Several years ago my husband and I were fortunate enough to find a lake home that we can live in year round. The house is located within a thirty minute commute for my husband and I was able to relocate to a job that is only ten minutes from the house. This has been wonderful because it is allowing us to live our retirement dream while we are still working. Every weekend we can take advantage of lake living without packing the car and driving to a cabin or campgrounds. Now we are still thinking about our retirement years and deciding if we want to relocate.
The lake shore properties are moving very quickly. Our present home is multi-level so we are not sure how we will be able to navigate the steps when we are older. We decided we would talk with different real estate companies in the various lakes areas and see what kind of trends they are seeing regarding development and land availability. We are not ready to act right now so we do not want to sign with one realtor. We decided that we would just spend a day here and there stopping at different real estate companies and seeing what they had to offer and what advise they would give us regarding how long to wait. On our various trips we would go through small communities that were close to different lake areas. We would stop and have coffee at local cafes and talk to people about the different real estate companies in the area. Most times there would be a relative of a local realtor in the café. On our way home we would stop and have a drink at a local bar. We found that you can get a great deal of advice from small town bartenders on just about everything including real estate companies.
So far in our travels we have located two communities that we think would be quite pleasant to retire in. We have decided that once we are retired it will not really matter how far we are from any particular area because we will not have to worry about commuting. We have moved often enough to know that we make friends quite easily and we join quite well with various church communities. We may decide to buy lake property now so that we will have it to build on in the future. If we should change our minds on the location we know we will be able to sell the property for a profit. Lake shore properties are going up annually and so there is no way we will lose money on this sort of land deal.