
Typical homeowners insurance covers wind and rain, but not flooding. Oh, and if you buy a home in a designated flood zone, your mortgage company will insist you buy flood insurance. Why? “The cost to insure a home without wind mitigation features could be four times higher than a home with wind mitigation,” says Chris Heidrick, an independent insurance agent in Sanibel, Fla. If you want to spend less on insurance, you’ll have to dish out for a wind mitigation test for the house you plan to buy to see how well it would stand up to severe winds. “No one wanted to insure us, so we had to use the default state insurer.” “Homeowners insurance in general can be tough to get when you live on a barrier island,” says Elliott, the northern transplant who now lives in Fort Myers Beach on the Gulf Coast. And that’s if you can line up any insurance at all. Retirees who move to Florida are often shocked to discover that deductibles for hurricane insurance often range from 2% to 5% (and sometimes as much as 10%) of the policy coverage, rather than the fixed dollar amount, say $500, they were accustomed to up north.
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Florida charges a steep "initial registration fee" of $225 to register an out-of-state vehicle, for example, and a drivers license costs $48 and is good for eight years (versus $10 for for an Arizona drivers license for folks age 50 and it's good for 12 years in that competing retirement hotspot).
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Buying a new ride for your retirement? The 6% state sales tax applies to the entire purchase price, plus counties can tack on their own vehicle sales tax. That’s higher than the combined rates retirees from snowbird states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Jersey are accustomed to paying. For instance, the combined state and local sales tax averages 7.01% in Florida, according to the Tax Foundation. State and local taxes in Florida can take a bite out of your retirement savings.

Interstate Highway infrastructure.Passing through 16 states Maine, New Hampshire. I-95 is not only the longest north/south highway it is one of the oldest routes in the U.S. Score one for the Sunshine State.īut don’t confuse "no state income tax" with "no taxes at all". Interstate 95 is 1,908 miles long and parallels the entire length of the Atlantic Coast from the Canadian border all the way south to the tip of Florida in Miami. A big whoop to many Florida transplants is there’s no state income tax, including no income tax on Social Security benefits, pensions and other retirement income.
