Three months after we finally closed on our dream lake house in Florida, our dock collapsed and went into the water.
Even worse, I was standing on the dock when it happened…
Fortunately, I wasn’t hurt (besides my pride).
And fortunately, the entire dock didn’t collapse all at once.
Instead, a huge section under my feet snapped in half and dropped me right into Lake Eloise.
I came up shocked and soaking wet.
I remember holding my fishing rod in one hand (and what was left of the beer I was drinking in the other hand) and immediately regretting a decision I had made a few months prior…
Which leads me to the worst part of this story (besides having an unusable dock and being wet).
The worst part is that I had a quote to replace the dock before we ever moved in (so we could have moved into a house with a brand new dock ready for action).
The quote was about forty thousand dollars.
I passed because I figured I could get another year or two out of the existing old dock…
By the time a builder could actually get to us, the same dock cost closer to fifty thousand, and we’d spent most of a year owning lakefront we couldn’t really use.
That’s mistake number three. The first two happened before we signed anything, and one of them nearly cost us the house.
Before you write me off as some guy who had never been around a lake: I grew up on Lake Link, spent a year on Lake Hatchineha, and rented on Lake Summit as an adult. I have been on Florida lakes basically my whole life.
Lake Eloise was just the first one I ever bought.
Turns out those are two very different things.
Mistake #1: I spent 18 months waiting for a better time to buy a lake home
My wife Loren and I looked at lake homes for a year and a half before we bought one.
Not casually. We toured houses. We looked at Zillow every day. We ran the numbers.
And every single time we landed in the same place: not yet. Wait until we’ve saved more. Wait until the right one comes along at the right price. Wait until it feels responsible.
In those eighteen months we passed on several houses that, knowing what I know now, were good deals. Actually, VERY good deals.
Every one of them felt out of our budget at the time. Every one of these lake homes would look like a bargain today.
Then we found the one on Lake Eloise, and we almost did it again.
We were days from backing out. It felt like too much money.
That’s the day Chris called.
The phone call that changed the math
Chris is an old friend, but we hadn’t spoken in about a year.
He called for no particular reason… just to catch up on life.
I ended up telling him that we were about to cancel our offer on a lake house.
He asked me if I had time to hear his biggest regret in life…
Years ago, he’d bought the affordable house.
The sensible one, the one where the math worked.
And his two daughters never wanted to be there. They wanted to be at their friend’s house, the one with the view, the one that was fun. So that’s where they were. He spent a big chunk of their childhood picking them up from somebody else’s house.
OUCH.
He said he’d pay anything to have been the house the kids came to.
He urged me not to make the same mistake he did.
He said, “Assuming you are financially approved to buy this lake house and that it doesn’t wipe away 100% of your savings, do it. You’ll make it work and you won’t regret it.”
So we did.
We closed in mid 2021, right in the thick of the COVID housing boom, before Florida lakefront home prices did what they did over the following two years.
Here’s the actual lesson, and it isn’t “buy the expensive house.”
It’s that I was running the wrong math.
I kept comparing a purchase price against a savings balance. What I never put a number on was the amount of memories our family would create at our lake house, along with the countless times their friends wanted to come to OUR house (and not the other way around).
That number isn’t zero. It just doesn’t show up on a mortgage worksheet.
I also didn’t factor in what buying on the RIGHT lake (aka a lake in demand) does over time. I’m not going to tell you lake property only goes up, because it doesn’t. Florida lakefront got hit hard from 2007 to 2011 along with everything else. But demand for the GOOD lakes has held up better than the market around them, and nobody is making any new ones.
And we certainly benefited from buying a lake home in Florida in early 2021…
Let me be clear, I’m not telling you to hurry.
Buying a lake home you can’t afford is a much more expensive mistake than waiting a year.
But “we’ll do it when we have more money” is not a plan, and for us it was really just a way of not deciding.
Mistake #2: I spent that year and a half shopping lake houses, not lakes
For most of those eighteen months I did what everybody does. Open Zillow. Filter by price, beds, baths, square footage, waterfront. Sort by newest.
Judge the house.
Nobody sorts by lake.
There’s no filter for it.
