The Grass Between My Toes and The Joys of a Bath

OOOH the joy, bath goodies for Mothers Day

Will we ever stay in a home forever?  It is a question we ask ourselves often, however we have for over 20 years seen our home as our Superannuation.  I was never convinced that making additional contributions to Super would provide us with the flexibility we may want and of course it is all regulated by Government rules and laws, which unfortunately continue to change.  It's my money and I should be able to do with it what I want, when I want and when I retire.  So we chose instead to build houses, and move on taking the capital gains with us over the years.

We have been retired now for nearly 5 years and our ability to continue to enjoy our retirement has been all about the money we where able to pocket selling our homes in this time, because I still cannot touch my Super.

You may have read my blogs about moving a few years ago, about moving out and then moving in - so I won't bore you with the messy details of this move, moving is moving but in case you didn't read my last blogs see:

http://ninker.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/moving-emotions.html and http://ninker.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/life-in-over-50s-lane.html

Lets just say while we enjoyed our time in the Over 50's environment it wasn't for us now, I did miss the grass between my toes and the space to still have the entire family over as well as friends.  Also we were lucky enough to be able to sell at Vision buy a newer and larger home on a standard residential block and put a good sum of money back into the bank account, which was another primary reason for the move.

We left Vision with more friends than when we arrived and that was nice - you can never have too many friends, and we thank those people (you know who you are), we had some lovely times in those 2 years with you all.  However the important things we discovered about ourselves in those 2 years really helped us understand what we where looking for, and without those years there we may not have felt as contented as we do just after a few weeks. Some of my more favorite photos with mates from Vision.

We knew 3 years ago we had to move, our beautiful waterfront home was just too large for 2 of us, too costly to maintain and had too much of our hard earned capital in it, but we didn't know what we really wanted, and moving to Vision gave us a safe environment in which to go through that

process, we would never have ended up where we are today without that.  

After selling our beautiful waterfront property and then travelling around Australia for 6 months while we awaited our home at Vision to be built, we where still in that phase of retirement where you are not 100% sure of what you want to achieve.  After a lifetime of setting goals and working towards milestones - you know getting married, having kids, watching them grow etc for a while you just want to chill, not really have to think of too much except enjoy life, which is OK but .... at some point you need or at least we needed to have something more in our lives, something we where committed to and something that gave us a sense of achievement as well as camaraderie.  

Derek has pushed himself and is now Senior Crew - 2 Stripes and a Gold Anchor

We originally thought that moving to Vision might help us in that process and it did and as I said above, we made some lovely friends whom I am sure we will continue to be friends with.  Moving to Vision however made us look closely at what we wanted and we discovered our wonderful past time of Volunteer Marine Rescue where we are constantly learning and being challenged to go above and beyond what we may have thought of as our limits, it provides us with a regular activity which helps to define the week/month etc and of course we found a great crew and some more wonderful friends who we get to have the pleasure of every week.

So in the 2 odd years we learnt a lot about ourselves and we learnt what it was we wanted to do and where we wanted to be. At first finding the right house seemed the impossible dream, but eventually we found it.  I knew I wanted to feel that grass between my toes again - have a bigger yard as well as a bigger home. While over the years we have had up to 3 baths in our home of which most where rarely used, I didn't know how much I had missed having a bath from time to time so I have been enjoying the luxury of a bath again.  Of course it is just lovely to be able to have everyone stay over in their own separated area and to be cooking up a storm because I have the space to cook, the space to store my stuff and access them easily and a pantry for all those wonderful cooking items.  It is those funny little things that we missed. 

It is nice to be in a safe environment with like people, but I now enjoy hearing the little girl at the back of us saying "I Love You Mummy", kids voices, the sound of lawn mowers going on a Saturday morning, families enjoying life - these are things I had not realized I missed, they where not things I had on my list of things I wanted in a new home, but in the last 4 weeks found I had missed.  We love our new home and all it gives to us.

Of course extra dollars in the bank account also help because they seem to depart so quickly when there is nothing else coming in, but that is the additional bonus over and above feeling the grass between my toes and the joys of a bath.  Fingers crossed we get at least 5 years in before we get an itchy bum again lol.