Cost/Benefit Analysis - Do you really need it?:Vacation Home

We're thinking about the toys and accessories that people buy to enhance their vacation lives and asking the question "is it worth it?" To answer that, we're doing an analysis to determine if you'd be happier and if the extra money spent would make it worthwile.

 This time, we're focusing on that vacation home...the cabin in the woods, the beachfront condo, the place on the river...your second home away from home.

To be clear, we're talking about another house besides the one you're living in now. That means a second set of bills, a mortgage (probably), and maintenance.

I'll use a cabin in the woods as our example. Let's pick a cheap place other than our state of California for our hypothetical cabin. If you look hard, you can find a basic cabin for under $300 thousand in, say, Idaho or Montana like this 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom on 5 acres near the border of both states in Benewah County.

It's a vacation home so we don't need a palace, right?

So what to we need to pay for...

Mortgage (principal and interest with 10% down) at 3% - $1180 per month ($14,160 per year)
Property Tax - $1850 per year (.630% Idaho State tax)
Insurance - $2500 (more for a high fire risk area)
Maintenance - $1500 per year
Total $20,010

So, right off the bat, you're spending over $20 thousand dollars a year on this low-priced vacation home...Over $1500 per month before you even buy a tank of gas to start driving to it.

Let's not forget, you have to furnish it, pay utilities, and...especially if you have special needs...may have to adapt it, like getting the bathroom redone for a roll-in shower (at least $10k) or install a ramp.

You should also keep in mind that this will be your prime vacation destination for years to come...since you spent all that money, other destinations will probably take a back seat. 

Sure, you could offset some of that money if you're able to rent it out when you're not using it but you also need to think about that expense. Do you need to hire a local agent to manage it? Spend money for damages your guests cause? Local permits needed to run a business?

On the plus sign, real estate can go up in price making it a good investment. That's not a guarantee, but it can easily happen.

Now, think of it another way. To rent a cabin will probably cost you $200 a night, maybe $1,000 per week (like this riverfront place nearby). If you go 4 weeks a year, it'll cost you $4,000...maybe up to $6,000 if you get a nicer cabin...compared to over $20,000 a year being an owner.

There's the cost, is there a benefit for you to own or is it better to just rent when you want to? The decision is yours.

Darryl Musick
Copyrigh 2022 - All Rights Reserved

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

ADVENTURES CLOSE TO HOME: The Genius Treatment

NOTE: We can't always be on the road so this occasional series of posts presents stories of a more general nature, things that happen to us while at home.  Hope you enjoy them...

There's not a lot my son can do. He can't play sports the way he'd like to; play a musical instrument; move out on his own...you get the picture...but there are some things he can. These he develops a passion for such as movies, gaining knowledge on sports, travel, etc.

One thing Tim loves is his music. Hopefully, I've inspired it, but he has great and evolving taste in music. For Christmas or birthday presents, he only has one request. iTune cards.  Along with his noise cancelling headphones, it's a great convenience for those hours long drives or flights to help him pass the time easily.

Tim loves his iPod and he has the largest capacity one ever made at 160GB.  He loves to boast that he's up to whatever this weeks number of songs are...in the thousands...so you can imagine his dismay not too long ago when his beloved iPod would no longer sync with iTunes on his computer or anybody else's.

Not only that, but when he logged onto iTunes, his account was empty.  A blank slate.  Easy you say, just sync the iPod with iTunes and problem solved but iTunes would not recognize the device. The backup and sync icons were grayed out.

A little backstory will come in handy here. One day, a few months ago, Chrome...the Google browser that Tim prefers to use...would no longer work on his laptop. Nothing that anyone at Google or the many offering advice on the Internet could suggest would work.

The last resort was reinstalling Windows 7. The update only install didn't work so we backed up his data and did a complete reinstall.

That fixed the Chrome problem. Unfortunately, now we had the iTunes problem.  Again, nothing we could find would fix it except I was finally able to get our desktop to recognize it and sync the songs on the iPod into iTunes but Tim still could not sync newly bought music back down to the device.

While resetting the device (wiping it clean and starting over, basically) would be the option, the empty iTunes window on Tim's laptop had me scared from trying this option. I didn't want to be on the hook should my son lose thousands of dollars of music, so a trip to the Apple Store and the Genius Bar were in order.

I booked a reservation online at the store in Rancho Cucamonga, a 28 mile drive away. It's only 12 miles to our closest store in Pasadena but we'd have problems parking and it's not free either. An extra 15 minutes would be a small price to pay not to have to deal with the crowded conditions in Pasadena.

We made a day of it. Tim got dropped off to see an early matinee of 'Whiplash' in Claremont. Letty and I had a snack for breakfast and did some clothes shopping. Our plan was to meet up again after the movie, have a quick lunch, then head to our appointment.

The Apple Store is located in Victoria Gardens, a giant outdoor mall that is so big it has several streets within to drive your car around.  It also has two streets called Main Street (north and south) and, of course, we picked the wrong one to park on. By the time we found the store, we'd whittled down our lunch time to 30 minutes.

The plan was revised to go to the store and see if maybe we could check in early.  No dice.  We are told to come back 10 minutes ahead of our appointment and check in.

The Apple Store site said our visit with the genius should only take 15 minutes so we decided to put lunch off until after our visit.

Coming back at the appointed time and checking in, we're told to wait at a nearby table to be called for the genius. Ten minutes later our name is called and, seeing Tim in the wheelchair, we're told to wait where we are and the genius will come out to us.
I set up Tim's laptop and iPod so we can get right to work.

25 minutes later, we're still waiting for the genius.  When we ask, we're told we're next on the list.  What was going on when they called our name to go up to the bar? Who knows, we're never told.

The same guy that told us to wait at the table for the genius now comes and tells us to head to the bar. What happened to the genius coming out to us? We're told they could help us at the bar better.

I break down our setup,head to the end of the bar (where a foldout platform is deployed for wheelchairs) and set it up again. We tell the genius the problem. She doesn't want to hear it, at least from us. She wants to hear it from Tim.

"It won't sync," he says.

"What are the symptoms?" she asks.

"It won't sync."

See, the problem is that Tim relies on his in-home IT specialist (me) to diagnose the technical problems. He can't really describe whats happening because he didn't deal with it.

Finally, I tell her she needs to listen to me because I'm the only one who can describe what's been going on.

OK, it needs a full reset. I make sure to ask that Tim will not lose any of his purchases.  No, he won't but anything he's copied from a CD (about a thousand songs) will be deleted.

Wonderful.

Reset commences, genius disappears ("I'll be right back."), and the synching begins.  About 10 minutes later, it appears the sync is complete but we want to make sure the genius looks it over and gives her OK but she's nowhere to be found. Out of the 25 or so employees just standing around the sales floor, she isn't one of them. Eventually, we ask what happened to our genius and someone goes to look for her.

She was out back smoking a cigarette. Finally, she give her OK and our hour and a half at the Genius Bar is over.  What an ordeal.

Stomachs rumbling, we finally head over to a nearby Fuddruckers to have a giant hamburger to quell our hunger.

Remind me why it is everybody is so crazy over Apple products again...

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved