The Move: From Indian Casinos to Accessible Gold Rush Living

After a harrowing, snowy drive over the mountains from Los Angeles, we rested up for a night in Visalia before arriving at the Jackson Rancheria Casino Hotel in the foothills east of Jackson, California.

That same storm has hit this region and we arrive to a rare coating of snow here at the 1500 foot elevation of Jackson (see pic above). We're hoping there won't be more because I want to be safe and I really don't want to have to put chains on our tires.

As always, the staff at the Rancheria are excellent and have a very nice room waiting for us. Housekeeping gets us a roll-away from another floor...where they have better and newer portable beds, apparently...so that we all have a comfortable place to sleep.

It's very welcoming after the packing, the cleaning, the moving...all the frustrations of leaving a long-time home...plus a very hard journey up.  With L.A. in our rear view mirror, a world of the unknown looms ahead of us.

Enjoying a nice breakfast at Margaret's Cafe, we plot out our next moves. We'll be heading down the hill to meet the owners of the house for a walk-through of the property. They'll be vacating later tonight...my mover keeps calling me to see if he can get his guys in a day early but I've told him many times, no...and then we'll pick it up in the morning.

The main obstacle for us has been access for Tim to the house. Due to it being in a flood zone, the floor level of the house is raised four feet off of the ground. I had ordered some aluminum wheelchair ramps from a company in Wisconsin. Heavy snow there delayed delivery for weeks but, finally, the day before we're to meet the old owners the ramps showed up.

When we arrive, they are in boxes on the side of the house.  I open up the long one (ten feet) and we prop it up against the front steps of the house to give Tim a temporary but steep way in. I stood behind him to brace as he went up.

The old owners are nice people, a retired couple getting ready for a big move to Finland, which is the home country of the wife. The husband shows me several 'smart' features of the house...sprinklers, cameras, lights, etc...and says "you'll figure it out" when I ask how they work (note - I didn't so I operate them manually now).

Tim is impressed with his new home. This is the first time he's been inside.  After chatting for awhile, we leave them to finish their packing and we go back to the casino.

It's bright and early the next morning as we go to meet our movers who said they'd be there at 8am. We're there at 7:30 and they're already waiting outside.

Letty gets the keys we received yesterday and lets herself in to our new home for the first time as unencumbered owners.

We put the 10 foot ramp back in and find a place for Tim to be comfortable in and out of the way while the heavy work begins. There is no internet or TV yet so that will be quite a chore for him. The movers chat with him as they go, trying to keep him involved so he doesn't get bored. Tim's being a trooper, though. No complaints from him.

It's about a four hour unload of the truck. I tip the movers, who did a great job, and they're off to try to make it back to L.A. before another predicted snow storm closes the Grapevine. They were lucky and made it back before it did.

We spend the rest of the day unpacking boxes, getting as much stuff out as we could and throwing any boxes that can wait into an extra bedroom that we're not using yet. Around dinner time, we head back to the casino for one more night...I wanted to stay here for another day to get some rest in an uncluttered room and also to give Tim one more shower since it had a roll-in shower and our new home did not.

The next morning, we check out of the hotel for good and head to actually move into our house.

Yesterday, while the movers were unloading, I had to partially demolish the shower in Tim's bathroom. With the glass doors on it, I would not be able to get Tim's shower chair into it.

For now, I've taken those doors off, put in an aluminum threshold ramp, and am able to somewhat roll Tim's shower chair in but he has to take showers in a reclining position until we get that fixed.

This morning, I have to build a better ramp for Tim. This will also be temporary, just so he can come and go in and out of the house as he pleases.

The ramps I bought were 10 feet and 8 feet long, respectively. I bought these two because it was much less that way than trying to buy an 18 foot or 20 foot ramp.  I'll build a landing ramp to connect the two so he'll have 18 feet of ramp that won't be nearly as steep as just the 10 foot ramp.

To do this quickly and cheaply, I decided that I'll get some 4x4 foot wooden pallets and nail them together.

It's a 35 minute drive to the town of Galt where the closest pallet recycler I could find was.  I drive into the yard and try to buy three but only two would fit in my van.  I'll get some 4x4 inch boards to build a square frame underneath them so I'll still be about as high as three pallets would be. The cost of this solution is $15.

I got three very nasty splinters loading them in. That'll teach me to forget the gloves. It's a painful cure as Letty removes them with a needle but it heals fast.

After nailing the pallets and 4x4's together into a 16 inch high turning platform, it's time to attach the heavy ramps to the deck, the pallets, and the ground. Luckily, a new neighbor...the former mayor of the town...came by to introduce himself and he helped me pick up the ramps and place them in the proper spot for mounting.

