Where should we retire?

In the next three years or so, we will sell our big house and retire. Probably won't stay here because of the pollution. We would like to live where the air is clean, cost of living isn't outrageous, and the winters are not too cold. Other than that, we are wide open to suggestions? Where do you live? Would you recommend it to others? We are going on the road this summer to check out some possibilities. Thanks for your help!

I am not solicting for the state of Tennesse but we have no income tax, cost of housing is in the lower part of the curve, winters are mild and we have four seasons.

I thought about moving when I retired but I changed my mind recently due to personal events. I am staying where I am at.

Knoxville is in the Tennessee valley and the Tennessee River runs right through it. My deck is only 25 feet from the cool river.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

My wife and I have been down the path you look forward to traveling. I retired at 56, eight years ago.
I could tell you where we now happily reside. I don't believe that's in your best interest(one click and you can find out). Seems you've already established some objectives which you feel to be important. Good start...
Three years or so out? Definitely not too soon to start doing your homework? There is a wealth of information on the internet, you need to do some digging and have a good time in the process. I suggest you use your available time to travel and eyeball places you find of interest. Arrange ahead of time appointments with realtors,Chambers of Commerce, etc. Many people are willing to help, first you must ask.
I wish you the very best on your adventure!
Ole Rouxdog

Some other things to take into consideration when you make a decision to move..especially when it is a major move and change of life-style (retirement qualifies)-- Some will be very important to you and others may not be at this time, but priorities do change over the years.

1. Access to medical services
2. Access to family/friends
3. (new) Community demographics
4. Cost of Living
5. Income possibilities.
6. Climate

We started looking for a retirement location about 3-4 years before I retired. That would have been in 1996 or so, as I retired in 2000. Since we lived in the Southern California High Desert area at the time, we were pretty familiar with the SouthWest as a region.

Basic areas that we examined closely were-
1. Southern Utah (St George-Cedar City)
2. Southern Missouri (Branson area)
3. Bluegrass Kentucky and Southern Indiana
4. Reno-Carson City, NV

For us.. We looked for a location with good medical facilities within an easy drive.Full-Service Hopitals and enough doctors who handle 'senior-citizen' aliments to be sure we could get the treatment we might be needing.

Access to family.- I had moved 'home' to SoCal from Indiana after my divorce and saw my kids on annual summer visits, but we were not close to share the times that happen now and then with them as they grew up. Most of them are within an hour of Louisville at this time. We stayed in SoCal until my step-father passed away and my mother decided she needed to move into an 'independent-living' center(in Oregon). At that point we had no close family on my side, and Janets kids had moved out of SoCal also. That made the decision to move out of SoCal easier for us.

Community Demographics- Is the place you are looking at likely to change in composure in the near future??? We were real serious about looking in Southern Utah for awhile, until we saw that literally thousands of Southern Californians were doing the same thing. The place we had almost purchased in 1998 is now part of a huge developemnt that looks just like what we wanted to escape by leaving the sprawl of SoCal. Is the town you are considering about to get a load of young families, which means lots of schools and parks etc (increasing taxes?). We voted against moving into a Senior-community to find a place with a real mix of ages to keep the place 'alive".

Cost of living speaks for itself. Things like car registration and insurance, Real Estate Taxes, utilities and stuff like that are considerably lower here than they were in SoCal.I will say one thing about retirement income. We do find that our priorities do change over time. Medical and Medicare take a bigger piece of the pie and a lot of the little things that used to consumme some of our income don't seem to be important to us now. Be prepared to deal with changing financial situations and priorities.

Related to that are income considerations. Janet found a nursing job that is paying better than the one she had in SoCal. I teach one class a term at the state college where I worked many years ago. If work is a part of your plan, then be sure that access to it is part of the relocation plan!

We selected the Louisville area for the above reasons... Climate was not a major factor, as I knew what it was like to live here. Obviously it is quite different than the high-desert area, but that difference is not as important to us as some of the other factors were at the time. I did tell Janet that we would give it five years. If at the end of five years she was really unhappy here, we would return to SoCal or somewhere out West. She loves it here, so the issue is settled as far as we are concerned. We did eliminate any locations with really cold winters. I spent 6 years in Upstate New York, and will never live in that environment again !!

