It’s Your Business
- Author: Terry Greenhut, Business Editor
- Subject Matter: Management
- Issue: Reading For Retirement
Moving is never easy, especially when it’s half way across the country to a place you’ve only visited a couple of times. Uprooting your family and changing your lifestyle from one that you’ve known for most or all of your life can be traumatizing. I’ve always prided myself in being adaptable and I’m sure I’ll get used to my new surroundings quickly but that wasn’t nearly my biggest problem with this move.
A little background: For years I had been telling my wife that I wanted to move south when we eventually retired or backed off our busy work schedule, but whenever I mentioned Florida she said, “No way would I ever live there. It’s way too hot and humid.” Then a few years ago, our one and only daughter married a boy from the Tampa Bay area and last year had a baby. Ever since it has been my wife’s mission to get us moved to Florida.
Is moving to Florida a bad thing? Not at all when you consider that the cost of living is so much lower and the winters are so much warmer – especially after putting in 25 of those winters standing at a workbench on a cold concrete floor rebuilding transmissions when the temperature outside was below freezing and inside wasn’t much warmer. It’s just that it’s all new.
The prospect of leaving behind everything that you’re familiar with – the friends you may never see again, your favorite places to eat and shop, the good doctors it has taken you years to find and of course, your favorite golf courses – is daunting. Sure, you can and will find replacements for most of those things but it will take a while.
Being in the transmission business you know that things just don’t usually go exactly according to plan and this move was no exception. As time went by it just became more and more difficult.
It started out innocently enough when I flew down from New York last February thinking I would just take a look around to see what was available and how I liked the area. I wasn’t planning to buy anything right then. Heck, my wife wasn’t even with me to look at houses, but my daughter talked me into going around with her realtor just to take a look. By the end of the only day we went looking I had found a beautiful house that had just come on the market that day, with several more bedrooms than I wanted, a much bigger piece of land than I needed and a higher price than I wanted to pay. After sending my wife the video I took and getting her approval, I made an offer, as did two other people who had looked at it the same day. So much for getting a steal of a price. I was in a bidding war that I wound up winning by paying two thousand over the asking price instead of the $20,000 under bid I had first submitted.
Did I pay too much for the house? It didn’t seem so at the time, comparing it with New York pricing, but now that I have had to replace some major systems over the past year that cost thousands, I think I might have.
The previous owners, it seems, did a really good job of covering up the fact that the air conditioning and the pool pump and salt-water generator were on their last legs. They pulled a sneaky trick. Rather than replacing the worn out systems, they bought a one-year warranty for about $400 to give the new owners confidence that they wouldn’t have out-of-pocket expenses. It covers most of the home’s systems with a $75 deductible per new claim but if the repair costs more than the old appliance or system is worth they pro-rate it and write a settlement check leaving the new homeowner to figure out what to do next. So, of course, those systems weren’t repairable, hence the thousands of dollars to replace them.
My next challenge, now that I owned the Florida hacienda, was to sell the New York house. The realtor, who had resold seventeen of the ninety four homes in my development, told me it would sell in no time. No time turned out to be nine months. Her estimate as to what my house was worth was based on a market that had changed dramatically in the past year. It was also based on so-called comparables that had renovated kitchens and baths (which mine didn’t). So we had to get more realistic with the price and wait for a buyer who fell in love with it and was willing to make the necessary renovations themselves.
A word to the wise: Don’t remodel if you think you are going to sell. Redoing kitchens and bathrooms are projects for people who are going to live in a house for several more years. If you plan to put the house on the market, you have no idea what your potential buyers will or won’t like about what you’ve done. You could easily spend $100,000 or more (not to mention six months of inconvenience) updating everything just to have potential buyers come through and tell you how much they don’t like your choices. You’d be better off knocking $50,000 off the price and advertising it as a fixer-upper. No stress, no mess. The people who bought our house are right now in the process of gutting and completely redoing it. So glad I didn’t renovate.
Another tip: When you put your house up for sale, if you can afford to, move out of it. Clean it, paint it, have a professional stage it, and leave. If you don’t, every day that it’s on the market you will have to leave the house in the morning looking like nobody lives in it and that gets old real quick. Your stuff will be mostly packed away and you’ll feel like you’re living in a hotel so you might as well go live in one. At least they’ll clean your room for you every day. I even had to send the dog down to Florida early because, although potential buyers might assume that you have one, they don’t want to see it or any evidence that one ever lived there.
