Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
Editor's Note: Back in September we published our "10 Best Places to Retire in South Carolina" article. Its very first Comment was from Judith. She wrote that she was about to leave on a 2 week tour, and even promised to write up a report of her travels. She lived up to her promise (Thanks Judith!), and here is her report. Note that we have added a few comments from other Topretirements members at the bottom of some of the cities to try to give even more dimension. We just love these in-person reports - nothing better!
By Judith
October 30, 2016 -- I did a two week tour of South Carolina from Sept. 21 to Oct. 6, and it’s taken me two more weeks to get on top of all my home chores after such a long absence. Laundry, email, you know. But it’s a quiet Saturday morning now, and I have time to put down my thoughts, for those who asked.
Travelers Rest: I entered the state of South Carolina on the freeway from Asheville, NC, which allowed me to pass through Travelers Rest. I was
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Published on October 30, 2016
Comments 45
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
September 20, 2016 -- So maybe you have been thinking about retiring in The Palmetto State - but wondering where are the best places to retire in South Carolina. Here is our 10 Best Places list, formed from 10 years of experience in evaluating places to retire across the world.
As always, it is important to recognize that this is our list with our criteria - your ideal list of SC places to retire might not be the same. Here are our criteria:
- High "Popularity" ranking on our annual "100 Most Popular Places to Retire" list
- Be an interesting place to live in retirement - is it pretty, have an interesting history, or have a vital downtown?
- Things to do there - are there a lot of activities, restaurants, or cultural resources?
- How about places to live - are there different neighborhoods or communities suitable for a retirement lifestyle?
Should you retire in South Carolina
SC is increasingly a popular choice for retirement, and for many good reasons:
- Mild winter climate
- Varied places to live - from beautiful beaches to lakes to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Charming little towns and some interesting mid-sized cities
- Lower cost of living and taxes. South Carolina is a very tax-friendly state with the 9th lowest tax burden in 2011 according to the Tax Foundation. Social Security is not taxable, and people over 65 enjoy favorable tax status (see our Guide to Retiring in South Carolina).
Our Top 10
Here is our list. All of them made our annual Top 100 list - 6 of them were in the top half (ranking on that list shown in parentheses). Most of these towns have at least 10 active adult or 55+ communities to choose from. To see all of them check out our SC 55+ and Active Adult Community Guide.
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Published on September 19, 2016
Comments 46
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
August 17, 2016 -- Note: We are pleased that MarketWatch published a version of this story on their site with beautiful photos - "10 Prettiest Places to Retire".
Talk about job for King Solomon, how could anyone judge the 10 prettiest retirement towns in America? There are just so many pretty towns, so many different ways to judge beauty - the task is impossible. That said, we are still going to make a good effort in this article to list some incredibly beautiful towns that make good places to retire. In fact we have 2 lists for you: 10 towns that we selected on our own and using some research from CNTraveler, plus 12 more that came in as great suggestions from your fellow Topretirements members. We welcome more
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Published on August 16, 2016
Comments 33
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
August 3, 2016 -- Sometimes you visit a possible retirement town that is just so darn pretty you can't stand it. Edenton, North Carolina is one of those.
Here is where you can find our more detailed review of Edenton. But it proved to be such a charming place to retire on a recent visit that we wanted to give you more of a description and photos too.
Where it is
Edenton is in northeastern North Carolina, about an
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Published on August 3, 2016
Comments 47
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
June 22, 2016 -- Most everybody has a drop dead requirement for their best place to retire. For book lovers, that can mean living in a town where there is an interesting bookstore. Sure you can buy books online at Amazon, but for many there is no substitute for being able to settle down in a comfy store where the staff knows their books, and the selections carefully vetted. In this article Lucy Burdette and her best-selling writer friends at JungleRedWriters.com review their favorite bookstore towns. As writers touring the country to give book talks and signings, they know book shops!