OK Those are some of the priorities we used in making our decision. I hope some of them will help you establish your own criteria. The best advice I can give is to discuss EVERYTHING together...and don't do anything in a hurry. Best of Luck. Ask for info if you want it. I am sure there are many others here who have gone thru the decisions you are making and would be willing to contribute their thoughts to this thread.

Way to go Al....
Shortchef, we're all likely to learn a few things from your original question.

Wasn't this the subject of a long discussion recently?

You might enjoy the magazine "Where to Retire". I occasionally even pick it up, myself, cause the articles are interesting. They always show a real happy looking couple on the front page.

It is such a highly personal decision, and Al-the-Mayor gave you some great guidelines to go by.
I'm even printing it out as we speak.

quote:

Originally posted by plb

Wasn't this the subject of a long discussion recently?

Probably

Many discussion tend to repeat in a different format. This one is sorta neat to me as I have wrestled this issue over and over. I am staying where I am at.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

My goal, and thats before I retire, is to move to East Central / Southern Indiana. Don't ask why, other then I love that part of this universe!

quote:

Originally posted by Sundancer7

quote:

Originally posted by plb

Wasn't this the subject of a long discussion recently?

Probably

Many discussion tend to repeat in a different format. This one is sorta neat to me as I have wrestled this issue over and over. I am staying where I am at.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

The one I was thinking of was specifically “Living in “The Carolinas.””

I am staying put. Like Uncle Vic and the Mayor I have a deep affinity for southern Indiana. My GGG Grandfather immigrated to the Kentucky territories circa 1780 and settled where Fort Knox is today. My grandfather moved to Indianapolis in 1909 and owned land all over southern Indiana--most of it forests. I always felt Indiana was in my blood and Brown County was my call. But I have been in Minnesota for 37 years and I go "home" to Indiana and tear up every year when Jim Nabors sings Back Home Again in Indiana prior to the Indy 500. But every year I realize I am less and less a Hoosier and the saying that you can't go back home again holds truth. My culture has changed.

It started 39 years ago after graduating from the University of Cincinnati when I visited Minnesota for the first time and stayed with inlaws on a farm in western Minnesota. They were totally foreign to me. They were characters out of the Fargo movie and I sounded to them from Deliverence. But the Hoosier I was I showed them how to eat a dozen ears of corn in one setting and a friendship was sealed. My wife was born in Minneapolis but grew up in San Francisco and Cleveland, OH. She never lived in Minnesota. We ended our visit with a stay at a lodge on Burntside Lake nearly Ely and the BWCA and a cabin on Lake Superior before my induction into the Navy. That was my brief introduction.

Just before mustering out I found a book in the Newport, RI base library, A Place in the Woods by Helen Hoover. It was a biography about a couple from Chicago that retired to northern Minnesota in the 1950s and lived on Gunflint Lake near the end of the Gunflint Trail. I think that changed my dream. Hoover followed with The Gift of the Deer, The Long Shadowed Forest and The Years in the Forest. Signed, sealed and delivered in my mind.

I don't think you can root me out of here. I know you couldn't root my wife out. Minnesota has its cold and I have accepted it and reveled in it. I love a cold snowy day below zero in temperature and the visits of the deer. I love Spring because it truly Springs from a true winter and not a drizzly, deep cold to the bone winter and the bald eagles return in mass. I love summers with hot days less humid and cool nights and the call of the loon now in the marsh behind our house. I love fall that starts crisply right after Labor Day and ensures Thanksgiving will be warm cocooning time. It is one of the healthiest states, education is tops, cultural institutions are many, it's clean, and the quality of life indexes are always in the upper echelons. I've noticed most studies of places to live seem to always give most of the weight to warm climates that ignore the facts of excessive summer humidity, wild weather, floods, hurricanes, ice storms (rare in Minnesota and much more treacherous than snow) and droughts.

There are drawbacks of course. Mosquitos can be considered the state bird. Oddly though we have been mosquito free this year. If you are not acclimated to the cold you would have a hard time adapting and accepting it. And we now have Northworst Airlines.

With all that said, I am amazed how many think nothing of family, roots, longtime friends, and your basic culture. In my job I have traveled around the country and seen almost all of it and have dealt with people in all regions. Though the country is much more blended today than my young years, there is a regional culture out there that you may be chancing in your move. Our next door neighbors moved to New Zealand two years ago. The wife was the NZ native. The husband was the Minnesotan. They are coming back here to stay permanently despite having what I thought was a paradise home on Waiheke Island off Auckland. Interestingly it was the wife who found you can't go back home again. And believe me, Google Waiheke Island and tell me that is not one of the most awesome places to live on the earth. I was envious of their move.

