Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael G.
There are retired people from all over the nation that settled down in The Villages, some snowbirds, and some full-time residence.
My question is: "What's your story that brought to TV, and why not other areas in Florida?"
Cheers!
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***CAUTION*** I tend to get a bit verbose, so grab your favorite beverage before jumping into my story.
We are right in the middle of our move to The Villages. In fact, construction started on our house in Hammocks at Fenney just yesterday. That said, if you had asked us a year ago about moving to The Villages, or anywhere else for that matter, we would have said that we had no plans to move.
Four and a half years ago we retired and moved to our “dream retirement”, a big house on a lake in South Carolina. We had planned it for years and we fully intended to live there to a ripe old age. It was a nice life. We had boats and a pool, and even belonged to the local country club. But what we hadn’t counted on was the isolation and long distances to just about anything we wanted to do, other than stuff on the lake.
Even in SC the winters were still cold (to us) so we would spend January and February in South Florida. And even then the other winter months were a bit chilly for any outdoor activities, let alone lake activities. We were even considering buying a condo or something in south FL to spend Winters in.
Then along came the 2021 real estate boom. We kinda followed it in the news, but paid little attention to it. Then our neighbor put their house on the market for (what we considered) a ridiculous price. That got us talking about “what would we do if we could get $xxxxxx for our house”. We talked about all kinds of options and kept finding reasons they wouldn’t make us happier. So it was just an occasional topic for discussion that went nowhere. After all, we had spent years planning for the place we currently had.
When we discussed what we thought would make us happier, we settled on things like better (Winter) weather, lots more activities, restaurants, clubs, and store less than 30-60 minutes away, more of a social life, closer to the activities we currently enjoy, etc… Does it sound like I am describing The Villages? We had no idea what TV was other than a big retirement community. We had never, ever, even considered moving to any type of community.
This story is starting to drag, so I’ll speed it up. It was in September last year we kinda decided on what would make us happier, IF such a place even existed, and IF our house could sell for a stupid amount of money. Big IFs. So we started looking and remembered that we knew a couple people that moved to TV, so we looked harder. We were amazed at what TV seemed to have to offer, so we booked one of the Lifestyle visits.
So in late September we visited TV and immediately thought that it was Disneyland for adults. After a 4 day visit we were hooked. We immediately went home and put our house on the market, which sold for full asking price, in just 2 days. 30 days later, we had put down a deposit on a Designer Home lot and closed on our house. Now we are Villages Guests while we anxiously wait for our house to be completed.
I am a planner by nature (and profession), so this big spontaneous life event was of some concern to my child, family and friends. In fact, words like “senile” and “crazy” were spoken at times, but here we are, trying to live our best life.