We stopped by The Villages two years in a row and always came away impressed. Thinking we could find similar amenities at perhaps lower prices in a less imposingly large community, the next year we toured several retirement communities in northern central Florida. All were nice enough and some had some advantages over The Villages. While stopping through at The Villages during this third-year tour, we came to an open house for a model that it turned out we liked a great deal. On the drive home to North Carolina, we weighed the pros and cons of all the communities and decided that for us, none came close in our minds to the total package that is The Villages. We also decided we would buy a house of that model. We got home, searched online and found a dozen instances of that model. We did the whole Goldilocks thing of "this one has cabinetry that is too dark, that one has cabinetry that is too light" and decided that one met all of our needs. It turns out it was the very unit we had toured. It turns out it was one of the last remaining houses for sale in its new neighborhood and was being offered at a 5% reduction in price. Since we'd learned The Villages don't haggle on prices, we jumped on it. We did the entire purchase remotely and it went very smoothly. We couldn't retire for another 18 months or so and were afraid that by the time we retired and moved here that the neighbors near us would have closed ranks and formed a tight social circle that we wouldn't be able to enter. Fortunately, we were totally wrong on that. They welcomed us and now we have a circle of good friends as neighbors. We've been living here for 2 1/2 years now and still want to pinch ourselves when we wake up to be sure we're not dreaming. Maybe we would have been happy retirees just about anywhere we might have moved to but we are ridiculously happy living here in The Bubble.
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