Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
December 13, 2017 -- How about this for a rhetorical question: would you like to retire in a boring place? Of course not, why would anyone choose an uninteresting place to retire. Unfortunately, many people are lazy about their decision about where to retire. The result: they end up living in a place with a lot less day to day zip than they could have had. This article will give you our ideas on the 8 most interesting places to retire in the USA, by region. We hope you will contribute your suggestions in the Comments section at the end of the article.
What makes an interesting place to retire?
Everyone probably has a different idea about what makes a town or city interesting. While a beautiful town is a great attribute in a place to retire, that is only one thing that might make it interesting. Here are some of our possibilities for what make might make
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Published on December 12, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
Part One: A Tale of Some (Very Different) Cities at Tahoe
By Flo Williamson
Beautiful Lake Tahoe is a wonderful retirement destination for well-heeled retirees who love all things outdoors. Nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains about 50 miles south of Reno, NV, this famous vacation resort area offers recreational activities and more. Lake Tahoe is about 11 miles wide and 21 miles long running north to south. The eastern third is in Nevada, with the western two thirds in California. Starting at the upper eastern portion of the lake in Nevada, we’ll take a look at the
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Published on December 2, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
November 5, 2017 -- There is a certain kind of person for whom a great place to retire means being right in the thick of it. Not stuck out of town in an active community, where every trip to anything beyond the clubhouse or golf course means climbing in your car. Nor the suburbs or a distant lake, which have the same transportation problems. For the kind of person we are thinking of, the perfect place to retire is one where your home is a comfortable walk, bike, or transit away from a vital downtown teeming with restaurants, shops, and cultural opportunities. We've reported on the best walkable places to retire before (see Further Reading below); here are ten more excellent places to consider.
Just about any big city has some wonderful neighborhoods where you can enjoy the urban experience. The same goes for very small towns. In this selection of 10 towns with great downtowns we concentrate on finding smaller cities for retirement, usually somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 people. We've chosen places with interesting downtowns where there is a lot to do, and that feature nice neighborhoods with easy access to all these
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Published on November 5, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
October 25, 2017 -- For the person looking for a urban retirement on a small scale, it is hard to come up with a better choice than Greenville, South Carolina. It has parks and a downtown that attracts people every day of the week, including Sunday morning. There are plenty of housing opportunities downtown that let you walk to just about anything you might need. There is an ever expanding bike path that runs through the heart of the downtown and 8 miles up the road - through the Furman University campus and on to Travelers Rest, SC. The cultural scene is hectic with frequent festivals, multiple events, and an array of cultural resources.
This fast growing town in northwest South Carolina has 68,000 citizens in the city proper, while the larger MSA area including Spartanburg approaches 1 million. The downtown has been the subject of intense and successful redevelopment efforts. Those have paid off, as the city won Great American Main Street awards from the
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Published on October 24, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
October 11, 2017 — We wanted to alert you that our very popular series on finding Affordable Places to Retire on the Coast (Part 2) has been updated. Real estate prices for all 10 ten towns have been updated (almost all went up since the list was created in…
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Published on October 11, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
September 19, 2017 -- The triple whammy from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria are causing a lot of people to reconsider where they retire. Some previous best places to retire might end up on the worst places to retire lists instead! But hurricanes are not the only natural disaster that can ruin your retirement - temperature extremes, earthquakes, tornadoes, forest fires, and flooding can be devastating too. Now, as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise to the highest levels in the history of the planet, our ice caps melt and sea levels rise, the dangers to where you decide from natural disasters are important considerations. it might be just as critical as cost of living, taxes, culture, climate, proximity of friends and family, and recreational opportunities.
In this article we will first talk about the kinds of weather and natural
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Published on September 19, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
August 8, 2017 -- Would this checklist for a great place to retire work for you?
- All public buildings have world class modern architecture - Triple check!
- Plenty of parks and open spaces - double check!
- Community-minded town with extremely active library, senior center, recreation - triple check!
- Public art is all around - check!
- Home prices must be below national median - check!
- Walkable, interesting downtown - check!
We are talking about the fascinating town of Columbus, Indiana - just south of Indianapolis with a population of 45,000. On our recent two day visit your Topretirments editor was blown away by what a great place to live and retire this is. Yet when we mention it to people of no little sophistication, they say, Columbus....Indiana .... never heard of it. This is your opportunity to learn more.
It all started
Columbus is known for being the home of Cummins, Inc., the Fortune 500 corporation started in 1919 that designs, manufactures, and
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Published on August 8, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
July 27, 2017 – For the first time since Topretirements began running our annual list of America's 100 most popular places to retire we have a winner from the west. In fact, we have two. Green Valley, Arizona took over the top spot from last year's winner, Sarasota, Florida. Hitting #2 on our list is another town from Arizona, the former cowboy town of Prescott, north of Phoenix.
Green Valley is a sprawling area south of Tucson near the border with Mexico. It covers a vast area with all kinds of communities and developments - in fact it has 59 different home owner associations. Retirees like its relatively low cost of living, warm winter climate, the nearby Santa Rita Mountains, and the extensive non-profit Green Valley recreation complex. Mountains near Green Valley
In gaining the #1 spot on our list, Green Valley was viewed over 12,000 times
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Published on July 26, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
July 17 — In this article we will highlight our experiences and impressions from a recent trip to the Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater area. We hope you find it useful.
All 3 cities on gigantic Tampa Bay are located on Florida’s West Coast, about half way down from FL's northern border. For comparison, Orlando is located inland to the northeast, while Melbourne is parallel on the East coast. There are also a number of smaller towns in the area, a few of which we will talk about here. The area has a warm Florida climate influenced by its proximity to the Gulf, although it is not quite as warm in winter as towns further south like Naples or Miami. The area is densely populated. Traffic, particularly in the winter season and summer, can be quite intense.
Boats anchored in the Vinoy yacht basin marina, St.Pete.
St. Petersburg has, in our opinion, the best opportunities for retirement in this group. There is a compact urban center that is attractive and walkable. All
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Published on July 17, 2017
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
July 11, 2017 -- In this installment of our "Dueling Retirement States" we compare and analyze retirement in the states that we will call the mid-South: Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. See Further Reading at bottom for links to the other regional comparisons in our series, such as The Carolinas, Gulf States, and Florida vs. Arizona.
These states can provide many different retirement lifestyles. They have mountains, lakes, cities, and small towns. Beyond that, they offer some of the most inexpensive living situations available in the U.S. Your retirement dollar can definitely go farther here, especially with their generally tax-friendly reputations. Winters in these states are much milder than in the most of the rest of the country, with a climate that is amenable to an active retirement year round. They are also generally uncrowded and less congested than many other retirement locations.
In this article we will compare and contrast these four southern states:
Alabama,
Georgia
Kentucky,
Tennessee
(links go to our mini-retirement guides to each state). Population and income data is from American Fact Finder-U.S. Census Bureau.
A Few Facts
Georgia is the largest state by population and also the youngest and most affluent. In 2015 there were an estimated 4.9 million people in Alabama, 10.3 million in Georgia, 4.4 million in Kentucky, and 6.6 million in Tennessee.
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Published on July 11, 2017
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