California E&S Insurance

Anybody considering moving to an undesirable city/state, to buy a cheapo house, specifically just to control your housing costs for the first five years of your retirement? I've been pondering this idea the last couple of days. Probably a huge longshot, so I doubt that I will be heading in this direction, but wondering if other FIRE peeps might have considered this. So, here's the idea. The theory is that you buy a cheapo house in an undesirable city/state. Why would it be an undesirable city or state? Because any city/state that's even remotely desirable doesn't feature any affordable housing. I'm talking about buying a house for 180k or less. There's very few locations in the USA where it's actually possible to buy a house for 180k or less. Two potential places that I've looked at is Louisville, Kentucky and Saginaw, Michigan. I've lived in Northern California my entire life, and I'm used to the beautiful, mild weather. I'm used to zero humidity. I'm used to temps that never go below about 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Moving to a place like Louisville, Kentucky would be a huge culture shock as well. Nothing but white people (really, really white lol), and black people. Where I live in Northern California, it's one of the most diverse areas in the entire country. We have a huge Vietnamese population in my city. A large Sikh population. Lots of Russian immigrants. All kinds of nationalities. It would be weird to go to a place like Kentucky where there's basically zero diversity. Anyways, I've been thinking about this idea, mainly because as a renter, you're taking a chance in the fact that your rent could be increased substantially at any given time. Sure, by law you might have 60 days to find another place, but you might have to move pretty far away to try to maintain your current rent costs. If that's even possible. So, the idea of "locking up" housing costs for a set number of years is especially appealing. By locking up, I'm talking about actually buying a home outright with no loan whatsoever. The idea of paying a 7+ % mortgage interest doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. I'd rather just own the home outright. There's still plenty of monthly bills that I'd have to deal with: 1. Property Insurance 2. Maintenance/Repair Slush Fund 3. Homeowners Insurance 4. Water/Sewer/Garbage 5. Increased costs of Utilities (compared to small apartment) 6. Landscaping costs As a renter, I'm currently not paying anything related to "water/sewer/garbage". Somebody can say that it's already built-in to the rent price (which I would furiously argue against), but that's another thing entirely. Also, I'm paying for electricity and gas at my current apartment, but my monthly average is incredibly low. I feel like it's much harder to keep those costs incredibly low when you're essentially doubling the square footage. (If I was to buy, I'd concentrate on 3/2's, even though I wouldn't really need a 3/2. But I'd do it to avoid the resale disadvantage) Of course, the downsides to this idea are numerous. First off, I'd be taking out a huge chunk of my retirement money to make this happen. Possibly 1/4th of my overall retirement money. If that money was left in stocks in a portfolio, there's the potential for a huge opportunity cost by taking that money out. Then you have the question of whether or not you'd get sick of this undesirable city/state. Maybe you could deal with living there for a couple of years, but you'd really need to be there for five or six years to really make it worth it. Then, when it does finally come time to bail, are you breaking even on the housing investment? Are you losing money? Maybe making a small profit? If you make a small profit, then it's a dream come true scenario if the location didn't bore you to tears and cause a huge depression, lol. Anyways, just wondering what thoughts people have on this? Just keep renting and forget about this dumb idea?

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