One of the biggest questions facing us when we decided to make the move was where we wanted to live.  We had narrowed down the city, but needed to decide between renting a house and an apartment.   We selected the apartment, and this post will talk about where we are with that.

One of our readers had commented that it doesn’t matter where you live, as long as you are near Walt Disney World.  Well, not quite.    There are a lot of areas we would never move to, even if it meant being close to the Mouse.    We wanted to live in a similar community setting as we had in Wisconsin, and while Clermont doesn’t quite fit the bill with that, it is a very nice area to live in.

Overall we have been satisfied with our apartment:  the office and maintenance staff are wonderful to work with, and it is nice to live in a place where we don’t need to worry about lawn care, or pool care or pest preventative treatments.  Over the past few months, however, we have been contemplating moving into a rental home due to a few different reasons.  We are hesitant, however, because we have heard horror stories regarding a few rentals here, and we don’t want to move from a good situation into a bad one.  It would also need to make financial sense; ie, we might pay lower rent, but we may have other expenses that we don’t here that would mean an increase in monies paid out.

So right now we’re kind of on the fence about it.  We currently have bad neighbor issues, but we’ve also had that experience when living in a house in Wisconsin, so moving doesn’t necessarily erase that issue.    We also would love more living space, as we lost approximately 700 square feet when we moved here.  We would love to find a four bedroom home here to rent, with the extra bedroom being designated as a guest bedroom/den area/craft room.    We don’t believe the electricity bill would rise significantly with more living space, as we need to run the air conditioner here more often than normal, as all our windows face only one direction, and unless its a fairly cool day, it doesn’t cool off the house significantly with no cross ventilation.

We have no regrets for moving into the apartments, as it provided security for us knowing that we had a relatively nice place to live.  Once we left our house in Wisconsin, we were technically homeless until we arrived in Florida, and that is an unsettling feeling to have, even though we knew it to be temporary.    Even if we do not make the move in 2014, we both feel that it be a change that will eventually occur, as we don’t anticipate apartment living for the rest of our lives in Florida.