Prior to retirement and buying here, we were close to having our mortgage paid off on our home. We figured we'd have the house paid off when we retired, sell the house and come here and buy. However, we also figured that would be stressful as we'd either have to buy a house here somehow before we got the money from the sales of our house or we'd have to store everything we owned and live in a hotel in the gap between selling there and buying here. We talked to our bank about it and they brought up the idea of a Home Equity Line Of Credit (HELOC). They loan you a fairly large percentage of the equity in your current home and you can use that money to A) pay off the mortgage on the existing home and B) buy or at least get a large down payment for a new home. The down payment didn't quite cover the cost of the new home we wanted here so we got a small mortgage to cover the balance. So we exchanged a mortgage payment for a HELOC payment and a small mortgage payment (for about the same monthly outgo). We then rented out the house here as a long-term, unfurnished house until we were ready to retire. With tax credits and such, we may even have made a few buck or at least didn't lose much each month and when the time was right for us to retire (and the long-term rental agreement was up), we moved here to the house we had wanted. In that mean time of roughly 18 months, the value of the house (according to Zillow) had gone up by 10% or more. We've been here 3 years and Zillow claims the house is worth about 30% more than what we bought it for. Judging from the sales prices of comparable houses, I think they're pretty accurate on that account. While the values were appreciating where we had lived, they weren't doing so nearly as quickly as they are here in The Villages. So if we'd waited, we'd maybe have gotten a bit more for our house but definitely would have paid more for a comparable house here.
In short, buying before we retired and moved here worked out quite nicely for us. Your mileage may vary.
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