Thank you to all for this conversation.
My wife and I have been renting homes in the Orlando area for the past 25 years, always dreaming of someday buying our own place. Now, with retirement in sight, we are starting to seriously have that conversation. We don't want to keep renting. We want a place of our own, a place where we can leave our stuff and make it easier to hop on a plane with a backpack and head down for a few days or a few weeks, knowing that everything we need will already be there. The kitchen will be stocked with all of the non-perishable stuff like spices and canned goods, the closets stocked with cleaning supplies and paper products, the drawers filled with clothing.
A few years back, we did take the baby step of signing up with Owner's Locker, a company that rents portable storage containers and delivers them to you wherever you are staying and then picks them up when you leave. We just used ours last week on a short trip and we'll be using it again when we return in 2 weeks. That meant we didn't have to pack things like shampoo and conditioner, soap, mouthwash, dish and laundry detergent, extra hangars, and various other things we have stored in there. But it's still not the same as having your very own place.
So within the next year probably, we'll start exploring neighborhoods and developments to see where we want to buy. We already have a couple of realtors we know down there who can show us around and help us narrow down the options. I'm leaning toward a condo or maybe a townhouse where there would be virtually zero exterior maintenance to worry about. I want to be able to lock and leave.
