January 6, 2020 – The coronavirus and the election might have been the two big national stories in 2020, but Topretirements Members and visitors had some other issues on their minds as well. We published almost 100 Blog stories last year, and it turns out that once again, features that highlight great places to retire almost always come out on top. Here are the most popular articles on Topretirements last year, 2020. As always, we appreciate any future story ideas you might have too.
20 Great Places to Retire on a Lake. This article picked the top 20 communities from the 122 lake towns reviewed on Topretirements. We focused on places where it is possible to live on or near the lake, with some kind of nearby town for entertainment and the necessities of life. This story from January was the runaway favorite of the year.
10 Best of the Best Places to Retire for 2020 In this “Best of the Best” review, we picked 10 towns from lists of our 60 Best Retirement Towns in three major U.S. retirement regions. Asheville (NC), a frequent winner, came out of top.
December 15, 2020 — We are pleased to announce the winners for the “Best Retirement Planning Articles” of 2020. The criteria for this first ever award are that the writing is thoughtful, timely, interesting, and helpful to retirees and prospective retirees. We tried to concentrate on more practical topics and avoided Top 10 lists, as they are ubiquitous and sometimes a little silly. Our hope is that you will enjoy and learn from these great examples of writing about retirement planning.
To come up with the winners we reviewed retirement-related articles on the main websites that we use for collecting retirement ideas. Those include: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, NextAvenue, Squared Away Blog, AARP, Robert Powell at TheStreet.com, The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, etc. We also looked through Topretirements.com for 2020 articles that were inspired by reporting at other media outlets. We tried to choose from a variety of these sources to spread the glory around. As few of these sites are behind a pay wall, so we have tried to provide permalinks. In some cases, however, you might not be able to read the article unless you subscribe. Real, honest journalism is under siege from sources that will make up anything outrageous to get readers, so please support organizations like these that rely on the facts and honest data.
March 31, 2018 — Coming of age movies like The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, 2001: Space Odyssey, etc. became cultural icons for us baby boomers, back in the day. Producers of these blockbusters found huge audiences among our generation. Hollywood is still making movies for us today. Many aspects of the plots and characters are the same (love and loneliness, finding yourself), everybody is just a lot older! Special thanks to our traveling companion Deb (a tremendous fan of movies) for helping spark this idea.
Here are our top 10 movies (including 1 TV series) for baby boomers that touch on the topic of retirement. We hope that you will add your favorites too. We start our list with more recent movies, then go on to some oldies but goodies. Most are classics, definitely worth watching again.
The Leisure Seeker. (2018) Academy Award winner Helen Mirren (more…)
January 3, 2018 — It is always a good exercise to review our most read articles of the year. It tells us what our Members are looking for, and it has the side benefit of alerting new readers to articles that struck home for others. So here goes:
Site recap
Thanks so much to our many members and visitors. We enjoy your feedback, and most of all the 1000s of incredible Comments we get to our articles each year. Your input is valued by us and your fellow members. In 2017 Topretirements.com had over 2 million site visitors and 5 million page views. It is gratifying to know that we are being useful in some fashion to people interested in retirement. (more…)
December 27, 2016 — In many ways 2016 was one of the craziest years we can remember. Fortunately Topretirements’ 10th year was interesting, but not full of upheaval. As an annual tradition we like to see which articles grabbed the attention of the Topretirements.com community during the year. As always, there are at least a few surprise articles that generate more readership and Comments than we expected. Here is our annual review of the best of Topretirements for 2016.
We Do Appreciate
This seems to be a great time to note our appreciation to the Topretirements community. So many of you read our articles, take the time to post Comments to Blog articles, suggest new topics to cover – thank you. Special thanks to our loyal advertisers who make this site possible. Many have been with us almost since our beginnings in 2007 – thank you for your support of this vibrant online community.
Overall
So far in 2016 Topretirements had over 1.8 million visitors (more…)
December 12, 2016 — Baby boomers have finally got to the age where senior centers actually are meant for us… oh perish the thought! Sadly it is true, the oldest of us baby boomers turned 70 this year and tens of millions are in our 60s.
