Choosing your home state...

dahkota wrote:

edatlanta wrote:
Don't forget to check your medical insurance costs in the states you are considering. Costs vary a lot from state to state and this includes medicare supplements.

X2 - we were all set to make SD our new "home." Then we saw the health insurance offerings. As fulltimers not of medicare age, we need a multi-state PPO. It would have been cheaper to keep our COBRA insurance rather than get insurance through SD. We have also dismissed Nevada and are currently looking at Texas and Florida. We will probably keep our current residency for a year while the health insurance changes settle.

I am going to sit back and wait on this also. health Ins coverage is my biggest concern right now.

we moved our domicile from Florida to SD for a couple of years, but the state is NOT all some make it out to be. Besides the tax basis, make sure you check anything that will have an impact on your lifestyle, ie, medical, DL requirements, CCW requirements, insurance requirements, etc. We found it was actually better in our case to make our domicile in Idaho, as they had a much better overall package for retirees and travelers than SD.

X2 for SD

edatlanta wrote:
Don't forget to check your medical insurance costs in the states you are considering. Costs vary a lot from state to state and this includes medicare supplements.

X2 - we were all set to make SD our new "home." Then we saw the health insurance offerings. As fulltimers not of medicare age, we need a multi-state PPO. It would have been cheaper to keep our COBRA insurance rather than get insurance through SD. We have also dismissed Nevada and are currently looking at Texas and Florida. We will probably keep our current residency for a year while the health insurance changes settle.

Don't forget to check your medical insurance costs in the states you are considering. Costs vary a lot from state to state and this includes medicare supplements.

X2 on south dakota

There's lots and lots of detail and discussion on choosing a domicile out there. You can even use these 2 keywords in Google: fulltiming domicile.

Here's something from the RVForum.net library. If you belong to that forum (rvforum.net), you can use this search and find lots and lots of discussion about it. And you can search all the forums here for the word domicile, and it will bring up numerous posts, too.

South Dakota....
No state income tax
Low sales tax on new vehicle purchase
Low vehicle registration
Low insurance costs
No estate tax
RV friendly....easy to become 'resident'
Lots of mail forwarding service that provide 'physical' address for Uncle Sams purposes

You can set up the mail forwarding address/service on-line so you can start all the change of address notifications
Just internet search 'mail forwarding service SD'....many businesses from Sioux Falls to Rapid City. I've used two of them (Alternative Resources...Sioux Falls and Americas Mailbox...Box Elder/Rapid City) Both were/have been great in handling mail.

After you set up your new home address you drive out to SD...spend one night at a CG and then go get drivers licenses, register to vote etc. Vehicle registration can be handled by the mail forwarding service OR you can take care of it when there getting DL's

We've used SD as our 'domicile' state for past 7 yrs.

TX also is rv friendly........but for us SD was less expensive overall (vehicle ins. was double based on a TX address and I just couldn't be a Texan)
FL has mail forwarding services also.....

We have 'full timers' insurance on our RV.....exact same policy that we had on our home before going full time.
National Interstate......been real good/great service/low costs for the coverage we have. No hassles with claims (2....one minor/one major)

Blue Sky & Foremost also do full time RV coverage

Only issue that is still being played out...medical coverage for full time RVrs.
Don't know how Obamacare will be for travelers.
Fortunately I use VA which isn't a problem as a traveler.