Vacation homes. You visit a beautiful place, you're enchanted, and the next thing you know you're dreaming about owning a little cottage tucked in the woods or by the lake or near the beach. Snap out of it, honey. Owning two homes is more than twice the hassle of owning one. The second home will have to be maintained, repaired and insured just like your first, but it will be empty for long periods, so things can go terribly wrong when no one will notice (bursting pipes, rat infestations, termite damage, etc.).
And if it's not sitting empty, it's being (ab)used by strangers or by freeloading friends. Most likely, you'll start feeling obligated to spend time there so you feel like you're getting your money's worth, even when you or your family would rather be somewhere else. Let other people deal with the hassle and rent their vacation homes.
We have really struggled with this one. When our vacation home was new, all of our trips there were vacations (with the exception of throwing down pine needles twice a year -- we designed our landscaping so that virtually no maintenance is required). But once a house gets a few years on it, maintenance issues are inevitable, especially for homes like ours that are so close to the beach. The wind, sand, salt, humidity do a number on a house. Door knobs with a lifetime warranty tarnish in a year. We
could paint the entire house every year, but that would be prohibitively expensive. Our beachfront neighbor painted his house last spring; it needs it again -- it looks sandblasted. These are just a couple of examples.
Then the renters' abuse on top of the effects of Mother Nature adds another level of maintenance issues.
And we have had issues happen that didn't get noticed for weeks due to the house being unoccupied. For example, the line to the icemaker developed a crack. We walked into the house and the floor under the refrigerator was flooded. Thankfully, the wood floors dried out flat in about a month, so there was no permanent damage.
Bottom line: we normally don't
vacation at our vacation home. If we are there for other than a weekend, we typically spend most of our time taking care of maintenance issues (either do-it-yourself to save money or arranging to have someone take care of issues that we can't). For example, we spent my entire spring break doing work at the house.
The sheer number of bills I have to pay every month for three residences (our college-aged daughter lives in Atlanta and doesn't work) is mind-boggling and time- consuming.
So we have been tempted to sell the vacation home and rent so that someone else can do the maintenance and pay the bills.
Yet we know if we were renting, we wouldn't come down every other weekend in the off-season and on the spur of the moment. We would really miss that luxury and having our getaway place.
Thus, our current plan is to downsize so that we no longer need to rent and to build a smaller vacation home with low maintenance being the number one consideration in every design decision. Also, we want to be further from the beach to reduce the effects of weather.
Edit: If money were no object, owning a vacation home wouldn't be a hassle. One could just hire a caretaker who takes care of all maintenance. Wouldn't need to rent. My, that would be nice.
