Lifestyle

She and Her Husband Loved Their 55+ Community for 8 1/2 Years. At 61, She Explains Why They Sold Anyway: “We’re Moving to a Condo”

By Mike Harper · November 10, 2026

The house was not even on the market when the offer came in.

Karen, who runs the YouTube channel I Go By Karen Life (@IGoByKarenLife) for women over 50, says she and her husband had listed their Arizona home once before and pulled it when it did not sell. They were happy to stay. Then, on the last day of a vacation in July, an agent called to say there were buyers interested in the house. Right after they got home, a second agent called with buyers who wanted to see it the next morning. Those buyers made an offer that night, and the couple took it.

“My name is Karen. I’m 61 years old,” she says in a video posted in September. “We didn’t move here thinking after eight and a half years we’re going to move. Not at all. Our lives changed.”

The first chapter was a happy one. She says that after years of working around the clock in Colorado, she sold her real estate brokerage at 53, and the couple moved back to Arizona, where they had met and where their daughter was born. They chose a community built for people their age because, as she explains it, they no longer had jobs or school-age kids to help them meet neighbors. Her section of the neighborhood is not officially age-restricted, she says, but nearly everyone there is in that age group. “We met more people and made more friends in one year here than we did in 15 years in Colorado,” she says.

She explains the rest in her full video on YouTube.

Over time, the couple’s lives moved outside the gates. Their only child, now 26, took a job in the Phoenix area and bought a house. Karen started going to gyms five or six days a week, and because of where they lived, she says she had to leave an hour before each class. “I want to quit driving. I want to start living,” she says.

She also says she burned out on volunteering. She started and led many of the community’s clubs, and she describes a few people making the work hard, while stressing that most neighbors were super nice.

The bigger reason was what they saw around them. Karen says they have watched friends age, seen spouses spend hours driving each other to doctors who are not close by, and seen neighbors stop driving at night on the dark road out to the community. She says ride-hailing drivers usually cancel once they see where they are headed. She and her husband, Mason, asked each other what would happen if that were them. “We don’t want to have to wait until that happens to have to move,” she says.

Mason had his own reason. “I’m tired of being married to a house,” he told her, as she tells it.

So they bought a top-floor condo closer in, with no yard, a short drive to her gyms and stores she can walk to. They have downsized before, she says, from about 4,500 square feet to about 2,700, and the condo is smaller still. “We are moving to something we never thought we would do. We’re moving to a condo,” she says.

She is clear that this is not a knock on 55+ living. She says she is not against those communities and would simply go into one knowing a lot more. Mason, she says, often puts it this way: “If we could just move this neighborhood, like, even 20 minutes closer in, we’d probably stay here.”

What counts as a 55+ community also varies. Under the federal Fair Housing Act rules for housing for older persons, a community that claims the 55-and-older exemption must have at least 80 percent of its occupied units occupied by at least one person 55 or older. That leaves room for younger residents, and each community sets its own rules beyond that.

If you are thinking about where you will live for the next 10 or 20 years, Karen’s story raises a few questions worth asking:

How far is the drive to doctors, a hospital, groceries and the people you see most?

Could you get around if you, or your spouse, stopped driving at night or stopped driving altogether?

How much yard and home upkeep do you still want to do?

Does the community’s age rule and club life fit the way you live now, rather than the way you lived when you moved in?

“We are not running from a house or a community that we hated,” Karen says. They are simply moving toward the life they want next.

This article is for general information and reflects the creator’s own account of her experience. It is not real estate or legal advice. The pool photo is illustrative and does not show Karen’s community. This article was produced with the assistance of AI and fact-checked against the sources cited by LightWave Reports.