When one golf home just won’t do…

        You have worked hard all your life and looked forward to a retirement of leisure and year-round golf. You don’t deserve the stress of having to choose between your dreams and your family, and yet many baby boomers face just that same huge lifestyle decision as they retire: Do they leave behind their kids and grandkids, or do they stay up North, resolved to put up with the cold winters, annoying traffic and higher costs of living?

        I’ve been giving this conundrum some thought lately since friends are facing this decision now, and yours truly

and his wife will be staring it in the face in a couple of years. In the next edition of Home On The Course, our free monthly newsletter, I set out to see if, in the wake of the housing recession, there might be some reasonable two-home solutions to the dilemma; that is, for what you might pay for one very nice home in a southern golf community, could we find two nice golf community homes that would put retiring baby boomers close to kids and grandkids for at least half the year and in a warm-weather climate for the late fall and winter months?

        Although a few compromises might be necessary -– one of the two golf homes almost surely will be a condominium or “cottage” in order to keep costs down -– we found it possible to purchase two homes for less than $500,000 and, in some cases, considerably less. For our main example, we chose the well-regarded Reynolds Plantation in Georgia and Owl’s Nest in New Hampshire (no-income tax state, by the way), both with outstanding golf courses, including six inside the gates of Reynolds Plantation. We also include 18 other examples of golf communities with homes ranging from $70,000 to the high $200s that can be mixed and matched for a North/South combination as low as $180,000. We could add thousands more examples east of the Mississippi alone.

        We will mail the July edition of the newsletter later this week, so please sign up today by clicking here. If, in the meantime, you want assistance in identifying one or two golf homes that match your requirements, please contact us at your convenience and we will get to work in your behalf.

It is possible, for under $500,000, to enjoy a golf and lake lifestyle at Georgia's Reynolds Plantation (top) and a mountain and golf lifestyle at New Hampshire's Owl's Nest.