We’re shuffling home to cold Minnesota today from our new vacation place in sunny Celebration FL. We’re heading from a place you can walk through a tropical paradise – sunny & 80-degrees – to a snowy landscape with temperatures in the teens overnight. We’ve been gone a full 74 days, so we’re excited to get home. Everyone is asking us when we will be back … Continue reading Two State Shuffle
Our friends and us sometimes debate the “vibe” of snowbirding in Florida versus Arizona. I would guess that about 2/3rds of our friends opt for Florida and 1/3 opt for Arizona. We were undecided until a few years ago when my wife noted that although we’ve been to both many times, when we’ve chosen Florida over Arizona at about a 3:1 ratio for vacations over … Continue reading Sunshine State Snowbirding Vibe
Living in Minnesota, I love the annual ‘Theater of Seasons’. We are really treated to some epic changes throughout the year, with the temperature hitting 100 degrees F in the summer and -25 degrees in the wintertime. We are home to 10,000 lakes & the headwaters of the Mississippi, but they are all frozen like a rock for at least 3 months of the year. … Continue reading Winter Is Over Already?
You can’t go from the Midwest to Florida in the winter – for any length of time – and not have people ask if you are getting ready to buy a place down here. We’ve been down here for 5 weeks now and that has brought us 35 days closer to coming up with a more permanent Snowbird plan. We’ve really clicked with the Florida … Continue reading Kicking Off ‘The Florida Project‘
We are two weeks into our six week winter getaway to Florida and enjoying the summer-like weather. January had relatively mild winter weather in Minnesota, but now that we have escaped, the temperature there has absolutely plummeted. If you think of your vacation investment in winter as having a ‘return on temperature’, our 2021 outlay is looking like Bitcoin right now. As you can see … Continue reading Winter Summerland
It was unusually warm this past week in Minnesota with sunny weather in the 70s. That never happens in November and we’ve been ‘living outside’ every day. Tomorrow it looks like we get back-to-normal in a hurry with a cold front dropping the temperatures into the 30s with rain quickly turning to snow. In Minnesota, it’s not an exaggeration to say these might be the … Continue reading Minnesota Winter / Florida Sunshine
We just got back from our Florida snowbird experiment and we really enjoyed ourselves. We stayed at a terrific villa in a sprawling Orlando resort complex. The weather was great for the most part, we met up with a lot of friends, and we enjoyed many of the fun things to do. While the villa is just a fraction of the size of our home … Continue reading Downsizing Day Coming?
We had the joy of spending a few days in Tennessee earlier this week with good friends of ours who used to live in Minnesota. No surprise, when we arrived from the Bold North, we brought snow with us! People we talked to in Tennessee said it was the first snow they had gotten this entire winter. Our friends moved here a few years ago … Continue reading Where To Live In Early Retirement?
Not long ago I had lunch with my recently early retired friend Russ, who gave me the inside scoop on snowbirding from wintery Minnesota to sunny Florida. Russ and his wife, Tracey, are new to the lifestyle, having bought a condominium on the gulf coast of Florida last year, which they can enjoy now that he retired from MegaCorp at the end of January. They … Continue reading Early Retirement “Snowbirding 101”
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