Which brings us to one of favorite pet peeves. In our Connecticut town there was a proposal to build a new “Senior” Center. The old one was a mess and not big enough for the number of people that wanted to use it. We lobbied, unsuccessfully, to build a “Community”, rather than a “Senior” Center. The Community Center would have had all the facilities and resources that aging boomers want and need. But in our view, freeing it from the “Senior” stigma would have boosted attendance and been a resource that the entire community could enjoy. Happily, a beautiful and (more…)
August 16, 2018 – 10 years ago this month Topretirements.com came out of the ether and appeared on the world wide web. It didn’t look like much, but there was some pretty good (if limited) information. Since that time we’ve had several redesigns and make overs, and the new content keeps coming. As of 2016, there are reviews of over 1000 towns and 3200 active and 55+ communities. Plus thousands of Blog articles and 10s of thousands of Comments. Based on the feedback we get, it looks like we have helped a lot of people along the way with their retirements. That makes us feel good! This was our first logo.
Today there is a profile and Q & A about Topretirements.com over at JungleRedWriters.com, the website for a group of women authors. If you are interested, it will tell you how we got started with the idea and some of the challenges and successes along the way. Here is the link to the article “Lunch with Mr. Topretirements.com:
Do you have ideas for our 10th Anniversary Edition?
Before the year ends we would like to mark the anniversary with a celebratory issue. Do you have ideas on the kinds of things we might include? We were thinking along the lines of “Best of”, “Worst of”, “Funniest of”, but would love to hear your ideas. Also, any feedback you have would be great to include – thinks that helped, didn’t help, things you wished for we don’t have. Please add your thoughts in the Comments below!
The image below is what the current “Best Places” tab looked like in the first year.
February 1 Update:Since we published this post more of the Topretirements site has gone mobile friendly. The City Reviews, over 1000 of them, are now much easier to view on your mobile. Please also check out our 2nd video, which is a quick one on “How to Get Started Finding the Best Communities at Topretirements”
January 3, 2016 — If you are viewing Topretirements on a tablet like an Ipad or a smartphone, there is a different look from you would have seen a few days ago. The world is moving more and more to mobile phones and ipads, and Topretirements.com is trying to meet that demand. To that end we are pleased to announce that after a long and demanding upgrade process, our site is now much easier to use and better looking on the small screen.
Stats by device type
The trend is pretty clear – Internet users are moving from desktop computers to tablets and mobile phones. In the last 6 months (more…)
December 30, 2015 — As 2015 begins to float away in the eddy of the busy holidays, it is interesting to see which articles grabbed the attention of the Topretirements.com community during the year. There are always at least a few surprise articles that generate more readership and Comments than we expected. Here is our annual review of the best of Topretirements for 2015.
We Do Appreciate
Before we list the best articles, we need to mention some other bests here. For one, we appreciate the loyal advertisers who make this site possible. Many have been with us almost since our beginnings in 2007 – thank you for your support. Our members are tops too; we love your insightful and thought-provoking comments and suggestions (please keep both coming!) It is fun to produce this site for such an engaged group of people.
Most Read Articles of 2015
The first few articles are no strangers to this list – our (more…)
December 29, 2014 — It’s always fun to see which of our Blog articles grab the attention of our dear Members and Visitors. Sometimes it is the unexpected ones that generate the most comments and/or readership, while usually any article that includes “Best Place to Retire” in the title does pretty well. Here is our annual review of the best of what we’ve come up with for 2014.
But first the stats
Thanks to our members, Topretirements had its highest readership ever in 2014. Over the last 12 months we had over 1.5 million unique visitors and 7 million page views. We can’t prove it, but we are pretty sure that no other website in the retirement sphere gets this kind of traffic or engagement. This site wouldn’t exist without the valued contributions of so many people who share their experiences and expertise – thank you! We also greatly appreciate our loyal advertisers, many of which have been with us for 5 or more years, who make all of this possible.
Most Read Articles of 2014
The first few articles are no strangers to this list. We write annual editions of the “Worst (and Best) States to Retire in” and these are always list toppers. Likewise our annual list of the “Most Popular Active Communities” attracts a lot of attention. But many others on our Top 10 were one -offs – and we are so glad you liked them! Interestingly enough, more than half of the most read articles in 2014 were originally (more…)
This was our first logo.