I don't think it came out too bad, do you?

Once that is done, Tim and I go back in to call up Dish TV to re-install our service and the local Internet company to hook us up.

Letty and I spend the rest of the day unpacking. Tim comes out to help me rip apart the cardboard boxes and smash them flat with his heavy wheelchair.

Worn out, we sleep soundly for the first night in our new house.  Trip accomplished but, this time, we won't be heading back to Los Angeles.

Darry Musick
Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved

MOVING CHRONICLES: Easing the Property Tax Burden in a High Tax State

So why did we choose to move where we did? Why did we stay in California instead of moving to a lower tax state? How did we still do it affordably?

First off, we did consider moving out. California is a very high tax state and it's getting higher every year. Now they want to tax our soda, water, and even ding us for every mile we drive...in addition to the other myriad taxes we already pay.

We looked...Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and even a few states farther away, like Tennessee and North Carolina...but, in the end there's no place like home. California is still the best we've seen and we don't want to be too far away from family.

How did we make it affordable? Well, contrary to common belief, not everywhere in California is suffering from sky-high home prices. Yes, you can pay well into the seven figures for a hovel in places like Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco, but there vast swaths of the state that are away from those high-priced locales where you can get some bargains.

We found it was almost impossible to live near the coast on our budget...however you can find reasonable near ocean house prices in the far north in places like Eureka...so we explore in the other direction.  Home prices in the Central Valley, Redding, Red Bluff, Chico, the deserts, and Sierras are very reasonable, it just became a search of where it would be reasonable and desirable.

The Motherlode region ended up being the most appealing. This is the historic area where gold was mined from the Motherlode in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains during the Gold Rush. It extends...roughly...along highway 49 from the area around Auburn in the north down to Mariposa and Oakhurst in the south.

Great homes could be found here for our $400,000 maximum price. Heck, I can still go out and find decent homes in the area (and in the other areas mentioned above) for less than $200,000.

Why was that our maximum price? One reason...property taxes. We would not have a mortgage payment, since we could pay cash, but we'd need to keep those taxes down to a manageable level to be able to afford it on our fixed and small retirement income.

One tax that is under control in our Golden State is property taxes. Thanks to Proposition 13, passed four decades ago, property taxes are strictly controlled and not allowed to jump dramatically. It's something the politicians in Sacramento hate but it makes the state liveable for the rest of us.

The gist of it is this:

• Basic property tax is 1% of the assessed value at the time of the sale, usually the sale price.
• Only if 2/3 of the property owners in a defined area vote for an increase can that basic amount go higher than that...for instance, the local school district can put a 1/4% increase on the ballot to get more funds. If 2/3 of the property owners agree, then the local property tax would go to 1.25% of the assessed value at the time the sale.
• The property tax can only be raised by a maximum of 2% a year so, if you paid $1,000 this year in property tax, next year expect to pay $1,020 - even if the assessed value of your house doubles or triples or more.
• When the property is sold, the new buyer pays on the newly assessed amount.

It's this last point that makes it hard to relocate within the state sometimes. If you paid $100,000 for your house 30 years ago and, over time, your tax is now around $2,000...you could be on the hook for a lot more if the houses you're looking at cost half a million or more (an extremely common and low price in this state). That's at least $5,000 per year.

We figured we could afford up to $4,000 per year which defined our top end house price.

It took a year of very casually looking at houses up here and, believe it or not, one day of intense house hunting to find the home we ended up with in Amador County in the heart of the state's gold country.

There are also two other propositions out there, Prop 60 and Prop 90, aimed at tax relief for seniors 55 or older. Both are able to be used one time.

Prop 60 states that if you move to another part of the same county you live in, you can take your tax rate with you so, if you paying tax on the $50,000 house you bought in the 70's and buy a million dollar McMansion a few towns away, your property tax will not rise.

Prop 90 works the same way if you move to another county that reciprocates. Currently, there are 10 counties that do:

Alameda
Los Angeles
Orange
Riverside
San Bernardino
San Diego
San Mateo
Santa Clara
Tuolumne
Ventura

These counties include some pricey and desirable real estate such as La Jolla, Newport Beach, Palm Springs, Claremont, Pasadena, Palo Alto, Ojai, and Thousand Oaks.

In short, you might have to give up your dream of living beachfront in Malibu or Monterey, but there are plenty of areas in this 3rd largest state in the nation where you can find a new dream.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved

House Hunters: Motherlode - Epilogue

If you've followed our posts...part one, part two, and part three...you'll know that this particular trip to California's Gold Country is one that we're not returning from. We're making a permanent move here.

