Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
Note: Coincidence or not, one of Topretirements' Best Places to Retire lists was picked up as a feature on January 26 by both TheStreet.com and MSN.com ("Best U.S. Cities to Retire in"). We are definitely honored!
January 20, 2018 -- How many "best places to retire" lists have you come across this month? We know we've seen plenty, in fact our son even forwards them to us. The big question about the never ending barrage of lists is, are they worth reading? Here we will explore the somewhat wild and crazy of best places lists, a topic we hope you will find interesting.
#1 - There is no limit to how specialized these lists can get
Thanks to a Denver Post article we learned a whole lot of new ways to tackle the "best places" list game. Consider some of these candidates
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Published on January 19, 2018
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
Part 2: Is the West Shore the Best Shore? (See Link to Part 1, the East, at end of article)
By Flo Williamson
January 8, 2017 -- There are many folks that claim the West Shore of Lake Tahoe and areas north offer the best living on the lake. The hardest part in visiting the West Shore is actually getting there, especially heading north along the lake from South Lake Tahoe.
West shore Lake Tahoe
While the areas just north of South Lake Tahoe have some of the best beaches and great state parks, it is also the route for some of Lake Tahoe’s greatest tourist attractions. In fact, this part of the lake in particular is generally much more oriented towards tourists than it is retirees. Camp Richardson is a government run campground, RV park, marina, restaurant, and more, catering to lake visitors. With 300 camping and RV sites and more cabin accommodations, the resulting traffic along this stretch of the one road around the lake can be horrendous, especially during the summer. Then, as you continue north, the road rises hundreds of feet above the lake with hairpin curves (and no guardrails) that seem like they’re ending in the lake itself - not for the faint hearted!! This leads us to Emerald Bay, one of the most beautiful and photographed bays in the world and the starting point of numerous hikes and
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Published on January 7, 2018
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
January 3, 2018 — Many people are intrigued with the idea of retirement to one of America’s oldest communities - Santa Fe, New Mexico. They are attracted by the beautiful mountains, the dry air, the charming old architecture, and the abundance of art. In this article we will discuss our recent retirement scouting trip to Santa Fe - what we learned about retiring there along with its pluses and minuses. We also hope that our Members who are familiar with the area can give their opinions and advice too.
Spanish explorers came to this mountainous area in northwest New Mexico and were followed by mssionaries in search of souls - the native Americans, the Pueblo people. These native Americans visited the area in search of game for thousands of years, then a few hundred years before Columbus discovered America settled here to farm and live in cliff dwellings and pueblos. Spanish settlers arrived about 1600 and in 1610 Santa Fe became the capital of the territory, the oldest State Capitol in the U.S. They built its charming downtown with a central plaza in the Spanish style. There you can find the Palace of the Governors, St. Francis Cathedral, several very old churches, and an
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Published on January 2, 2018
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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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