You have retirement living choices when deciding where to retire. You can decide to stay in place, purchase a second home, or move your primary residence to another city or state. There is no easy or correct answer for WHERE to live in retirement. You have your own dreams, desires, needs, and responsibilities when deciding what’s right for you. This information will help you evaluate your options for the decisions you need to make.
Three Choices For You To Consider
1. Staying Put
The most inexpensive, least disruptive, and easiest decision you can make is to continue living where you already live. There are numerous positive reasons why this is the best choice for many retirees. You may not want to start over navigating a new area of the country and building new relationships.
While this might be the easy answer, you need to recognize that your house may still require some major and extensive structural accommodation to meet your needs as you age in place. You may find it easier to stay in the same area and move to a home that already accommodates aging in place and avoid going through renovations.
2. Relocating After Retirement
For another group of retirees, there may be just as many reasons to “get out of town.” In many ways, the rationale can be the flip side of your decision to stay in place. You may relocate to be near your adult children, grandchildren, or aging parents. You might just want a slower pace of life or to lower your cost-of-living.
Some people choose to relocate to specific destinations like the mountains, the beach, the desert, small towns, college towns, or historical destinations. You may simply want to move to get away from all the traffic or to embrace an urban or suburban lifestyle. Increasingly, baby boomers want the adventure of starting over in a new locale and creating a new way of life for themselves. There is no right or wrong reason for moving. It’s a matter of personal preferences and needs/wants. Most important is the need to communicate your needs and preferences with your partner and those who will be impacted by your decisions. If you are single, make sure you are sharing your ideas and plans with family and friends even though the final decision is yours.
3. Purchasing A Second Home
There is another alternative to the concept of WHERE to live in retirement. Perhaps it can be defined as having your cake and eating it too. This concept involves purchasing a second home that you live in during certain times of the year while maintaining your present residence. If you currently live in a colder climate, you may want to explore a second home in a warmer climate. If you are currently living in a warm climate, you may decide to find a second home in an area where there are milder summers to escape the heat and humidity, while at the same time enjoy the bonus of being closer to family and friends.
If your budget permits, this can prove to be the very best of both worlds. This is the decision my husband and I made while exploring our retirement living choices.
We love where we live in northern Virginia and can’t imagine giving it up on a permanent basis. We both have large families and close friends we want to stay connected to. We bought our condo in Tampa after much research and exploration regarding various lifestyle needs. We wanted the area we chose to be in a warm climate no more than 15-20 minutes from the airport, to provide good medical care close by, and to offer cultural stimulation and entertainment of all kinds. We really wanted an escape from the winter weather. Buying our second home in Tampa on Florida’s west coast has been great for us.
My book—Where Will You Retire? A Retirement Guide And Exercises For Deciding Where To Retire, Buy A Second Home, Or Relocate*—is full of discussion starters and exercises designed to help you narrow down your retirement living choices. You can also use these 7 tips as you consider retirement locations.
Here’s to making great retirement living choices!
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