Next on the challenge list was the move itself. Hiring a moving company, unless you have a whole lot of money to burn, is not a fun experience. Even though we had sold most of our furniture, because during the time we were waiting to sell our house we just about outfitted the new one completely, we still had a sizable number of boxes and other odds and ends that had to go. The estimates from the moving companies were not at all precise. The numbers ranged anywhere from $8,000 to $14,000 depending on weight. The catch is that they couldn’t weigh your stuff at the time of the estimate. They have to wait until it’s on the tractor trailer and then drive it to a scale somewhere to weigh the whole thing. By then you are committed to anything they tell you. Sounds like an open ended R.D.I. doesn’t it? Not wanting to do, that I got a firm price from a company that charges a flat rate to fill up a 26-foot straight moving van and take it where you want to go. So for $6,200 I thought I was all set.
Moving day came. It was the usual chaos but we had to add the fact that all of our stuff didn’t fit on the truck. I didn’t think it was going to be a problem and neither did the movers. After all, it was mostly boxes. Well, it turns out there were many more boxes than we thought. My next alternative was to rent another truck for the overage and drive it down myself. Since I was going to rent a car trailer and tow my wife’s car down with my Jeep Grand Cherokee I thought I might as well hook it to the back of the rental truck and take it down on this trip, then fly back to New York and drive down again with her. Another few thousand wasted dollars and we’d be on our way. Not quite.
Driving to my house to load up my wife’s car I noticed in my rear view mirror that the trailer was wobbling down the road. Arriving at home I checked the wheels and sure enough, one was loose; not lug-nut loose but wheel-bearing loose. I called the company. They towed it away to fix, but couldn’t. Although the bearing is a common part, the spindle that needed to be replaced along with it, isn’t. Now they had to find me another trailer; hard to do when all the one-way rentals are heading south this time of year. It took an extra day but they found one.
So now I’m ready to go, or am I? On a final walk through I went downstairs and flushed the basement toilet only to see water coming up through the drain in the shower next to it. The house drain, which had never clogged in the 22 years we lived there, decided to do so today. So now it’s a $300 plumbing bill on the way out the door. I guess it was the house’s way of giving me a raspberry.
Now for what I like to call “The final insult.” I saw my neighbor out in front of his house so I decided to go say my final goodbye to him. He was staring at my Jeep which was parked at the curb behind me. All of a sudden he said, “What the heck happened to your Jeep?” I turned around to see both doors on the passenger side smashed in. He said, “Yeah, I noticed it yesterday. I thought you knew.”
I guess I didn’t have any reason to be on the right side of the car in the past few days. I don’t have a clue when or how it got hit. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to drive it to Florida like that. I don’t know any body and fender guys down there but I do know that I have a great one in New York. I drove it over there. “John, you gotta help me,” I said. “This car has to leave for Florida next Monday or Tuesday at the latest.”
When he finished laughing he said, “I don’t think so. It needs two new doors and the pillar straightened, not to mention paint and transferring all the parts from the old doors. This is normally about a three-week job but I’ll see what I can do.” He ordered the parts that day. The adjuster came the next morning and approved the $6,200 repair and, believe it or not, by the following Tuesday afternoon the car was ready.
Meanwhile, I drove the truck down, towing the other car. I showed up at the same time the moving truck did. It seems they were delayed a couple of days when their truck broke down in Georgia. In fact, the truck that was outside my house wasn’t the same one that left New York. The company sent an empty to where the other one broke down and transferred the load. Talking to the driver I found out that he subsequently got a $1,000 ticket for being overweight at a weigh station in Northern Florida. He was not happy.
I flew back to New York on Sunday. Since the car wouldn’t be ready until Tuesday we stayed at a hotel and proceeded to eat at all of our favorite restaurants over the next couple of days figuring we may never have that chance again. At least that was good. Wednesday afternoon we left. Friday night we arrived. No more drama, thank goodness. Now all I have to do is pay all the credit card bills as they come in.
Was it worth it? I didn’t think so at the time, but now as I am writing this article it’s 25 degrees and snowing in New York. I may not be totally happy in Florida yet but I’m getting there.
