From Our Members: How to Avoid Choosing the Wrong Community (and Pick the Right One)
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
May 14, 2025 — Nobody understands the dozens of mistakes you can make when it comes to choosing a retirement community than our wonderful Members here at Topretirements. By the same token, they have developed many simple strategies for how to pick the right one. On this website they have made thousands of wonderful and wise comments, suggestions, and experiences on how to negotiate the journey to the perfect place to retire. This article will attempt to gather and organize a sampling of the best ones – space keeps us from publishing many other great ones.
Check Out These Wise Comments from Topretirements Members
We are so impressed with the collective wisdom of our Members over the years. Your real world experiences and insights are invaluable!
Chris: Making decisions and having a plan is the only sure fire way to end up in the right community. Otherwise there are just too many wrong forks in the road!
Nancy: Do a stay and play and dig, dig. The builders reputation usually easy to find construction issues are important but not as important as finding the right community. Also thoroughly research all utilities, taxes, etc. – it adds up.
Comments on "From Our Members: How to Avoid Choosing the Wrong Community (and Pick the Right One)"
Chris says:
In the new Netflix series reprise of "The Four Seasons", the character played by Tina Fey says something that definitely applies to the search for the perfect place to retire. It goes something like this: "Do you think in the whole wide world that there is only one person out there who was meant to be your perfect life partner?" I think there are many places to retire that would be great for me, I just haven't found out about all of them, and there are too many to choose from.
guy restivo says:
great articles
Jan Cullinane, author says:
Once you know what you want in terms of weather, cost of living, taxes, transportation, health care, etc., find a new/developing community. It's much easier meeting new people and developing friendships when everyone is new/fairly new to a community.
Patrick says:
I love these types of posts. Great ideas on how to approach complex decisions. I laughed at HEF's recommendation about watching House Hunters shows. We enjoy watching those shows but we hadn't really thought of using them in that manner.