Our age was also a factor. Barbara is 68 and I am 70. We are active members of our bowls club, still are, and over the past few years we have had a number of members who have made the move when they were closer to 80. Without exception, they all say they should have done it years ago.

Tom: "I turned 70 and I thought to myself, ‘I don't want to do this anymore,' meaning the house and the obligations you let yourself get caught up in. My older sister is over 80, and she said ‘go and do things, anything, while you can.' And that is what we have done."

"We were tied down a bit to our own house; it was pretty big and we rattled around. When you thought about it we lived in four rooms - the kitchen, the family room, the bedroom and the study - and that's what we have here. In fact, we have three bedrooms and a motel down the road for the ‘bludging rellies' - just joking."

"Barbara took great pride in the yard, but it tied us down. We like the idea of being able to just hop in the car and go for three days and then just expand it to a week. We can here; we just tell Ron the caretaker and he picks up the mail for us. So it's a lifestyle thing for us, moving to a village."

"Our age was also a factor. Barbara is 68 and I am 70. We are active members of our bowls club, still are, and over the past few years we have had a number of members who have made the move when they were closer to 80. Without exception, they all say they should have done it years ago."

Barbara: "It's a very different decision to, say, buying a holiday home where if it doesn't work you can just sell it. Here you want it to work. We looked at a lot of villages but when we drove in these gates we both just thought, ‘this is nice.' The setting was good, it's newish and the unit is a really good set-up."

"It has everything we need; it is enough space without being too big. It's just over 12 squares and with the garage it's 16.5 squares. We remember our first house was just 10 squares and that was considered the normal size then!"

"We thought the move would be bad; we hadn't ‘downsized' in 26 years! Luckily, the person who bought our house bought a lot of stuff, and the kids took a lot, but so did Cash Converters and Lifeline. After one week here I was ready to get rid of some more. You just don't need it."

Tom: "We looked at the financials very closely. The best I can work out there are five models of contract for villages and in the end they all work out about the same over five to 10 years. One way or the other, it's going to cost you. But what you are paying for is convenience, for other people to do things for you. At the end of the day, what are you going to do with it [the money] anyway? And this is like a resort - we feel that we are on a permanent holiday... a busy holiday. We have been to bowls three days this week."

"What you are paying for is convenience, for other people to do things for you."