Travel nursing in Jacksonville Fl. area

Specialties Travel

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Hi,

My husband and kids are eventually moving to Jax. Fl./ St. Johns/St Augustine area. He is already there renting a room. Our home in SC has not sold yet and if I move then we would not be able to afford 2 mortgages. I have 17 years in PACU, and was thinking about trying a travel nurse assignment, see if I like it. I would try around the Jax area or close by. I figured that this was the only way that I could afford 2 mortgages. My husband is already there and comes home weekly. I would still have my home address in SC. I would actually be traveling home to SC frequently for the first 6 months agyer I move for family reasons. What are the criteria for traveling. Has anyone else traveled to pay 2 mortgages. I do understand that I could only do this for a limited time. But I want to get down there before school starts.

Thanks

As long as you keep your home (until it sells) and keep the address as your nexus, you have a good tax home, and going to Jacksonville as a traveler will probably benefit you financially. Once that house is gone, and you do not establish a new residence in SC (with verifiable expenses), you lose the tax benefits of travel and you are going to be better off as staff. If you need family health insurance and your husband's job does not provide it, you may be better off going on staff immediately.

By the way, home ownership is not necessarily better than renting. The main thing a mortgage offers is savings discipline, however at a high cost - the large amounts of interest that goes along with a mortgage (more than doubling the cost). Most Americans love owning stuff, especially houses, and indeed because of the forced savings, families that buy homes go into retirement better off than most other Americans. But if you can be disciplined about investing what would have been your mortgage payment, you will likely do better, more than twice better at retirement age. Pick up a house along the way when you can pay cash.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/your-money/to-buy-or-rent-a-home-weighing-which-is-better.html

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html

Some counterpoint to that here:

Q4 2

Thanks for all the great advice...I always thought owning was better because I could write off the interest. I will read the links you suggest. NedRN!

Most people do! But look at it this way, is it really worth flushing $10,000 in interest payments a year from a mortgage down the drain to get $2,000 worth of tax breaks? That is if you are in the 20% income tax bracket. It gets worse: much of that amount you would have gotten anyway as a personal deduction (2015 was $6,300) if you didn't itemize (because of that interest deduction).

Having a family may mean that you itemize anyway even without a mortgage (but by far most itemizers are either homeowners or wealthy), but if you don't itemize, your chances of being audited for any reason go down dramatically, perhaps 10 fold as a bonus.

Investment decisions, whether home or other, are complex and personal. But it is worth going into decisions with your head up and not just relying on common wisdom.

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