Our Retirement Home Blessing

This is our retirement home. Nestled at the edge of Forestbrook Reserve in Myrtle Beach, you will find our "forever home." Being a Salvation Army officer's kid, that says a lot, because I lived in 9 different houses before I graduated college (we actually lived in two houses while I was in college). Since then, you can add another 19 until we finally landed here! We don't plan on moving ever again! By the way- I have the address list of very house I ever lived in.

Here is the story of our retirement home blessing:

Three years before retirement (2020), our plan was to come to Myrtle Beach and find a good realtor (and we found one of the BEST!). We wanted him to show us some houses and we would fill him in on what we liked and what we didn't like about those houses. Then in 2021, we would come back and get serious about buying a home. During that year, I would learn everything I needed to know about buying a house, because, well, I had never done that. We always lived in Salvation Army provided "quarters" (homes).

Our realtor gave us access to his web site where we found about 4-5 houses we liked. The day before he was to show us around these houses, we drove around ourselves to see them from the outside.

The first was already SOLD, so that was crossed off the list. The second was in a neighborhood we didn't particularly like (and it was hard to get to), so that one was crossed off the list. The next one just didn't look as good in person as it did online, so off the list. The last two were fine and since we didn't have any others we liked, we would go with the realtor to see them the next day.

Very quickly that day, we realized the first house looked great on the outside, but was going to take more renovation than we wanted. Almost a bit sadly, we went to our final house. I mean, we had "struck out" so far, what was going to happen with our last one?

In case you haven't guessed already, we walked into the house shown above. Within 5 minutes of looking Debbie and I both KNEW this was THE house! Good news, bad news- we loved the house, but I knew nothing about the house buying process and wasn't even sure we could make an appropriate down payment. I went into deep thinking mode to figure out if we could do it.

Our realtor said if we liked it, we should make an offer right away, because he was certain it would not stay on the market much longer. To make a long story short, we made an offer and went back and forth a couple of times until it was all settled. Then a date was set for the closing. We went home back North to figure out the process and work through all the paperwork we needed to do.

About a month later, we came back to close and "lived" in our home for 5 days before we returned to work and decided to rent the place until we needed it. That proved to be a God-thing as well, because that extra money helped a LOT in paying for the mortgage and having some money to do the minor renovations we wanted- like painting, carpets, etc.

A year passed. You might remember the housing market went CRAZY in 2021! If we had waited until we had planned on buying a house, we never could have afforded our house or anything like it. The price had gone way above our limit. God had a plan all along. I am glad we chose to listen to His plan and not mine!

God says "My ways are not your ways." Good thing!

God is so good to us. We see our retirement home as a direct blessing from God. And the first of our many blessings he poured down on us as we headed into retirement.

Trust in Yahweh with your whole heart and don't depend on your own knowledge and understanding. If you do this, He will make your path an easy one (my paraphrase). 

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Postscript: In the process of buying our house, I learned a LOT about the process of buying a house. If anyone reading this is interested, I can provide a simple two sheet list of steps.