Well, we won't be returning for good but we do have to go back, sell our current home, pack up and move.

Sealing the Deal - After the sellers accepted our offer, it was now our responsibility to get a deposit in and open escrow on the house. First, the deposit...it's late Thursday afternoon and we have 72 hours to deliver it. Since the weekend's coming up, that means we'd have to do it in less than 24 since the escrow office is closed over the weekend.

My plan is to do an online transfer from a credit union account to a bank account I have and get a cashier's check but that will take more than 24 hours. Some phoning around and I'm finally able to talk my credit union into wiring the funds straight to the escrow office's bank.

We're now under contract and in escrow to buy this house (we asked for a 60 day escrow and put a contingency on our contract that we had to sell our current house first).

It's time to take a deep breath...now the stress begins. We can't sleep, we're too wound up with our house purchase and the next day, we check out of the Doubletree in Rancho Cordova and head home.

Getting Into Shape - Now the fun begins. It's time to get our current home in shape for showing to prospective buyers. I've been working on getting the junk out of our garage and even started packing a few boxes but it's still not enough and the garage is getting full again.

I go and rent a local storage locker and move all of our extra stuff in the garage over to it.

We have two bedrooms with hardwood floors in need of refinishing. I can't find anyone who can do it within three months. At first, we decide to just sell it as is but our real estate agent isn't having it. She knows someone who can do it now.

We go with her recommendation which means Letty and I have to clear everything out of the bedrooms. The three of us, and our possessions, move into the family room for three days of misery while the crew works on the floors.

The bedrooms could also uses a new coat of paint, so the same crew takes care of that as well as the walls in our living room.  Old electrical outlets are upgraded...and one of the crew breaks our breaker box so that the lid will no longer close on it. We remove it for the time being and promptly forget about it (it will come back to bite us later).

Once done, we move everything back...just the two of us. Elizabeth, our realtor (who is excellent, by the way), has a photographer come over to take pictures. There's a bit of shuffling while we move patio furniture and trash cans so that they won't be in the background of his shots. At one point, I even moved our patio set out onto the hiking trail behind our house for a few minutes while he took pictures of our backyard.

The Show Begins - The house is listed two days later at $539,900 as Elizabeth hosts an open house geared to other real estate agents. In our area, this is called "the caravan" as agents go all over the area to these Wednesday open houses to see what's on the market.

In the meantime, Letty is asking me worriedly how low I'm willing to go on our price and still be able to buy our new house. Just take it as it comes, I tell her. No use agonizing over something you have no control over.

Elizabeth texts me and says the open house went well and we need to get out of the house that evening because someone wants to look at it.  Later, she tells us it's a couple who put in a bid at several thousand dollars over our price. She shows us that the financing package they have is rock-solid and I'm about ready to say "yes!" but she says "let's just wait a bit until I have the public open house on Sunday."

Again with the nerves...should we really wait or just go in and let this process begin? I have faith in our agent, so we follow along.

The open house...we go out all day, trying to have fun, but worrying more about what's going on back at the house. Finally, it's time to go back.

Elizabeth comes over and says there's another offer and more are on their way. This offer is for even more and now we are in the happy position of having a bidding war.

She says she'll go back to the original bidder's agent. They really want the house, apparently, so she thinks they'll match the offer. They do have better financing so that would be nice.

A couple of days later, she give all interested parties until 10am to get their offers in. After, she comes over and presents them to us...the original bidders have indeed sweetened the offer to even more than the secondary bidders.

That's enough for us...we accept and now they're under contract. A 30 day escrow is opened and a whole 'nuther level of stress opens up.

The Steamroller Arrives - Inspectors must come over and give our house the once over. An appraiser needs to come in and affirm that the house is really worth what our buyers want to pay. Any problems spotted by the inspectors needs to be addressed...remember that breaker box?

First, the termite guy comes in. Since we already had a regular pest control service with Western Exterminator, they waved the fee. Several areas of dry rot needed to be replaced but no termites. They'd take care of it...for a price. We said to go ahead.

As a side note, the inspector used to be a professional baseball player so it was fun for this group of baseball fans to chat with him about his former career.

The house inspector finds a plumbing leak under the master bathroom and says the breaker box needs to be replaced, along with a few other minor items like moving the dryer vent another inch away from the house.

I'm ready to call someone in to fix but our agent says, just wait, the buyers need to tell us what they want done first. We wait...and wait...for a couple of days before we finally get their response. They would wave all the rest of the repairs if we give them $2,000 at the close of escrow.

Fine...it still leaves us with quite a healthy profit when all is said and done and we just want to be through with this process.