As we hoped, most of these towns are great places to retire - and not just because of their wonderful bookstores. The kind of town that cultivates and supports a good book shop is a place that has many other things going on too - good restaurants, shops, cultural events, interesting
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Published on June 21, 2016
Comments 32
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
June 1, 2016 -- Easy walkability to town, parks and lakes, and shopping were top considerations for retirement living when we surveyed our members 3 years ago. To help you find places that meet that criteria we have identified 10 Florida towns where it is easy and a joy to walk around in.
Some people's vision of a Sunshine State retirement conjures up a bleak landscape of strip malls and busy highways. The reality is that Florida also has some of the most livable towns in America. Towns where you can live downtown or close to it, and walk to everything that is important to you, day or night. In fact, in most of these Florida towns the walking is so good that you could even survive without a car.
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Published on June 1, 2016
Comments 35
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
May 24, 2016 -- Does the idea of retiring to a small town seem nice, but just a little too confining? Or do the bright city lights get you excited - until you realize the urban pace might be too big, too intense, too congested, too expensive for a retirement lifestyle? If you are torn between the two, perhaps you should consider a small city, where you can experience the best of both worlds - retirement on a smaller, more livable scale, along with plenty of excitement, restaurants, and happenings to enjoy.
To produce this article we searched for smaller cities that are perfect for retirement. We tried to avoid places that get mentioned over and over again, or that are more popular as tourist destinations than as a place to live in retirement. Our criteria were relatively simple:
- City population between 100,000 - 250,000 (our definition, and hard to measure precisely)
- A distinct city center that is bustling day and night
- Advantage given to towns located in the Sunbelt or slightly warmer climates, since most retirees have that preference
- Not prohibitively expensive
11 Great Small Cities for Retirement
Here is what we came up with, using popularity figures
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Published on May 23, 2016
Comments 199
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
May 9, 2016 -- The nation’s 77 million baby boomers face a life-changing decision - finding a place to live once they retire. Making a good choice involves many considerations, but the most critical is to select a place that helps them fit in and feel welcome quickly. After all, moving is never easy, and neither is making friends and social contacts from scratch. Fortunately this new list, “10 Friendliest Places to Retire”, can help.
The ten towns on this “Friendliest” list that made the final cut have one major thing in common: they are in fast growing areas that attract
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Published on May 9, 2016
Comments 79
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
April 11, 2016 -- We love hearing stories from real people about their adventures in finding the perfect place to retire. So we were very fortunate recently to get an in depth interview from 2 old friends, Sandy and Ann, who shared their retirement search adventures. We hope you will find it interesting and instructive. (Don't miss the Further Reading section at the end - over the years we have interviewed a whole lot of people about their retirement search experiences - and the links to those stories are all there!)
Prior to retirement the pair lived in a comfortable New York suburb, from which they commuted to successful careers in the Big Apple. Their enviable lifestyle included frequent ski trips to Vermont in winter and a busy social life at a country club the rest of the year. But when it came time for retirement, both were interested in a change of scenery. They agreed on two main motivations: to have easier access to outdoor recreation opportunities like hiking, biking, and skiing; and to escape New York's expensive cost of living and real estate taxes.
Looking down south
Like so many others, they were faced with a big
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Published on April 11, 2016
Comments 30
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
April 6, 2016 -- Are any of the Best States to Retire" lists you see so frequently worth the few minutes it takes you to read them? That is a pretty good question, since A: there are so many to read, and B: they seem to contradict themselves more than they agree. This article will illustrate the many ways that 2 recent lists differ from one another, along with the few ways they coincide. We will also see how these lists best and worst selections compare with the last 2 editions of Topretirements "Best (and Worst) States" lists. All of which has us shaking our heads at the general lack of agreement!
Every time we publish one of these types of lists we can count on a few readers taking a shot at why we picked this or that place, or why we didn't include yet another. That is understandable, as even when objective criteria are used to make the
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Published on April 5, 2016
Comments 38
