In October, US News & World Report gave its list of the ten best places to retire on Social Security alone. They are: Albuquerque, New Mexico Austin, Texas Buffalo, New York Columbia, South Carolina Grand Rapids, Michigan Jacksonville, Florida Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Spokane, Washington St. Louis, Missouri Tucson, Arizona Looking at this list, I would guess that they never looked at anything below a certain population level because it doesn’t include anything resembling a small town, and I can’t say that I would much like to live in any of these places. Austin wasn't a bad place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there, St. Louis was pretty awful the last time I was there, and I don't even like driving through Buffalo. * Source
I would hate to try and live anywhere on social security alone and I would never choose any of those listed. Any town with a population over 15 or 20 thousand is too big for me. When traveling across country I try my best to avoid even driving through any big city.
I don't like livimg in Houston, Texas, but most of my grandchildren live around the area. If it wasn't for them I would sell everything and move. I would love to live in an area that has no more than a cross road, with a blinking yellow traffic light. I am lucky though, I live in a small neighborhood that has one road into it, and that is the only way out. So we don't get any traffic from the outside, unless they are just Looky Loo's. We all have 5 to 30 acres, so we don't have to live on top of each other. i was going to post a couple of pictures of my old log cabin, but when I try I get a message that the file is too large. I don't understand this, I have posted many of the same picture on several other sites. Hmmmm!
I can tell you Tennessee is great place to live on SS. The state has no state income tax. We also don't have personal property tax (like they had in Virginia). With the TVA being, literally, in our backyard, energy costs are low. If you stay out of the big cities, property prices are extremely reasonable - we moved here two years ago and bought a newly constructed home, 1400 sq ft, with hardwood floors, attached garage, custom cherry cabinets on 1.5 acres - for $108,000. Our property taxes are less than $1,000 a year. We live in between two towns, one with a population of 12,000 is about 15 minutes away, the other, population 2,000 is about 10 minutes away. Our little town has a population of about 600. So you're looking for city life, maybe not the best place. But there are several really nice cities in Tennessee that aren't too expensive - Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga.
I'd like to settle in Tasmania for a year or so, with my entire family. And then, another year in Queensland. There's no place like the Down Under for me.
I remember my father talking about retiring to Florida, as it was a kind of old-cliche he used to hear in his childhood days. I wouldn't like to retire to Florida though, in fact I don't understand why should someone had to retire at all. In my opinion, senior life has nothing to do with productivity, and you may retire at 20 if you have enough money for this, and willing to do anything else than staring at the sky for the rest of your life. I believe is not that you retire, but life gets your retiring forcibly on the day you pass away. Meanwhile, life is to live it, and this involves keep working even if you are in age to retire on social security. I have no plans to retire until life retires me, but if I would have to retire to another place, it would likely be within the same city I live and I'm in love with.
I would not recommend Grand Rapids, MI. It's kind of boring. There would not be much to do there. There is nothing really notable about the city. Living out in the country would be cheaper than living in any city in MI.
That's the flaw behind the article that opened this thread. The authors only considered large cities and these are not necessarily the best choices.
In the late 1970s, a relative who had been living in the US came home for retirement. The exchange rate of the dollar to the peso is quite good. But the best thing that time was the interest rate in the banks which reached 20% per annum for the time deposit. Our relative had a heyday because he said that his money would be growing by leaps and bounds with that high interest. That economic atmosphere persisted for a year or two until the economy got back to its feet. Sometimes I am dreaming if I can find a place like that when I retire.
There are small towns throughout the country where young people can no longer find work, and that are too far from any larger towns for them to commute, where houses can be bought for very little, yet can offer a good standard of living to someone who does not have to punch a clock for a living, whether because of a retirement check or the ability to work from home. I live in Millinocket, which is roughly in the center of Maine. With a population of just over two thousand, Millinocket is the main gateway to Baxter State Park, which is also the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. The country around here is nice, with plenty of woods, streams, rivers, lakes, and ponds. While Millinocket is not crime free, it would compare very well to most larger cities. Millinocket was founded in the late 1800s as a pulp and paper mill town. There were only two farms in the area before the Great Northern Paper Company chose it as the site for its mill, which became the largest pulp and paper mill in the world. More than three-fourths of the town's population worked in the mill and, except for those who were retired and a very few others, everyone else worked in businesses that were supported by the mill, such as retail stores, a hospital, a foundry that mostly did work for the paper mill and, of course, the forest and trucking industries that supplied wood to be turned into pulp. After a succession of layoffs, the mill was still running when we bought our house, but it employed fewer than a thousand people, where it had once directly employed more than four thousand. We bought a two-story home that had been an apartment building since the 1940s. After tearing some walls down, we turned it into a single family home. At the time that we were looking for a house in Maine, we had $25,000 in cash that we could put toward a house, and this building was listed for $35,000. Great, we thought. It shouldn't be hard to get a mortgage when we can put more than half the selling price down. When we contacted the realtor, she told us that the price had been reduced to $25,000. Even better, we didn't need a mortgage. We paid a friend who was an assessor to look the place over, and he reported that it had no structural problems. We called the realtor back to make arrangements for a purchase, and she said that the seller really wanted out and had dropped the price to $15,000. She then asked what we had paid the assessor, and deducted that $500 from the selling price, and we bought our house for $14,500. Since then, the mill has closed entirely. We are seventy miles from Bangor, the nearest likely place for anyone to find work. People get tired of driving 140 miles a day just to get to work and back, plus the cost of gas detracts from the amount of money earned. Not long ago, I counted 29 for sale signs on our street alone, and there are a lot of other houses that were simply abandoned. My neighbor's daughter just bought a two-story home with a full basement for $600 on a tax sale. It's not a bad house, either; I knew the guy who used to own it. A couple of months ago, the town had more than twenty houses up for auction. $600 is unusually low, but a lot of houses sell for under $20,000. The downside is that this is Maine. It gets cold here and it stays that way for a long time. White stuff comes from the sky that has to be removed from driveways and sidewalks, and I am talking about snow that will sometimes completely cover your car in one night. We moved into our house in April of 2001, and we didn't know until May that there was an abandoned car in the back yard, since it was completely covered by snow. Fuel costs also has to be figured in. In order to find a department store, I have to drive seventy miles each way, but we have grocery stores, hardware stores, and agricultural supply stores nearby. We make the trip into Bangor ever couple of weeks, but do a lot of shopping online. Millinocket is nice, but perhaps not ideal. However, there are similar small towns all over the country that were dependent upon one industry that is no longer there. If you can find one that the environmentalists haven't gotten to, driving the costs up to where only their rich friends can afford to live there, you can get a nice place. These small towns are never taken into consideration in surveys such as the opening post here, which generally consider only larger cities.
They seem to leave out the other idea of living in another country. I wrote a blog in 2007 living like a king on pennies. http://doug-livinglikeaking.blogspot.com/
I just read your blog,, and it sounds like you had a wonderful experience sailing around , and then finally settling down. Living in the Dominican Republic sounds like a great idea, and a good way to make a small pension last longer and go further. If I didn't have all of my family here; I have sometimes considered moving to another country where living is not only cheaper; but a mosre simple lifestyle. Richard Paradon has talked a little bit about how much he enjoys living inThailand, and he makes that sounds like a good place to reture to as well. Not only that; but I think the less industrialized nations, where people are more used to being self-sufficient , will do better if we do have some kind of a global economy crash. And it is starting to look like the dominoes are getting ready to topple.