Our Golden Cage

 

By Rick Boettger

 

Cynthia and I are trapped by Key West. I want to leave, to have adventures, to live in exotic and rare corners of the world.Why not spend a month or two apiece in the Maldives, Raja Ampat, Easter Island, Bhutan, the Seychelles, Boquete, and a hundred others? We could do it. We have neither children nor jobs keeping us even in the U.S. This is not a dress rehearsal–this is the only life in this mortal flesh we are going to get, and we are writing the script, so why not wallow in all the rich variety the world has to offer?

 

 

But damned Key West, aye, there’s the rub. The home, the friends, the life we have here is a golden cage that has us trapped as surely as house arrest. We have fashioned such a perfect life for ourselves here that even other luxuries are different, not better, and always worse. And this is a common affliction I know people who’ve happily moved to be near grandchildren, or who couldn’t afford us, or for whom Key West was too exotic. But I’ve never had a friend move and say, “Rick, you’ve got to come to San Francisco or Vail or Rockland or Asheville or Bonaire or Sonoma or Hana or Monaco or Prague or Phuket or wherever, it’s the best!”

 

 

Like all of my friends and I expect most of my readers, we have a great place to live, a remarkable cast of interesting friends we could find nowhere else, a fulfilling job of some sort, a “hobby” like my singing, some kind of civic involvement like my writing, and besides we get to bike to great restaurants and cultural events.

 

 

Oh, and the weather and our still-vibrant waters. How can any of us leave? Why am I so nuts as to be even considering it?

 

 

Okay, this has to be something else wrong with me again, as no one I know in my position is considering it. It’s a conflict between two of my basic and successful approaches to life. The first is my “Quit winners” philosophy I developed as a professional poker player in my youth. When you’ve harvested what you gracefully can from a game, get out before someone pulls a gun. I applied that to my own life when I retired at 48 just because I had a guaranteed $100k/year for life, which is all this lower-middle-class kid could imagine was as much as anyone would ever need, and there was too much fun to be had.

 

 

Right now, the Key West real estate market has turned our funky old flat into a gold mine. I’m not a smart real estate investor. Better: I am a lucky RE investor. I bought the Key Haven home in 1996 because my ex-wife wanted something sparkly new. I bought the Old Town rentals because a friend needed a partner for the down payment to buy out toxic neighbors. And we bought 1402 Olivia because it was not for rent, and was huge on one floor when my knee was too bad to go upstairs.

 

 

But it’s public record, the gain on these tickles seven figures. With our five fixed-benefit pensions and other substantial savings, we truly can go anywhere for the rest of our lives, or live on a decent cruise ship if we really begin to lose it. And I have trouble believing our good fortune on the Olivia home. The last time we had numbers like this in local RE, they crashed. This may be the opportunity people passed up in 2006 when they could have sold their tiny mid-town condos for half a mill, but they held on and they are still underwater from the $300k they paid.

 

 

To me it’s like leaving good money on the table. And we no longer deserve our funky-palatial spread. I often feel it is obscene that day after day for months only Cynthia and I have have 1760 indoor square feet all to ourselves, while going from our large private deck garden and pool out to our also-large front porch to catch the sunset and the neighbors. We used to be proud to use the large space for righteous political and cultural parties, but now we’ve gotten too lazy, and rarely open the house as we used to. Someone else with visiting kids should own this and throw lots of big parties, as the Wares do next door.

 

 

Next week, my second basic and successful approach to life: letting the crazy out. I’ll explain how we all got here, and why we should try to upgrade perfection.

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