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Best Places to Retire and Where to Retire - Books and Resources
Finding the best place to retire can be a difficult process. It seems there are newspaper and magazine articles coming out nearly every week touting a new city as the best place to retire. When determining where to retire, it's important to keep a few things in mind. First, and most importantly, there is no one "best place to retire". Nearly everyone will have a different set of criteria and ranking of priorities that factor into the retirement relocation decision. For some, it may be warm weather, golf, and many planned activities, while for others it may be proximity to grandchildren and nearby colleges or universities. For others, the best retirement city may be in a state that has low taxes.
So, when considering where to retire, we suggest not treating the process as being a right or wrong choice, or of having to make a choice that is consistent with someone else's pick of the number 1 place to retire. Similarly, cities that are not in a list of top ten places to retire should not be rejected for the same reason.
Second, in helping to make a choice that's right for you, we suggest compiling a list of the most important factors for your determination of where to retire. It might also be helpful to rank-order these choices, from most important to least important, but the rank order is not critical.
Along with the list, it's also helpful to list "must haves". This list might only be two or three items long, such as housing cost must not exceed a certain price, or that the grandkids must be within a certain driving distance. (One note of caution - in the "must have" list, take into factors that may change, such as grandkids moving to another state, in considering whether an item should be on the "must have" list). In any event, once the "must have" list is completed, you'll be able to save a tremendous amount of time by not considering places that don't meet these key needs.
After developing your lists, the next step is to get more information. The retirement communities included in this website all have wonderful facilities, and would welcome the opportunity to provide you with more information or answer any other questions you might have. Also, there's no substitute for actually visiting the communities and getting the flavor of the community first hand.
In addition, below are a number of books and resources that you might consider in your search of where to retire. Each of these books takes different approaches; so you may wish to consider purchasing more than one.
For instance, Retirement Places Rated focuses on statistics of almost every type; ranging from weather to housing prices to detailed demographics on population, and to a lesser extent on narratives about places. If you're a statistics-oriented person, you will probably enjoy this book.
Conversely, the sixth edition of John Howell's book, "Where to Retire", is much the opposite. Howell provides excellent narratives of dozens of towns to give the reader a flavor of what each community is like, with only a sprinkle of statistics thrown in (such as cost of living and taxation, no doubt important information). This book is one we would highly recommend.
To find out more about these books and other retirement resources, click on the thumbnail pictures of the book, and you'll be directed to the Amazon.com website. There, in addition to browsing books, you will also be able to read what other readers think of the books.
Good luck in your search!
Books of interest
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