Five worries to ignore when
searching for a golf home

Searching for the perfect golf community home is tough enough without polluting your research with unnecessary concerns.  Over the last dozen years working with hundreds of clients, I have found that some couples entering retirement worry needlessly about things they should basically ignore.  Here are five worries that should not be a significant part of any search for a golf home.

State and local taxes 

Every one of the 50 States in the Union must raise taxes to pay for the things its citizens count on, such as roadways, emergency relief, schools and all the other services most of us take for granted.  States like Florida, Alabama and New Hampshire may look reasonable, at first blush, as low cost-of-living havens because they do not assess a state income tax.  Yet, these states must make financial collections of some sort in order to pay for state services.  So whereas Florida’s state income tax is zero and its property tax rates are generally lower than the national average, free-spending retirees may find the Sunshine State’s sales tax average of 6.8% (combined state and local taxes) annoying.  And many Floridians find it appropriate to have a strategy for buying a car elsewhere, as Florida assesses a 6% sales tax on the entire purchase price; and county sales tax (based on where the buyer lives) adds an additional tax on the first $5,000 of the car’s purchase price (or on each lease payment).

It is smart to have a budget plan for retirement, but it is silly to over-obsess about taxes.  Overall cost of living, of which taxes are a component, should guide you in your considerations about where you can afford to live.  And if affordability is your most important consideration for your retirement location, look at retirement in a Midwest state.  On US New & World Report’s list of most affordable states, Ohio is overall the cheapest, followed in order by Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Nebraska.  Florida does not make the Top 10.

Country club initiation fees

You have made the decision to live in a golf community for one main reason, to play golf where you live.  If it weren’t for the golf, you could choose one of many wonderful homes in communities or old-fashioned neighborhoods with no golf inside the gates.   If you are a golfer, it makes little sense to torture yourself by living adjacent to a golf course you won’t play because it is too expensive.

But is it?  Some might feel that a $30,000 joining fee, for example, is just too much to pay, no matter how much you plan to use the club’s facilities and golf courses.  If you have, say, a $400,000 budget for a home and a $10,000 budget for golf membership (before dues), it should not be too difficult to find a house you like for $380,000; just include the $30,000 membership in your overall $410,000 budget and you will have the best of both worlds.  

Consider that when you join a club in the community you move to, it will help you integrate into the social life of the community that much quicker.  (Note:  I have purposely used the high-end of initiation fees for the sake of the example above; most country clubs inside golf communities have lowered their fees post-recession to attract a steady stream of members.  Many fine private clubs are now charging between $5,000 and $10,000 to join, some less.)

Distance to airport

I have visited roughly 150 golf communities in the 12+ years I have worked with people to find their dream golf homes, and I don’t believe I have ever visited one that was more than two hours from a decent regional or major-hub airport.  Indeed, most of them are inside one hour.   Although I include “distance to airport” as one of the criteria on my Golf Homes Questionnaire, I counsel clients not to consider it as a requirement.  Unless you are an air traffic controller, it isn’t as if you are going to endure a daily commute of 90 minutes or so to the airport; chances are your travel schedule during your retirement years will include no more than four trips per year to see family or friends or to visit far-flung vacation destinations.  Those airport round-trips add up to just a few hours extra on an annual basis.  Are you really going to choose one golf community over another based on the slightly shorter distance to an airport?  You shouldn’t.

Community friendliness

If you are a frequent reader of this newsletter, you know I have harped on this issue consistently, the question in some couples’ minds about whether a particular golf community comprises friendly residents.   The quick answer is that all golf communities are substantially friendly, just like all neighborhoods where you lived your lives and raised your kids were friendly; if they weren’t, you would have moved, right?  But whereas few couples would have asked their real estate agent if a neighborhood was friendly before they bought a house there (and raised their children), somehow the question comes up often among retirees searching for a golf community.

The simple response is that if you are friendly, you will make friends.  And you will make them faster if you jump willingly into the organized activities of the community (see club initiation fee item above), whether that means joining the men’s and women’s golf leagues, social clubs, getting involved with governance of the golf club and all the other myriad activities you will find in most medium- to large-sized golf communities.  As with anything in life, you typically get out what you put in, including new friends.

Summer temperatures

Many of us with our eyes on the Southeast as a permanent or half-year destination obsess about the heat in the summer.   We envision strategies where we play golf either first thing in the morning or very late in the day to avoid the consequences of heat and humidity, and we make sure cold drinks and towels are easily at hand.  (Country clubs in the Southeast are good about helping their members and guests avoid heat prostration.)

More to the point, the perception that some states are hotter and more humid than others in the Southeast drives our choice of where to live.  Florida, of course, has the reputation of being the hottest of them all, one reason why some of the state’s private courses permit public play in July and August in an attempt to keep some revenue stream going.  (Their members typically head north for the summer.)  But are temperatures in Florida so much higher in summer that they justify some retirees ignoring the Sunshine State altogether, and passing up clearly the best weather in the South during the winter months?

The answer is, “Not really.”  The travel website Thrillist.com studied weather in all 50 states and ranked each from best to worst.  You want the best weather in the nation?  Move to Washington State.  You want to avoid the worst weather in the country?  Stay away from Mississippi.  The rest of the rankings at Thrillist are interesting, if not all that descriptive.  Our favorite Southeast states don’t fare very well, with Georgia named the 6^th worst for weather, Florida the 8^th worst, South Carolina 10^th from the bottom and Virginia the 15^th worst.  If you put stock in Thrillist’s ratings, North Carolina is the place to be, ranking 31^st worst or, put more positively, 19^th best.

But is there really that much difference, say, between Sarasota, FL, in August and Raleigh, NC?  I took a snapshot of temperatures and heat indices on August 9 at 3 PM EDT in half a dozen southern cities, and I didn’t see much difference from Florida to North Carolina (heat index in parentheses):

Those are all uncomfortably high readings but note that Sarasota was one degree cooler than Myrtle Beach and that Vero Beach and Wilmington, NC, posted the same temperatures; Wilmington is 620 miles north of Vero.  In other words, parts of Florida are less hot than some parts of the Carolinas in the summer (on certain days).  The difference is a matter of degrees—but only a few of them.

Larry Gavrich
Founder & Editor
Home On The Course, LLC