Key Points:

• Florida’s real estate market is more and more dangerous due to typhoon and rising insurance costs.
• Common retiree spots like Florida and Phoenix face ecological problems.
• Secure, lower-tax areas like Tennessee are greater options for retirees.
• Also: start your retirement plan today!

Watch the Video

Edited Video Transcript:

One of the things that I always track is what’s called the… S&P Case-Shiller Index.

To me, it’s the granddaddy of all of the research on national real estate and real estate in the top twenty markets.

So if you look at these markets over the last, since they started the index in the year two thousand, the hot markets are basically the ones in California and Florida, Tampa, Miami.

It used to be you could go down to Tampa and say, I’m going to buy a house.

And ten years later, the price of it doubled.

And people were going down there because they liked the weather and they were going down there because of the tax situation.

So I think that there’s going to be an interesting play in Florida real estate right now, particularly in these areas which have been hit very, very hard.

You go into the market and people can’t give their houses away.

So you’ve got to ask yourself, do you want to come in and get a house for next to nothing?

And then now you’re the owner and you get wiped out by the next storm.

So it’s a gamble.

But it means that real estate in places like Tampa is going to go from being not just expensive, but rising very quickly to I can’t find anybody to buy my house or my house is gone.

It’s in the ocean.

So you can buy my land.

There’s a lesson here for people who are either just homeowners or people who buy real estate as an investment.

And that is Florida is not the place, if you want the hot hand, going to Florida ain’t going to be the case.

And I think up until a few weeks ago, you could say, well, you know, it probably is.

I couldn’t agree more.

And having lived on the Gulf Coast, either in New Orleans or Houston for most of the last fifteen years, I can tell you that the storm and obviously we’re we’re recording this prior to the storm hitting, which is supposed to be tomorrow.

It’s going to make it.

It’s going to be catastrophic.

It’s going to be as bad or worse than Katrina because it’s going to go into the Bay of, you know, Tampa Bay, that’s going to have a foot, you know, surge of, you know, of the water, a water surge of feet.

And it’s coming in at, at best, it’ll be a cat four at best.

And there’s a good shot. It could come in as a cat five.

And the, the run of real estate there is over.

It is over because people are going to see what happens and they’re going to go, Oh my God.

And insurance prices are incredibly expensive.

And it may get to the point where you can’t insure a home there, you know, for less.

Oh, you can’t. There are a lot of places you either, you can’t insure it or the insurance rates are tripling every year.

So, I mean, I think the lesson for people is look, Florida was a great place to move to for fifty years.

I mean, you know, you go down, no taxes, it’s warm.

You get to leave places like Wisconsin and Michigan to someplace like that.

But the migration to Florida is over.

And the real estate prices there, I’m predicting that at least around Tampa are going to collapse, literally collapse.

They’re going to absolutely collapse.

And the thing is, knowing this story, you know, because I think you’re aware, you know, my wife’s family lost everything in Katrina.

The city she lived in was called Chalmette.

And it was a, you know, a small suburb, you know, sixty, seventy, eighty thousand people of New Orleans.

Every building was underwater, everything.

And it took years and the whole, you know, people left.

And so what’s the people that moved in were not the kind of hardworking, good blue collar, you know, people that worked at, you know, the plants that were on the Mississippi there.

You know, it’s a lot of the unsavory kind of characters that you wouldn’t want to be your neighbors.

And I think you’re right.

I think Florida real estate boom is over and probably over for decades.

Well, I think there’s some advice here, though, particularly for people who are either about to retire or, you know, they’ve retired and they’re They’ve got a home, they’re thinking of going someplace.

The places that people always picked, don’t go there, okay?

Don’t go to Phoenix because pretty soon it’s gonna be a hundred and twenty degrees, you know, ten days out of the year, it’s gonna be a hundred and ten, fifty days out of the year.

Places like Phoenix are not going to be livable anymore.

But if you’re retired and you’re not twenty-eight years old, it’s even worse.

Miami and Tampa.

Well, having lived in Phoenix for eight years, you know, at least Phoenix has, they don’t have the concerns that you have of tropical and hurricane storms.

You know, I mean, it is hot.

But, you know, they have this thing.

It’s running low on water.

Yeah. Phoenix is running low on water.

It’s typical, yeah. It’s hot, running low on water.

Everybody who wanted to retire, the first place they’d look is Phoenix and Florida.

So if you’re thinking of moving those places, our first piece of advice is don’t go.

The other thing is you can go and you can find out that almost everybody else is leaving in the turnstile.

You get in the turnstile, you come in.

So if you’re thinking of buying a house down there and hoping that ten years later it’s going to be worth thirty percent more, you know, ain’t going to happen.

So for all of you retirees.

Yeah.

Yeah. And again, I think in more and more the real estate shift, because people are going to continue to flee the big blue tax, you know, burden.

They’re going to continue there.

But now they’re looking at like places where I live in Tupelo, Mississippi.

They’re looking at, you know, Chattanooga and They’re looking at smaller towns that don’t have the exposure to the Gulf.

They don’t have that concern.

And again, if you want to go to Arizona, go to Tucson.

Even though it’s about an hour farther south, it’s actually a touch higher in elevation and a little bit cooler.

And that’s relative, . But you’re exactly right.

And Phoenix has expanded so much in the last fifty years that it’s almost connected to Tucson.

Where it used to be, you’re not even remotely connected to it, but it’s getting close.

So anyway, our advice here is that you’ll keep seeing these articles in the media about the best places to live.

Yep.

Florida will probably continue to be there.

These cities, Phoenix.

What we want you to do is we want you to look away from the screen and make another decision.

Yeah, and look at areas that are in Tennessee.

And again, when you consider… areas that are somewhat safe, every place, nobody in their right mind ever thought Asheville, North Carolina would be destroyed.

And we were just there last summer.

Oh my God, it was beautiful.

The place we stayed was called Black Mountain.

And half of that little town is gone.

It’s just absolutely gone.

So you’re going to really do your homework because I got to tell you, I’m from Detroit.

And I think from a climate standpoint, it’s the safest place in the entire universe.

And there are a lot of open houses there.

You can buy a house for a thousand dollars.

So go to Detroit, buy a thousand dollar house, fix it up.

And there are no hurricanes in Detroit.

And this is serious.

People who are about to retire, you’ve got to rethink where you’re going to go.

That’s the takeaway of what this segment is.

Think about it.

I’ll do some work on this because, and we’ll, let’s find five cities or so that would be a good idea, you know, that are, you know, not in a heavily taxed state, that are a little bit warmer.

Because we both know, you know, Michigan, I was just up there and it was beautiful, but it was early September.

And, you know, from January.

All right, I’ll do this.

We’re going to do a list.

You know, So we’ll come back real soon, and we’ll have five or seven cities that are a good alternative.

For retirees, we’re going to have cities the best and worst, and we’re going to tell people why.

Right, exactly.

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