A New Hometown
Do you every wonder what it is like to fall in love with a city or town other than your hometown? New Bern, NC was that place for us…
A bit about us: Frank and I had moved approximately every 2-3 years for the last 27 years - buying and renovating houses, living in them for a while, then flipping them for profit. This was a second marriage for both of us. We were starting anew.
Frank took an early retirement package from his position as a school psychologist in Massachusetts and I left banking to finish my college degree that I started so many years ago. There was good money to be made in real estate and flipping and we did well. Until 2008.
We owned a few properties and had everything tied up in those investments when the walls came crashing down. By 2009 we had lost everything. Financially we had to act fast. We were not kids anymore, we were in our fifties…not an easy age to find new employment even in our chosen fields. We tried new fields of work including Property Caretakers. While taking care of beautiful properties was fun and different, we knew that we couldn’t do physical work like that forever, so Frank found that, even after 15 years, he could reactivate his school psychologist license and come out of retirement. I went into retail (ugh) for a while so that we could get back on our feet and recoup some of our losses. This finally allowed us to once again buy our own home. Unfortunately, Frank was now Last-Man-In and soon became First-Man-Out when it came to school budget cuts. We knew we had to find something more affordable were this to continue. We needed to find a small home and small mortgage while we were still employed, so we made our “wants” list:
Good healthcare system nearby
Low real estate taxes
Warmer climate
Smaller home with smaller price tag and safe neighborhood
Somewhat near the coast/beaches
Within a day’s drive of our family
Good for retirees
Plenty of things to do
Neither of us had ever heard of New Bern, North Carolina but it kept showing up on nearly every list. We knew that we had to check it out, so we planned a road trip…
