No. of Recommendations: 4
Our time has greatly freed up now that we are true empty nesters, needing to cater only to ourselves. It's time to hit the road again. One avenue of travel that we are in the midst of setting up is home exchanges. The IRS, (USA oriented, but that's what I know,) does not consider an equal exchange to be taxable, and this is considered a residential transaction that does not seem to be subject to regulation, since you are essentially having "guests" in your house. Because of an HOA that does not allow short term rentals, I could not do AirBnB even if I wanted to, but this can be done without restrictions.
The website I signed up with allows you to do a direct exchange with another household: you staying in their house while they stay in your house at the same time. Another approach is to allow people to use points to stay in your house. The points are banked and you can use them at another location at another time. This is particularly useful if you are time limited, or if you have no desire to visit their neck of the woods, and you have another place to stay.
For example, our vacation home is two hours away from our primary residence and that is where we will be staying until we go through this a few times. I want to be close on hand should there be a problem that needs our attention, or if we have not yet explained everything enough, like how the TV works, and we can't help them out over the phone. Meanwhile we will be where we want to be anyway, and someone will be paying us points towards a future exchange, with our house not looking vacant and ripe for thieves.
One potential issue we faced was the need to clear some space for them in our closets and dressers, as well as fighting the weirdness associated with complete strangers staying in your house. For us this is again where the vacation home comes in, and we have moved to the VH a considerable amount of our want to keep but don't need on hand...like boxes of past IRS returns and statements. We will have a locked owners closet here to keep the little we need on hand. Frankly it's made for a more spacious and relaxing home, but the first floor unit of our vacation home has become a storage unit.
I also want to find a house cleaner who can act as a go to person should there be an issue, allowing us to go on our travels more stress free. If this works, we may hold on to the house rather than sell it in 2024 as planned. The area is in high demand, low housing supply with constrained new construction. Housing holds up well, even in 2008, which only saw a very minor decline. We have a 2% FRM with 28 years left on it.
This is my kind of travel. I hate hotels, preferring to live in a community and check it out in depth. We are in the process of looking for a new area to live, and could envision doing this for at least a few years, returning from time to time when it's time to see medical professionals. Or we may just get a house sitter for this next year and throw it on the market early 2024. Will let you know.
If you are interested in checking it out, the site we are going with is homeexchange.com. If you use my code as a referral when you sign up, we both get extra points than had you checked it out on your own, about equal to a night's stay. Email me if you want the code. They are pretty liberal with the points up front. I already have close to 1200 just for signing up, setting up a profile and a few other steps needed to set up an account, with another 500 waiting when I finish. I should have enough points to stay about a week or so, even without putting my house on exchange. That's worth the IIRC $175/year fee, which you don't get charged until you arrange your first exchange.
Probably one of the biggest weaknesses of the site is it's hard to browse if you have not signed up. You have to have your profile completed before you can see many pictures. On the one hand, this makes it tough to check out the site, but on the other, it makes it tougher for lookie lous to peek into your home. The address of your house is not stated on-line. I was impressed with the world wide coverage they have. Lots of places we would like to go.
This post was cobbled together over a busy day, so I apologize if it's not the most concise or explicit. Feel free to ask questions.
IP
