My wife and I just returned from a four-day trip to Arkansas, the purposes of which were to: 1) look at some houses in Hot Springs Village that we might consider buying; and 2) visit some ethnic food markets in Little Rock, because Hot Springs Village (HSV) and its nearest neighbor, Hot Springs, are not hotbeds of ethnic cuisines.
The trip was not as productive as we would have liked because of the weather. The Polar Vortex continued to have its way with central and northern Arkansas during our visit, so we could not even get into Little Rock the first day of our intended visit due to treacherous road conditions; the next day, we could not visit HSV for the same reason, but we did get to Little Rock that day. And we did find some very nice Indian and Asian and Mexican markets, which satisfied our concern that we might be considering a move into an ethnic food desert.
Our visit to HSV the following day, punctuated by very heavy rain, made house-viewing a wet and messy affair. It was productive, though, in that we removed one place from our list of possibilities; it is a place that would require extensive work, but priced accordingly. Another place looked interesting, but didn’t reach out and grab us.
Though we’ve almost settled on moving to HSV, both of us still have some reservations, mostly related to the fact that HSV is almost entirely residential. But places where there’s a mix of residential and commercial tend to be places in which prices are much higher than in HSV. Among the appeals of HSV are the physical beauty of the place (amazing trees, lakes, mountain views, etc.) and the very reasonable price of housing. If we were to put every dime we get out of the sale of our current house in a house in HSV, we very possibly could get a very nice place right on a lake in HSV. We won’t do that, as we want the sale of this house to generate retirement cash.
Though I kind of hate the idea of renting, it might be best for us to consider it for a year; living in HSV for a year would allow us to determine whether it’s really a place we would want to live permanently.
I don’t know. It would be so much easier if we had a lot of money. But we don’t. And there’s the rub.