You can't measure a place on someone else's advice. Everyone is different. I'm not recommending Minnesota. I am recommending thinking about where you are now and how important it may be to you especially if you grew up there, been there for many years or have family there.

PS. My retirement commences at the end of the day tomorrow.

I retired "more or less" in 1993. I have not really found a place that satisfies me all year around. I'm a fresh air nut--much prefer a place I can have the windows open and not be uncomfortable temperature wise. There are lots of "3 season" places I could love--east of the Mississippi, places like western North Carolina, northern Alabama, possible east Tennessee and large parts of New England. But those places all have winters that are too cold for me.

I am also someone who likes a certain urbanity--the food, the buzz, the high culture of the city--so I don't think I'd be happy year round in a small town or rural environment.

There may be one place that would meet all my needs: coastal San Diego within a few miles of the ocean (it gets nasty hot when you go more than about 10 miles inland). But that is one of the most expensive places in the country to move to.

What I have ended up with is to stay where I have lived for 25 years now--downtown San Francisco--which, for about 8 months of the year suits me near perfectly, but also I bought a small, very inexpensive home in southern Arizona near Tucson (it was inexpensive when I bought it--a lot less so now) where I can go at the onset of northern California's dreary, drippy winter. Tucson would, of course, be far too hot for me, though, as a year-round place to live.

So far, this has worked well for me. I am getting a little tired of the biennial drive between NoCal and Tucson, but I am comfortable in both places when I am there and, after a few months in each begin to look forward to returning to the other.

I would cast my vote for Desert Hot Springs, CA. You're on the other side of I-10 where the real estate is less expensive. Climate is blue skies and sunshine every day. Lots of palm trees, hummingbirds, roadrunners and quail. We have two grapefruit trees, an orange tree, a lime tree, a fig tree, kumquat trees, roses and a kapok tree.......along with all the cacti. Just across I-10 is Palm Springs, Palm Desert and Cathedral City, just to name a few. You can have breakfast, lunch and dinner outside nearly every day. I know where we're going when we retire! It's not coming soon enough....I love the desert!!!

It is interesting to read the priorities that folks have..be it climate, family, cost of living etc. I would not presume to debate anyone else's choice of location...We all make those decisions based on whatever we feel is important. AND That's the point!! If you establish "What is important in finding a location (including staying where you are)", you will have made a major step in finding where you will want to go (or not go!)

I love the desert as well.. I had some great friends and "Railfan Buddies" that I would have been real happy to hang out with thru the retirement years, yet I chose to move away from that happy environment. We had set priorities and made compromises that made other locations "higher" on our list.

Don't start you decision making with a set location. Start it with a list of the things that are important to you, keeping in mind the changes that happen to folks as they grow older. If you do that, locations will start to climb or drop on your list of possible choices. I think that the criteria used for the decision-making, rather than the "I will find a reason to like this place" seems to be the smarter way to evaluate anywhere!

I am reminded of the folks here at Roadfood.com who live in their RV, traveling from place to place as their hearts direct. I love to travel and roadtrips are always of interest to me, but I could not live that life-style. That is not intended as anything negative about their choices, It is a simple statement about how I choose to live. We can do a month or more on the road...but then need to "come home" to OUR Home and OUR Yard and trees etc to re-attach ourselves to OUR "Place". After a few weeks, I am ready to head out again...but I need that "place to call Home". That is simply part of my life.
BT and Lisa have compromised on that sort of decision about location. By having two homes, and spending time at both each year, they satisfy their desires for variety and change while still having "a home". It works well for them. There are always ways to compromise that will help 'balance' a decision.
I enjoy reading about how all of you have made these decisons (or will be making them). It helps me understand how different we are as "people".

How about the Coast of Carolina?You can buy my Restaurant and then I can retire.

Even though I am only 44, I am already thinking about this subject matter. Whenever I go on these trips, I am definitely doing it with that idea in mind. Having said that, my leading candidate is upstate South Carolina, which I dearly love. Of course, if I ever get married, this will not be my decision alone.

