After more than a dozen years of home ownership my wife and I decided that the white picket fence version of the American dream didn’t necessarily suit us anymore so we finally sold our beloved Lakewood Cottage in the quaint lakeside town of Mount Dora, Florida, which was itself a miracle given the relatively depressed local housing market.
Only four days before our listing was to expire our buyer made an offer and four days after the listing expired we had a signed contract for the figure my wife and I had agreed we needed to make the move worthwhile. Fortunately for us, we had substantial equity in our home so we left with a good-sized nest egg in exchange for our nest.
The bottom line for us is that we are able to retire all our debt and move whenever the mood strikes us. What has helped make such a drastic transition doable is that we started the process of downsizing our possessions more than a year ago when we first thought of selling our home after a neighbor’s tree fell on it [see “Celebrating Life” post].
One irony in all of this is that we didn’t actually have a white picket fence at our old property and yet we do at the new place we are living, which I will write more about next time. Suffice it to say we are loving our new lifestyle and looking forward to adventurous times ahead.