The Final Chapter - An article comes out in the newspaper about how the local real estate market is seriously cooling and might even be crashing. It even used one of my friends as a source for the story. Oh no! Don't give our buyers any more reason to try to pull out of this.

"Relax," Elizabeth (and my friend quoted in the story) tells us. "You're too far into the process."

I'm just thinking about Murphy's Law but Elizabeth and my realtor friend were right...the escrow closed right on time. We call up north and they're also impatient to move so the close date on that escrow is moved up and closes the day after ours does back in Southern California. It's time to move.

More is to come but we'll be running the nuts 'n bolts accounts of the transaction stories on our other blog, the Cheapskate Suburban Dweller, while we'll concentrate on the travel aspects on this site.

See you then!

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved

House Hunters: Motherlode - Part 3

On our post-Christmas house hunting trip to Amador County, California, we've seen four houses. A dreary cookie cutter house in Jackson and three houses in Sutter Creek, including the one my wife was now anxious to buy.

We had two more houses to look at on this day and we were heading down the hill 11 miles to the little town of Ione to meet Tammy, our agent, at a house in downtown Ione.

We had driven by this house before and I'd researched it quite heavily online. Superficially a beautiful home but I'd found some issues with it that had me leery of it.

This 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 1780 square foot home on an almost 8000 square foot lot looked stunning, inside and out BUT...there was an apartment building directly behind it. Most of the driveway was turned into a landscaped patio.  Nicely landscaped, but still taking away from a parking area.

There was a large area behind the house that would be big enough for an RV and boat but, because the patio had been placed in the way, I could find no way to access it without rebuilding that patio.

Still, it was a gorgeous house and it was on the way to a new housing development the agent wanted to show us so we decided to give it a closer look.

Since there were six steps to get in, Tim stayed in the van while we went in to look.

Immediately, when we walked into the front door, my wife's jaw dropped. A gorgeous living room with 10 foot ceilings and wide doorways to the dining room and bedrooms spread out before us. One of the four bedrooms had been turned into an office in the front of the house. Two bedrooms were just off a bathroom that could work for Tim with a little modification, with doors he could drive his chair through.

The biggest surprise was in the back, however. A 400 square foot master bedroom with a master bathroom including an antique, clawfoot tub.

It was indeed quite a stunning house but I still had my reservations.

"There's a large parking area in the back but I don't know how you use it," I told the agent.

She showed me a hidden entry around the corner on the side street with a gate that opened, giving us access.

"What about that apartment building?"

"I know the owner, he's very picky about who lives there. There's never been a problem."

The tiny driveway out front was negated when I found the side entrance.

We would need to build a ramp for Tim before he could even set foot in the place but the 43 inch height of the porch was not too high to overcome.

Forget the house in Sutter Creek, Letty had found her Nirvana.

Still, we had one more to check out...brand new houses still being constructed that could be customized to our needs before moving in. Heck, this house was a year shy of being a century old.

Outside of town, across from a state prison, is Castle Oaks...a new housing development built around the town's  golf course. Tammy took us to the model homes.

With floor plans ranging from 1600 to 2100 square feet, 3 to 4 bedrooms, 2 to 3 bathrooms, and sitting on small 4-5,000 square foot lots with backyards facing the course, these homes could indeed be customized with accessible bathrooms and other features for special needs but still seemed a bit tight in the hallways and doors.

Not to mention that it looked like any other generic, suburban development with cookie-cutter houses jammed in very close together.

While Letty was off looking into another room in the house, I saw the writing on the wall.

"Tammy, as nice as these are, I think I know which one we're going to want," I told our agent.

"The house downtown? Great, are you ready to put in an offer?"

When Letty came back in, the answer was an enthusiastic yes.

The century old house in downtown Ione was listed for $400,000. We offered $380,000.

"I'll put the offer together and give you a call later when the seller's respond," Tammy said.

We set off back towards Rancho Cordova while our agent went to work.

About halfway to the hotel, my phone rang.

"The sellers have countered. All the conditions are fine but they want $389,000"

"OK, I'm driving back to the hotel with my wife and Tim. Let me talk it over with them and I'll call you when we get there."

After hanging up, my wife said "take it!"

When we got to the hotel, I called her up, accepted the terms, and was told I need to get $4,000 to the escrow office the next day to seal the deal and to sign the contract.

That would be an adventure in itself. More on that, next time.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved

House Hunters: Motherlode - Part 2

After a rather mediocre start to our house hunt in the outskirts of Sutter Creek, California, we're moving on to the city proper and inspected a brand new house about a quarter mile away from downtown Sutter Creek.