Congratulations Davydd! Hope you have a long line of tenderloins ahead of you. :)

quote:

Originally posted by lleechef

I would cast my vote for Desert Hot Springs, CA. You're on the other side of I-10 where the real estate is less expensive. Climate is blue skies and sunshine every day. Lots of palm trees, hummingbirds, roadrunners and quail. We have two grapefruit trees, an orange tree, a lime tree, a fig tree, kumquat trees, roses and a kapok tree.......along with all the cacti. Just across I-10 is Palm Springs, Palm Desert and Cathedral City, just to name a few. You can have breakfast, lunch and dinner outside nearly every day. I know where we're going when we retire! It's not coming soon enough....I love the desert!!!

What you describe--the palm trees, hummingbirds, roadrunners, quail, citrus trees, cacti and roses all sound remarkably like my neighborhood near Tucson. While we do lack the Palm Springs bling, we have the University of Arizona (and its thousands of students) to provide excitement. And we also have much lower taxes than CA--both income and property. The top state income tax rate is around 4% and some pension income is excluded unlike CA. I pay about $700 in property taxes (but that'll probably go up $100 or $200 this year as the assessor catches up to recent "bubble" prices of homes). Frankly, the whole attitude toward taxation is different in AZ than in CA--they try hard to keep it low at the expense of their educational system and much else--which I might feel differently about if I had kids in school and so forth, but we are talking about a place to retire here.

Might as well offer a few pics:

From the street--before I bought it
[img]http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b6d927b3127cce8afa93966f2a00000016100Acsmblw0ZsmLA[/img]

My rosa banksia
[img]http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b6d927b3127cce8afab872ae7300000025110Acsmblw0ZsmLA[/img]

Back patio
[img]http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b6d927b3127cce8afab87f2f4e00000016100Acsmblw0ZsmLA[/img]
[img]http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b6d927b3127cce8afab8572f6600000016100Acsmblw0ZsmLA[/img]

The Santa Rita Range (over a golf course)
[img]http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b6d933b3127cce8a881dfa454600000016100Acsmblw0ZsmLA[/img]

2-1/2 more hours and one of those hours is a fun get together with staff.

We will have more time for using our kayaks, our pontoon boat and our camper van. In lieu of the 50 some business flights all over the country I have taken in the past year I will now have to make up for with the camper van. We have a good start already with 13,000+ miles on it in 1-1/2 years. Next up the Indianapolis Brickyard 400 NASCAR race at the end of July and then maybe Texas and New Mexico swing through this October. My mind is now on driving up to Alaska maybe next year. We might take an Alaskan practice start to Banff and Jasper in late August. So many places to go...but the Mayor is right, it is always nice to come home. Many of the places you think you might want to retire to may be better just to visit.

Like Sundancer, we retired in place. We still live in the house we have lived in
since 1965. Our ties to this Village are too strong for us to casually move to some other place, and our youngest son and his children live within a five minute drive from our house. I hate the snow and cold weather, but Gail loves winter, so we compromise and flee this place for about six weeks for warmer places in January and February.

A few magnificent days each year in Spring and Fall are enough to keep us here in the Hudson Valley and to allow us to forget the heat and humidity of our Summers and the ice snow and bitter cold of our Winters.

I have to admit we never made specific plans for our retirement; we vaguely thought we would travel a lot - we still travel, but not nearly to the extent we thought we would . We never made any particular consideration of medical care - our doctors come and go, but we do have several top notch hospitals in the area. Neither of us do any remunerative work since retirement, but I keep up my interest in local politics and Gail works on several local improvement committees.

One thing you need to know when you retire is that your life will revolve around doctors, druggists, and other health care people to a far greater extent than you might want to think. Thank s to Social Security and Medicare and a strong Union health plan that followed us into retirement we remain quite secure.

Another is, keeping up your house becomes an increasing burden as you age - I cant do the maintenence work I used to do ( no laddars for me). Real property taxes increase every year, competent handymen become more and more scarce, and expensive, yet, our income, thank s to luck , has more or less kept up with the needs of our house , but we know that the day is not too far off when we will have to sell out and move to some sort of arrangement where all of those problems are taken care of by someone else (except , of course, the matter of income).

And, one more thing, I dont think I've ever seen a couple happier in retirement than our friends, Al The Mayor Bowen and his lovely wife, Janet .

Cheers, John

quote:

Originally posted by seafarer john
Another is, keeping up your house becomes an increasing burden as you age - I cant do the maintenence work I used to do ( no laddars for me). Real property taxes increase every year, competent handymen become more and more scarce, and expensive, yet, our income, thank s to luck , has more or less kept up with the needs of our house , but we know that the day is not too far off when we will have to sell out and move to some sort of arrangement where all of those problems are taken care of by someone else (except , of course, the matter of income).

