The grass apparently isn’t greener in Florida.
Thousands of Florida transplants who moved to the Sunshine State during the pandemic are packing up to move elsewhere, complaining of unrelenting heat, devastating hurricanes and dangerous wildlife.
More than 700,000 people lured by the promise of sunny weather, no income taxes and lower costs moved to Florida in 2022, including 90,000 from New York state, according to census data cited by NBC News.
But nearly 500,000 have abandoned Florida and left in 2022, according to NBC News, which interviewed several disillusioned transplants who decided to head back north.
One of them was New Yorker Louis Rotkowitz, who spent two years in the state.
“Like any good New Yorker, this is where you want to go,” the doctor told NBC News by phone on the way to his new home in Charlotte, North Carolina. “This is a complete mistake.”
Rotkowitz said he and his wife purchased a home in the West Palm Beach area, where they decided to live a more relaxed and affordable lifestyle.
He got a job as an emergency room doctor and his wife became a teacher.
But Rotkowitz soon realized they had made a mistake.
“I had a good salary, but we could barely make ends meet. We had no quality of life,” he told the outlet.
The doctor said road travel was a nightmare, the cost of their homeowners association dues had doubled, and he didn’t feel safe after the state passed a law allowing people to carry guns fire without a permit.
“There, everyone walks around with guns,” he told NBC News. “I consider myself a conservative, but if you want to carry a gun, you have to have a permit – there should be some sort of process.”
Jodi Cummins, who moved to the Palm Beach area from Connecticut in 2021, shared a similar story.
“It wasn’t utopia on any level that I thought it would be,” Cummings told the outlet. “I thought Florida would be an easier lifestyle, I thought the pace would be a little calmer, I thought it would be warmer.
“I didn’t expect it to be literally 100 degrees at night. It was incredibly difficult to make friends, and it was expensive, very expensive,” she said, adding that she thought she would make more money as a private chef thanks to the lack of taxes. on income.
Home insurance rates in Florida climbed 42 percent last year to an average of $6,000 a year, and auto insurance is more than 50 percent higher than the national average, according to NBC News, which cites the Insurance Information Institute.
Florida is also among the most expensive states to buy a home – with prices up 60% since 2020 to an average of $388,500, according to Zillow.
After six months, Cummins decided she had had enough of the high costs of car insurance, rent and food, as well as the traffic and scorching temperatures.
“I was so quickly disenchanted with Florida,” she told NBC News. “There was this feeling of confusion and guilt about wanting to leave, about moving there and realizing it wasn’t what I thought it was at all.”
Meanwhile, Barb Carter decided to return to Kansas after a year of living in Florida, where she sold her Orlando-area home for a loss of $40,000 and left behind her children and grandchildren .
Among the reasons she cited were an armadillo infestation that caused $9,000 in damage, Hurricane Ian – which destroyed the roof of her 62sd birthday – and the inability to find a surgeon to remove a tumor from his liver.
“So many people ask, ‘Why would you go back to Kansas?’ “I tell them all the same thing: You need to take off your vacation glasses,” Carter told the outlet.
“For me it was a very false promotion. Once I lived there, I thought, you know, this is not at all what you imagined,” she said.
Connecticut transplant Veronica Blaski said rising costs pushed her to leave Florida less than three years after she and her husband decided to move to the Sunshine State.
At the start of the pandemic, she was offered a higher-paying job as manager of a landscaping company and looked forward to good weather and a more comfortable lifestyle.
But in early 2023, Blaski said, the couple faced a “bulldozer” of costs.
Her home insurance company threatened to drop coverage if she didn’t replace their roof, a $16,000 to $30,000 job.
She also expected her homeowners insurance rates to double, face an increase in property taxes and their homeowners association dues that rose from $326 to $480 per month, according to the report.
Her husband took a second job on weekends to cover the increasing costs.
“My little part-time job that made $600, $700 a month paid for either car insurance or home insurance, and I forgot about groceries,” said Blaski, who worked in retail, at NBC News.
“There are all these hidden things that people don’t know about. Make sure you have extra money saved somewhere because you will need it,” she added.
When her husband’s former boss in Connecticut asked if he would be willing to come back, the couple jumped at the chance to put Florida in their rearview mirror.
New York Post
