Trying to become a Florida Resident hits a snag

State of Residence or Domicile

As we discovered, there is a distinction between the two terms. State of residence is where you are physically living, whereas domicile is where you call home. When you own property, state of residence and domicile are pretty cut and dry. You have a house. That house is in a certain state, and you live there. But when your house is portable, and you don't really live in any one state, it becomes a little more cloudy. We did a lot of research and there is a company that helps with this called Escapees RV Club. They have a lot of resources to help with this process. So basically we just need to establish an address, establish some connections to that state, and that becomes our state of domicile.

Texas, Florida, or South Dakota

The 3 main states that are advantageous to establish domicile are South Dakota, Texas, and Florida. All three states do not have State Income Tax, so there's that. We looked at each and we decided Florida was the best choice for us because the vehicle registration is flat for both the trailer and the truck, and doesn't require yearly emissions so we wouldn't be required to come back if we didn't need to. So with that decision made, we started to find out what we needed to do in order to domicile in Florida.

How do you get your mail??

The first part of establishing domicile is getting an address. This could be a friend or relative, but we didn't want to have someone have to deal with telling us what we received and decide what we needed to forward and such, so we found that there are mail forwarding services that will allow you to establish an address in one of these states that will serve as your place of residence AND they will collect all your mail and you can choose to destroy, forward, or scan the mail if you need to. We deciding on Good Sam's since you kinda need a Good Sam's membership for this lifestyle anyway, and their headquarters is in Florida, so there wouldn't need to be potentially two addresses to keep track of since the other services could requires two address.

So now we have an address......what's next?

The next major step in this process is getting  getting Driver's Licenses and vehicle registration stuff done. Our first "home base" being Charleston, SC for a couple months, we "thought" that we could pop into Florida and take care of this and zip on back. A 4.5 hour drive. We could do that in a day if needed. Au contraire!! In Florida, you have do all this stuff  in the county in which you reside. On paper that is Crestview, FL which would add about 4 hours to this errand. It is what it is, so what's next? FL provided us a form to provide to the leinholdeer to request the title to be transferred. Our instructions were to fax this form to them, and then, once completed the Florida DMV will have the title and we can do all of this in one fell swoop.

Enter Chase Auto Financing into the fray.

Our next blog will cover the ordeal of trying to coordinate this with through Chase and the Florida MVD. As of this moment, it's still "in process." It's a shining example of how not to treat your customers and how to hide behind the faults of the last guy you spoke to, but more on that.

Home Is Where You Park It

Oh, home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you
Oh, home, let me come home
Home is where I'm alone with you