Tammy takes us up the hill to a nice street, Foothill Road. This is more like it.

Here is a beautiful, 1460 square foot home with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms on an almost 10,000 square foot lot. With everything new, it looked much nicer and doable than the last house.

A couple of nagging issues for us were that the hallways were still a bit narrow, as were the doors. Tammy was suggesting that we could widen the doors for Tim's bedroom and bathroom but, with a price that was $29,000 over our budget, it would be hard to do financially.

Outside, the back and side yards would need to be landscaped. The sprinkler timers were also very cheap, battery powered hose mounted devices that didn't sit right with me. Inside, the living room had a spot to mount a TV way up high on the wall over the fireplace, with a view marred by a ceiling fan.

Still, everything was brand new. It was a great neighborhood, if hilly for Tim's chair, and was in the heart of one of Amador County's most desirable areas. A lot better than the last house we saw but still had some significant issues.

(Note: we eventually passed on this house. As of this writing, it is still on the market at a reduced price of $399,000-Ed)

Just a couple of blocks away was a house that had just come on the market. At about 30 years old, this house on Gold Strike Court was like the house we just saw but more mature. Great landscaping, beautiful interiors...including a laundry room that was almost as big as our current bedroom...but still a bit out of our range at a matching $429,000.

It was also way up on a hill, which would mean a tough time for Tim on the streets here.

This one also had steps which meant we would need to build a ramp to get in.  With 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 1600 square feet on a third of an acre, I could see Letty making plans to make it ours and trying to figure out a way to afford it.

We had a front runner.

In nearby Jackson, a very cookie-cutter, boxy house was quickly eliminated and that house on Gold Strike Court was looking very good.

Next, we were heading down the hill to the tiny town of Ione to look at a couple of more contenders. It seemed like a waste of time, since my wife had already mentally picked out her new home but we'll play this game out.

Those two houses will be profiled in our next report.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved

House Hunters: Motherlode - Part 1

It's Christmas Eve and we're headed to Sacramento. It's become a Christmas tradition for us to leave the headaches of the season behind and come up to our state's capitol where we can dine on the Delta King...a permanently docked steamboat on the Sacramento River...on Christmas Day.

Usually, it's in conjunction with a vacation to the area (you can read the stories on those past trips on this blog). This year, we have a different purpose.

A couple of days ago, we signed a contract to sell our house in Southern California. Yep, we're giving up the life of never ending traffic jams, overcrowding, and various numbskulls clouding our days in exchange for the slower paced life in the Sierra foothills in the historic gold mining region of the state.

But, first, Christmas.

As it usually happens, we're winding up at the Doubletree Suites in nearby Rancho Cordova. It's basically our go-to hotel in the area. Nice, big rooms...near a light rail station...and all the Doubletree, chocolate chip cookies you can eat at a price I can live with.

I can get cheaper in the area and I can get better but, here at the Doubletree in Rancho Cordova, I get a good mix of quality with price.

Fully sated from our Christmas dinner and bags of candy from Candy Heaven, just up the street from the steamboat, we tuck in to rest up for our big day tomorrow.

After breakfast, we're heading up to Sutter Creek off of highway 49 in Amador County. I have been looking for months at houses in the area and have winnowed it down to a list of five that look like they'd work for us. I've made arrangements to meet an agent from Coldwell Banker to show us those five houses and suggest others that might work for us and our budget.

In a nutshell, here's what we need...
One story
Wheelchair accessible or can be quickly made accessible
3 bedrooms
2 bathrooms
1400+ square feet

What we want...
A big lot
Separation from neighbors
As turnkey as possible

...for a budget of no more than $400,000 (or less if there are some major renovation projects to do).

Our GPS on T-Mobile is very flaky up here in the foothills beyond Sutter Creek. This first house is about a mile outside of town and the actual waterway that the town is named after is part of the 1 acre-plus backyard.

We find it, just past the junky looking yard nextdoor that looks like it came from an episode of American Pickers.


The driveway is heavily fissured (that'll need to be replaced) and yard maintenance has not been a high priority for the owners...did I mention that it's also huge?  Seeing that very large and very messy yard, this city boy immediately abandoned his dreams for a large piece of rural land.

A few minutes later, the real estate agent shows up...Tammy.  Introductions and then she takes us into the house. Tim stays in the car because of the four or five steps to go inside.

The house is ok...a bit dated with narrow hallways and doors. Bathrooms are tiny.

It's just a few minutes before we cross it off the list and call out "next!"

Let's see if this episode gets better on our next episode.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2019 - All Rights Reserved