So it never occurred to me that choosing your lake mattered most.
After countless searches, it came down to two houses: a newer, nicer lake home that isn’t part of the Winter Haven chain, and an older, WAY outdated house on Lake Eloise.
We took the ugly, outdated lake house…
It was the best decision we made!
The reason isn’t that Lake Eloise is better looking or in a better part of town.
It’s that Eloise is on the Winter Haven Chain of Lakes.
From our dock we can run to other lakes, tie up at a restaurant, take the boat over to our best friend’s house (who live on the next lake over), and get on water that’s big enough to actually do something on.
The other house had a lake you could look at (and that’s about it).
The Lesson: You can fix a house. You cannot fix a lake.
A dated kitchen, ugly bathrooms, a bad elevation — those are a budget and a contractor.
But you can’t add chain access to a lake that doesn’t have it.
You can’t fix a lake with a chronic algae history, or a mucky bottom, or water that drops far enough in the dry season to leave your dock sitting in mud.
Whatever the lake is, that’s what you bought.
What you are actually buying when you buy the lake
- Chain access – can you run to other lakes, or are you circling the same one all day?
- Algae and hydrilla history – not what it looked like the week you toured
- Bottom composition – sand or muck where your dock and swim area go
- Dry season water level – how far it drops, and whether your dock ends up sitting in mud
- Traffic and access – public ramps, boat pressure, who else is out there on a Saturday
Every one of those is knowable before you ever write an offer.
None of it is on the listing.
That gap is the reason MyLake.com exists.
The house comes with forty photos, a floor plan, an inspection, and a disclosure.
The lake — the part you can’t undo — comes with almost nothing a normal buyer can find.
Here are the 11 most costly mistakes to avoid when buying a lake home in Florida. It’s free.
Mistake #3: I went cheap on the dock
Back to the dock story.
As I mentioned, the house we bought was over 50 years old, and nothing had been updated (as in literally nothing).
That being said, we had a little work being done on the house before we moved in.
While those crews and different contractors were on site, a dock builder quoted me about $40,000 to tear out the thirty-year-old dock and put in a new one.
That would have meant we’d have a finished, new dock in the same month we moved in.
I looked at that $40,000 number sitting next to everything else we were already spending and told myself the existing old dock had lasted thirty years and could give us a couple more.
It looked ugly, but not unsafe. That was my read.
Three months later it was unsafe, with me on it.
The money was the smaller half of it.
This was 2021; builders were running out of materials, and backlogs were stacking up.
It took me over six months just to get back on a dock builder’s schedule — then demo, then build.
The same dock I had been quoted about $40,000 for was now closer to $50,000. Thanks Covid!
The part I didn’t see coming…
I thought of the dock as the amenity to the lake house.
The dock IS the house.
We use it nearly every day!
The dock has become our place of peace (and joy).
I go down to the dock and feed the fish (and turtles) every day. After the feeding frenzy dies down, I sit in one of our Adirondack chairs, look out over the water, and take it all in.
Some days it’s a bald eagle flying right near the dock, some days it’s watching the curious otters swim by, and some days it’s watching the ospreys dive down for fish.
Each day is different at the lake, but one thing remains the same… that feeling of peace.
Six months of owning a lake house without a usable dock taught me what the dock was worth better than any quote could have.
Who this advice is wrong for
I’ll be honest, buying a lake house in Florida isn’t for everyone…
If you don’t want a boat, don’t want to maintain a dock (and perhaps a seawall), and want a house you can move into without touching anything — then trading a nicer house for a better lake is the wrong call for you.
You’ll be paying a lakefront premium and a maintenance bill for water you look at.
The trade I made only pays off if you’re actually going to get on the water. Be honest with yourself about that before you pay for it.
What I’d tell you to do first
Pick the lake before you pick the house. Everything else is reversible.
I wrote up the full list of what goes wrong — eleven mistakes, what each one costs, and how you’d catch it before closing. It’s free, and it’s the guide I wish somebody had handed me in 2020.
→ Get the free guide: 11 Costly Mistakes to Avoid When Buying a Lake Home in Florida
Questions about a specific lake in Polk County? Ask me here. Free, no pressure.
