Baby Boomers Are Blowing Up Florida and the Rest of Us Should Pay Attention

There is a mass exodus happening right now along the Florida coastline, and the insurance industry is the one holding the door open and laughing. Retirees who spent decades building their nest eggs in the Sunshine State are getting eaten alive by homeowners insurance premiums that have tripled, sometimes quadrupled, in the span of a few years. I watched this happen to a family friend who retired to Sarasota thinking she had it all figured out. She did not. The insurance bill alone started consuming what was supposed to be her travel money, her grandchildren money, her dignity money.

So now the Boomers are moving again, and they are landing somewhere on the East Coast that nobody expected, somewhere quieter and cheaper and apparently immune to the actuarial panic attack that Florida has become. This matters to you even if you are thirty-five and nowhere near retirement, because the places these retirees are flooding next will see property values climb, tax bases shift, and local insurance markets get tested in entirely new ways. The money always moves somewhere and when it does, somebody positioned themselves to collect a toll on that movement weeks before you ever heard about it. The insurance companies knew. The real estate investment trusts knew. Your 401k statement, meanwhile, has no idea what is coming and neither do you sitting there thinking Florida was just a Florida problem when it was always a warning about what happens when climate math collides with the fiction of affordable retirement and the whole gorgeous lie just