This can be another advantage of the Southwest. Whatever you think of the immigration situation, it has led to the availability in places like Arizona and parts of Southern CA, New Mexico and Texas of plenty of skilled workers willing to do "handyman" type home repairs for very reasonable amounts. Just by way of example, my Tucson house has what they call a "foam" roof which needs to be recoated with an "elastomeric" coating every 5 years or so (this coating is highly reflective of sunlight and heat--up to 98% gets reflected). 5 years ago I did the job myself for nearly $800, just for the materials. This spring, I found a workman who has a good reputation among my neighbors to redo it and he charged me $900 including materials. Considering that doing it involved scrubbing down the entire roof with an industrial cleaner, hoisting 5-gallon containers of the coating material onto the roof and spreading 2 coats of the stuff (it's like thick paint), I think what amounted to $100 to do the work was the bargain of the century, but it's typical for the area.

Before making your final decision...visit Oxford, Mississippi. Have some ice cream on the balcony of Square Books, eat catfish at the Old Taylor Grocery, picnic in the Grove on game day and see what you think. Oxford is my husband's ultimate destination and you might be surprised that it's yours, too.

Thank You John, your kind words are appreciated.

I don't know how to say this without sounding really "out of it", but I could never have retired when I did without the support of my companion and wife. We talked about the money, the location, the timing and the other meaningful events connected with this major decision. I could have stayed on, doing what I was doing and socking away the max allowed by law for retirement. However by leaving when I did, I have enjoyed the freedom of movement that I had at 57, that I find a bit more difficult now at 65... and will find even more difficult in another decade or so. I don't think I would have been able to work out all the necessary details of the retirement without her sharing the 'thinking' as we worked out our plan.

quote:

Originally posted by lostnthemail

Before making your final decision...visit Oxford, Mississippi. Have some ice cream on the balcony of Square Books, eat catfish at the Old Taylor Grocery, picnic in the Grove on game day and see what you think. Oxford is my husband's ultimate destination and you might be surprised that it's yours, too.

I just got back from Oxford, MS a couple of days ago. A beautiful quaint town that is totally college orientated. A nice place, remote but reasonally close to Memphis if you want to hang out.

I was also in Starkville, MS. It was OK but not as neat as Oxford.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

quote:

Originally posted by Davydd



PS. My retirement commences at the end of the day tomorrow.

Congrats, Davydd! Hope you don't get bored hunting down all those BPTS's. Doubt you will!

So'd they give you a golden watch or just the golden boot?!

DD

quote:

Originally posted by desertdog

quote:

Originally posted by Davydd



PS. My retirement commences at the end of the day tomorrow.

Congrats, Davydd! Hope you don't get bored hunting down all those BPTS's. Doubt you will!

So'd they give you a golden watch or just the golden boot?!

DD

No gold watch but a really cruel present on this day--an Apple gift card. I almost wanted to bolt my retirement party and go stand in line for an iPhone but then I remembered I am still tethered to a year and a half with a Verizon Wireless cell phone contract.

quote:

Originally posted by buffetbuster

Even though I am only 44, I am already thinking about this subject matter. Whenever I go on these trips, I am definitely doing it with that idea in mind. Having said that, my leading candidate is upstate South Carolina, which I dearly love. Of course, if I ever get married, this will not be my decision alone.

Hey, wanna get married?!?

We can compromise with coastal South Carolina. (Myrtle Beach okay with you?)

I haven't lived in one place for longer than 8 years and I don't plan on starting now! As much as I like Alaska, I also like the desert, the East Coast, the Midwest, Europe, North Africa, the UK and Asia. Retirement for me is going to be one gigantic field trip!

I'd like to introduce y'all to a place just down the road from Al-The-Mayor.

http://www.visitbgky.com/

I can't talk enough about how much I love Bowling Green, KY. I moved here in 1993 from New Jersey and it only took me about a year to totally love the place. The taxes are minuscule, the cost of living is cheap, the schools are the best in the state, and the people here are all painfully nice.

Come visit!

Sundancer,

I'm less than 25 minutes from Starkville.....but I'd take Oxford (2 hours away)any day over S'ville. That maroon & white just bothers me.

Hotty Toddy!
Darlene