furniture and knickknacks, so we had built cabinets and dressers into the closets so we didn’t need dressers, chiffoniers, highboys, bureaus, wardrobes, cupboards, commodes, chests and sideboards.  We had to make decisions to divest of our large, but rarely used, dining room set.  Couches, wing chairs, and ottomans were sold off or donated.

We had liked how the new house had been decorated, so we purchased a dining set, bookcase and TV stand from the current owners.  We got rid of our piano and all the bedroom sets except for our beloved Saatva mattresses.  Then the hard part began.

We looked in the attics, cubby holes, closets, and garage to root out anything unused in a year or more. I looked at my box of military memorabilia and decided it could go.  Old diplomas, awards, citations, medals, photographs, and other mementos were finally discarded: some having followed me around for decades only to sit quietly in a box in a corner of the attic awaiting the next move. I wasn’t going to bring them along this time.

Once you make decisions on the furnishings and sell off the good stuff, the real difficult work begins: runs to the dump.  Over a two week period, I came to be on a first-name basis with the fine gentlemen who manage the town disposal facility.  At first, I was able to drop off a case of bottled water and some lightly used tools that they gladly accepted. After the tenth (and subsequent runs), they simply waved me through the gate, said “Hey, John….”, while I rolled up to the gaping maws of the trash compactors and loaded them up with our forty-year collection of stuff we weren’t taking to Florida.

Our realtor suggested we not sell the furnishings until we had a solid offer on the house so it would be “staged”.  But she had her priorities and we had ours.  We weren’t about to wait and hope we could sell stuff only a couple weeks away from closing on the new house, but we were surprised how quickly the furnishings went once we advertised them for sale.  Just before our first showings,  the realtor came in to give us the standard realtor lecture about clearing away clutter and making the house look neat and tidy.

She walked in and clamped her mouth shut.  She saw a mostly-empty house with only our bed and a few sticks of furniture slated for Florida.  She went home, got a tacky, old table and two wobbly chairs, and she and her husband put them and a few fake plants around to “stage” the house. When the doors opened for the looky-loos on Saturday, we had 38 showings on that first day and eight offers.  This all sounds fantastic, right?  We are going to be swimming in all this cash from a bidding war, right?   Well, fellow travelers, read on.

One big offer rolled in within hours.  A big one – far above asking, with a honking big due diligence down payment.  We saw the dollar signs and jumped on it.  Three weeks later, three weeks after pulling our house from the market, three weeks of  every conceivable review, test, analysis, and evaluation by an entire troop of inspectors, the buyer got cold feet.  We had noted he was 70 years old and were curious why someone even farther along in his retirement plans than we were would want to take on a large house with a heated pool, hot tub, outdoor nature area, and an active koi pond.  Apparently,  this same revelation occurred to him three weeks into our bargain.  He asked for his down payment back.

Wait, you say!  He can’t get it back, you say!  That’s why they have earnest money, you say!  And you would be the voice of everyone outside of this transaction who wanted to advise us.  Let’s just say that after several deep dives with attorneys, real estate magnates, and a guy at the barber shop,  we were advised to just give the geezer his money back to avoid weeks or months of costly legal wrangling.  We learned it’s a poorly kept secret these days that earnest money down payments are a financial fig leaf that can be plucked away for the slightest of reasons.  We may have won the case, but the clock was ticking, we now had a house to sell – again – and an agreement with the seller in Florida we weren’t going to stiff like our buyer had done to us.

We looked at other offers we had received that first day and ended up contacting someone with a (much) smaller offer who really did want the property.  We signed an agreement, got a deposit half the size of the one from elderly Mr. Big Bucks, and signed so we wouldn’t get strung out on a financial limb while trying to move to Florida.  Shortly after this flurry of autographs and agreements, the movers showed up to pack us up in a small trailer and take us 600 miles so I could go through the same paperwork to cement the deal in Florida.  In the meantime, our family financial keester was in the wind as I had purchased an expensive house while still owning another expensive house.  Three more sleepless weeks of worry would pass before the final crossing of tees and dotting of eyes.

So, now I am retired, we decided to make a major life change as a result, and we are ensconced in a new house in Florida minus most of what we had worked decades to afford.  At this point, I am OK with that.