Preventing Dave from Freezing

I didn't leave the house for two days. Just between you and me, nothing says "MOVE TO FLORIDA" like the single-digit temperatures and gloomy Ohio winter weather. I'll work in the hangar just fine when temps are in the 20's, I'll bring the propane heater when they're in the teens, but single digits keep me at home.

I'm not necessarily sold on Florida, but it has obvious benefits. Not all are weather related, either. There's more than one climate that I have to consider when pondering a move. One that may not be as obvious as the weather is the tax climate.

While Ohio's weather can be distinctly unfriendly to pilots and airplane builders, its tax climate is fairly benign, at least when it comes to owning an airplane. In Ohio, my annual airplane registration costs substantially less than the annual renewal of the license tags on my car. Florida is the same way. Not all states are, though. Many states charge an annual property tax on things like airplanes. These taxes, even at percentages as small as 3%, are prohibitive. Florida specifically exempts airplanes from those taxes but many of its neighbors do not. Georgia and the Carolinas do not. My choices seem to be Florida or Tennessee. It's not easy to make a determination because states don't consider it to be a relevant enough factor to mention on their taxation web sites.

When the weather gets bad enough to keep me at home, I spend a lot of time on the computer using Google maps to look at prospective retirement locations. Sure, retirement is a couple of decades away, but it's nice to have a plan, right? Besides, it kills time.

This weekend I found another way to kill time: I had the introduction, tail kit, and fuselage kit portions of this blog archived into a PDF file. PDF? Preventing Dave from Freezing?? No, it means Portable Document Format. Which in human-speak means you can read it on just about any computing device. The nice part about it is that people can download it and have it right on their computer/iPad/Kindle and not have to be teathered to the internet to read it. Does anyone care? I don't know, but I wanted to have a backup of it for myself and figured it would cost me nothing to share it with the world. Just in case.

Here's the link:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B4DKCfPk8DZwZDJhNTAzMjgtYTBiMy00MWFkLTk5YjMtMzBmMDIzNDUxOTJj&hl=en