Welcome Back

Location: Williston, FL (High 67, Low 26)

After being gone for a few days, our beautiful Florida weather returned today. At the moment it is a very nice 71 degrees outside.

So far, today has been a day of errand running. We completed the paperwork yesterday to transfer our titles to South Dakota. This morning we headed to the Post Office for a money order and then to a print shop to have a document notarized. We had been surprised to find a notary at a business of this type, but when we asked in the office, they directed us to a card for this location. At the same place, we were able to send our paperwork via Fed-Ex, so it is now winding its way toward South Dakota. We also made a quick stop at the grocery store. It was a nice “run around and get stuff done” kind of morning.

Merikay asked yesterday why we had chosen South Dakota for our home base. Originally, we had intended to use Florida. I found a mail forwarding service out of Jacksonville that seemed to be a good one. We were going to visit there in person and check it out while we were on vacation a couple years ago. Then we read an article comparing states used for home base purposes and discovered that a drawback of using Florida was that many counties had higher vehicle insurance rates as a result of the age of many of Florida’s residents. That gave us pause and we started rethinking our strategy. Right about the same time I read this post by Phyllis about her and Len’s experience getting set up in Texas.

The next state we looked at was South Dakota. It had a lot of positives…the same no state income tax situation, ease of registering vehicles and getting licenses, low 3% sales tax, no yearly inspection requirements and insurance rates are very good. We thought that there were a lot of positive points in South Dakota’s favor. (I have heard conflicting information about health insurance rates in South Dakota but we are lucky that that is not a factor for us.)

The main negative is that we will have to make a trip there every five years to renew our drivers license, but when we weighed that against all the positives, we decided that it was worth it.

We set up our mailing address back in December after we had a contract on our house. We are using Alternative Resources in Sioux Falls, SD. (I have also heard of a lot of people that use My Dakota Address in Madison, SD.) We have been very happy with Alternative Resources, and would recommend them to anyone who is looking to set up their home base in South Dakota.