Things To Do In SW Florida

When Morgan Voke bought a run-down house with a leaky roof and the vacant lot next door at tax deed sales, he figured he’d renovate the properties, improving a small pocket of the historic Black neighborhood of East Altamonte.

But Voke was later stunned to learn the properties — now combined into one lot — carried tens of thousands of dollars in code-enforcement liens after years of neglect by the previous owners. That bill was now his. This came after Voke and his business partner paid $120,602 to buy the shabby properties.

“There’s got to be a better way,” he said. “It discourages anyone to buy any of these dilapidated houses — dilapidated properties — and fix them up because they come with liens.”

In the end, Seminole commissioners unanimously agreed Tuesday to waive the remaining $24,781 in liens after an appeal from Voke.

Still, county leaders acknowledged a longtime problem nearly every local government struggles with: What to do with vacant or ramshackle properties that become a continual drag on nearby home values or the quality of a neighborhood. read more

By Kimberly Palmer, NerdWallet

Sometimes, even budgeting experts say it’s OK to splurge.

For Jen Smith, co-host of the “Frugal Friends Podcast” and co-author of “Buy What You Love Without Going Broke,” responsible splurging meant buying costly hurricane-proof windows for her home in St. Petersburg, Florida, an area with a history of bad storms.

“It’s for the safety of our home, and we saved for it,” she says.

Deciding when to splurge on an expensive purchase can be tricky, and even Smith admits she initially felt guilty about it.

Her podcast co-host and book co-author, Jill Sirianni, explains that part of the challenge of splurging is that “we’ve been sold a binary that you’re either a saver or a spender, but in reality, we all spend and we should all be saving.”

The trick, Sirianni says, is knowing when to embrace each tendency.

If you’re trying to decide when to save or splurge, here are some questions to ask yourself first to help you make an optimal decision:

Does the purchase fit in your budget?

“Starting with a budget will increase our awareness around spending money,” says Gerald Grant, Jr., a financial advisor with Equitable Advisors in South Florida. read more

While President Donald Trump has been in office less than a month, the costs of some consumer goods and services are trending up.

At nearly $5 a dozen, the price of eggs just surpassed record highs, and while quite moderate in comparison, bread, electricity, gasoline and natural gas also saw meager month-over-month increases, according to the latest data from the Consumer Price Index.

But before you start reworking your budget to afford a dozen Grade A, note that not all grocery prices are surging. In January, milk, oranges, tomatoes and ground beef all saw a minimal decrease in cost, while the price of bananas and poultry remained more or less the same.

While many of these month-over-month changes are not directly linked to the White House, they may soon be, with new tariffs and possible international trade wars sure to affect average prices at the grocery store and the pump.

The Tribune is tracking these 11 everyday costs for Americans — eggs, milk, bread, bananas, oranges, tomatoes, chicken, ground beef, gasoline, electricity and natural gas — and how they are changing with the new administration. This tracker will update monthly using CPI data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. read more

By ALAN SUDERMAN, Associated Press Business Writer

When the Trump administration’s crypto czar, David Sacks, recently held a news conference to announce a new congressional working group to advance cryptocurrency regulation, many digital asset enthusiasts were unimpressed and underwhelmed.

“There were a lot of people on X who felt like this wasn’t, you know, a mind-blowing announcement,” Sacks said on a podcast a few days later, referring to the social media outlet formerly known as Twitter. But Sacks said having the White House and key members of Congress committed to passing key crypto legislation in the next year, possibly within six months, was worth celebrating. “We’ve never had that before, so that is pretty monumental,” he said.

Every day, 35,000 people travel along West Colonial Drive to and from downtown Orlando. If they want to escape the ugliness around them, they must avert their eyes.

Businesses have been fleeing West Colonial for 20 years, and COVID was a nail in the coffin. Even national retailers like 7-Eleven, Family Dollar and Burger King shut down, concentrating the blight on the corridor that now has 32 vacant lots and buildings.

But where others see an eyesore, Amit Kumar saw an opportunity. His efforts over the last year illustrate the loose public-private partnership determined to transform this corridor much in the way East Colonial was reborn over the last decade, according to a report in GrowthSpotter.

In 2024 the restauranteur bought the shuttered and graffiti-covered Burger King for $1.16 million and plans to invest another $1.5 million in the property. Kumar is the chef and owner three restaurants in Orlando, including Bombay Street Kitchen, which has earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand for three straight years. He told GrowthSpotter he plans to convert the Burger King property into a commissary and test kitchen to train his cooks and create new menu items for the other restaurants. He will also operate a limited seating restaurant where he’ll serve a five-course tasting menu of his elevated Indian creations. read more